Version of a paper read at the Annual Meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, NOvember 1969, in Washington, D.C. (DS)

Strengths and weaknesses of generative grammar are examined by an apologist for the traditionalists. Criticism is directed toward difficulties encountered by the layman in comprehending texts on linguistic theories, linguists' use of jargon and pet formulas, and unwieldy amounts of terminology constantly being developed. Special attention is…

The author questions the usefulness of the concepts of transformational generative grammar, especially as represented in Jacobs and Rosenbaum's "English Transformational Grammar, for the teacher of English as a Second Language. Paper presented at the TESOL Convention, Chicago, March 1969. (FWB)

In viewing the approach to English and other grammars in the light of linguistic universals, the author feels that the principal justification for deep structure analysis of English is that "deep structure analyses of all the languages of our multilingual world in combination can serve as a genuinely scientific basis of a defensible universal…