The Elementary Transformations

In transformational theory, the first result is that there is an equivalence relation among certain subsets of sentences in respect to their word choices. The second result is that the transformations, in each language, are not just an otherwise uncharacterized set of changes from one sentence structure to another. A small number of constants appear in many transformations, and only a few types of structures are seen in the resultants. If, therefore, we consider a transformation as possibly an operation on word-selections, or on the elementary sentence structures that are satisfied by these characteristic word-selections, we may seek to divide such operations into a small set of elementary operations.