Microsoft Word Revised Syllabus Ver doc

The same Grammatical Construction may have many different meanings 
The fact that what is generally regarded as the same grammatical construction may 
represent a number of different relationships, and can be said to have many different 
meanings, is no better illustrated than by the grammatical construction consisting of two 
nouns or pronouns connected by ‘of’. The following two phrases from the Bible (KJV) are 
typical of some of the different relationships expressed by the Structure “A of B”. 
1.
The will of God (Eph. I:1) 
2.
The God of peace (Rom. 15:33) 
In order to determine precisely the relationship of the components A and B in these 
phrases, we ask ourselves; Just what is the relationship, for example, between God and will in 
the phrase the will of God ? Obviously, it is God, the second element, which “wills” the first 
element. Or we may say it is B which does A, i.e., “God will”. 
In the phrase the God of peace we are not speaking of a peaceful God, but God who 
causes or produces peace. Thus the relationship between A and B in this instance is almost 
completely the reverse of what it is in the will of God, for in the God of peace, A causes B. 
We are forced to the conclusion that the construction Noun+of+Noun can “mean” 
many different things, depending on what nouns are involved and what meanings we assign 
to them. In other words, this construction means not one relation, but many: it is ambiguous. 
Our efforts must therefore be aimed at discovering and then stating unambiguously exactly 
what the relation is in each case. 
Kernel Sentences 
In order to state the relationships between words in ways that are the clearest and least 
ambiguous, the expressions are most often simply recast so that events are expressed as verb, 
object as nouns, abstracts (quantities and qualities) as adjectives or adverb. The only other 
terms are relationals (i.e., prepositions and conjunctions). 
These restricted expressions are basically what many linguists call “kernels”; that is to 
say, they are the basic structural elements out of which the language builds its elaborate 
surface structure. In fact, one of the most important insights coming from “transformational 
grammar” is the fact that in all languages there are half a dozen to a dozen basic structures 

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out of which all the more elaborate formation are constructed by means of so-called 
“transformations.” In contrast, back-transformation, the, is the analytic process of reducing 
the surface structure to its underlying kernels. From the standpoint of the translator, however, 
what is even more important than the existence of kernels than on the level of more elaborate 
structures. This means that if one can reduce grammatical structures to the kernel level, they 
can be transferred more readily and with minimum distortion. This is one justification for the 
claim that the three-stage process of translation is preferable.