Two grammars for Chinese number names

Abstract

The purpose of this note is to introduce a restricted class of transformational grammars, the deletion grammars, and to use them to discuss the names of natural numbers in Chinese. Hereafter these names are referred to as Chinese number names.Transformations and transformational grammars were introduced into linguistics by N. Chomsky. By now a vast literature on transformations has grown up. However, many of the transformational grammars appearing in this literature lack precision and rigor. In particular, it is not always clear what corpus they generate because of the multiplicity, complexity, and inadequate definition of the transformations contained in these grammars.