You are BS'ing. This is not an example of anything.It is a way to explain to non-linguists how a transformational grammar works. It's also a way to explain how most linguists have bought into an absurd theory.
There is no evidence that this "deep structure" exists. The BS is with Chomsky and his followers.
Dear everybody,
This debate has spanned two website: here and
David Horowitz's Front Page Magazine at
http://www.frontpagemag.com/GoPostal/?ID=6689 . Well, it's spanned three websites if you count that of this article's author, Marc Miyake, at
Amritas.com
Well, now a third/fourth website has entered the debate. Some guy named Jason Malloy at a site called
"Gene Expression" saw the article here and on
Front Page Magazaine and commented on it at
http://www.gnxp.com/MT/archives/000261.html
That sites says:
"Unfortunately this is all highly misleading. Tailored for a political audience of a certain persuasion[1], Marc would like to convey the story in a way that makes Chomsky out to be the left-wing baddie (that the audience is already prepared to think of him as) who subverts decent American science. In Marc's moralized version the 'good' linguists were going about their proper duties collecting all kinds of data, while the 'bad' linguist decides to self-indulgently taint the field with PoMo gibberish (something FrontPage readers already outraged by Chomsky's radical politics will be eager to accept). But what Frontpage readers won't know is that the role Chomsky played was exactly the opposite- it was the gibberish he helped to contradict. Despite his poor reputation among modern conservatives, it should be made clear that Noam Chomsky was among the first to raise a serious challenge to the hegemony of the Boas school of thinking which denied the concept of a human nature and taught the infinite malleability of man."
I don't know if Jason Malloy is on this board or on
Front Page Magazine's, but I think it's kinda cool that this debate has spanned three (or four) websites.
It is a way to explain to non-linguists how a transformational grammar worksWell I am not a linguist. I am a physicist. I know a little bit about linguistics and a whole lot about silly numerical examples that purport to demonstrate something but demonstrate nothing. Yours demonstrates nothing.
A better example would have been a Captain America Decoder Ring. You put a message in and you get a message out - same way every time. Whether there is such a decoder ring - a transformational grammar is a matter to be proven or disproven through empirical demonstration. Contending you are playing craps instead, is not an argument.