An Account of Rise and fall of Transformational Generative Grammar TGG: A Descriptive Study

Purpose: To account for the rise and fall of transformational generative grammar (TGG). Method: The researcher followed a descriptive research approach where the presentation of this paper is totally based on previous studies accounting for TGG. Results: There were many reasons for the rise of TGG including: innovativeness of this approach, its presentation in relation to other fields like mathematics a logic, providing more reasonable answers for controversial issue in regard to language, etc.. On the other hand, there were many reason that have lead to the fall of this approach including: ambiguity resulting from integration with other fields, namely mathematics and logic, rise of sub-schools most importantly generative semantics, frequent modifications of the proposed theory, etc.. Conclusions: In spite of the fact that TGG was able to approach language innovatively but it seemed clearly to link human cognitive abilities to the proposed theory. More focus was based on the sentence level ignoring meaning and text.