"Deletion is posited as a universal process in language, and "identity and "indefiniteness are suggested as universal conditions under which deletion takes place. Usefulness of exploiting language similarities in language teaching is stressed. This paper was presented at the TESOL Convention, Chicago, March 1969. (FWB)

In the years following the appearance of Noam Chomsky's book, "Syntactic Structures," in 1957, transformational grammarians modified and improved his initial model of language. The notion of a deep structure of meaning underlying a sentence's surface structure was revised to embody elements representing negation, command, and interrogation, and to…

A review of the background of transformational grammar and a discussion of Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures" begin this introduction to the "new" grammar. Following discussions are on the components of a theoretically complete grammar, the main deep structure components (noun phrase, auxiliary, and verb phrase), grammatical relationships,…