The Classification of Words

part but not all of the sentence The unstressed suffix -n't is not only
the normal negative signal with an auxiliary: it occurs only with auxili­
aries and the related copula 'be'". (Op. cit., p. 13).

V,8*
231

ial complex»

John smokes
John smoking participial complex John ... {to) smoke \ infinitival com-

plexes

(for) John to smoke

As we see, the complexes possess only the person component of predicativity. The other two components can be obtained obliquely from some actual predication. That is why the complexes are always used with some predication and why they are called 'secondary' predications. In the sentence / felt him tremble the complex him tremble borrows, as it were, the tense and mood components of predicativity from the predication / felt and becomes obliquely equivalent io an actual predication He trembled into which it can be trans­formed. Thus a complex may be regarded as a transformation (transform) of some actual predication, the verbid acting as an oblique or secondary predicate.
§ 395. The terms 'transform', 'transformational' have become popular among linguists after the publication in 1957 of Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's transformational grammar is a theory for grammatical des­cription of linguistic structure. It is a generating grammar in the sense that it is a body of rules to generate an infinite set of grammatically correct sentences from a finite vocabu­lary. As B. Strong has it, it "combines great precision with a cumbersomeness that unsuits it for ordinary purposes." ^l
In this book we do not deal wi th transformational grammar as a theory, and we use the term transform as it is defined by R. Long. ² Transforms are "Syntactic patterns that close­ly parallel other syntactic patterns, from which they are conveniently considered to derive, but that are nevertheless distinct in form and use. Thus the main interrogative Was Jane there"? is conveniently regarded as a transform of the main declarative Jane was there. Clauses with passive-voice pred-icators ³ are obviously transforms of clauses with common voice ⁴ predicators. / gave him the book can profitably be con-
¹ Modern English Structure, Lnd., 1962, p. 81.

• 
  The Sentence and its Parts, p. 508—509.
  ⁸ Predicates.
  
• 
  Active voice.
  

232

sidered a transform of / gave the book to him, and an economics teacher of a teacher of economics."
Similarly, the sentence The bus being very crowded, John had to stand can be regarded as a transform of the sen­tence As the bus was very crowded, John had to stand or the participial complex as a transform of the subordinate clause.
Likewise can the infinitival complex of the sentence It is not possible for him to do it alone be treated as a trans­form of the subordinate clause in It is not possible that he should do it alone.
The gerundial complex in / resent your having taken the book can be viewed as a transform of the subordinate clause in / resent that you have taken the book.
As we see, the complexes retain the lexical meanings of the clauses, but they are deprived of the predicative (struc­tural) meanings of mood and tense, which they borrow, as it were, from the finite verb.
This correlation of structural and non-structural predi­cations is also part of the system of a language regularly detaching the structural part of the predicate from the'no­tional one.