The selection of papers reprinted here traces the development of syntax
from structural linguistics through transformational linguistics to
operator gram- mar. These three are not opposing views or independent
assumptions about language. Rather, they are successive stages of
investigation into the word- combinations which constitue the sentences
of a language in contrast to those which do not. Throughout, the goal
has been to find the systemati- cities of these combinations, and then
to obtain each sentence in a uniform way from its parts. In structural
analysis, the parts were words (simple or complex, belonging to
particular classes) or particular sequences of these. In
transformational analysis, it is found that the parts of a sentence are
elementary sentences, whose parts in turn are simple words of particular
classes. The relation between these two analyses is seen in the
existence of an intermediate stage between the two, presented in paper
4, From Morpheme to Utterance. A further intermediate stage is presented
in the writer's String Analysis of Sentence Structure, Papers on Formal
Linguistics I, Mouton, The Hague 1962 (though it was developed after
transformations, as a syntactic rep- resentation for computational
analysis). Generalization of both of these analyses leads to operator
grammar, in which each sentence is derived in a uniform way as a partial
ordering of the originally simple words which enter into it: Each step
(least upper bound) of the partial ordering (of a word requiring
another) forms a sentence which is a component of the sentence being
analyzed.
