Encyclopedia.com - Results for Chomsky, Noam According to transformational grammar, every intelligible sentence conforms not only to grammatical rules peculiar to its particular language, but also to "deep structures, a universal grammar underlying all languages and corresponding to an innate capacity of the human brain. Chomsky and other linguists who have built on his work have formulated transformational rules, which transform a sentence with a given grammatical structure (e.g., "John saw Mary) into a sentence with a different grammatical structure but the same essential meaning ("Mary was seen by John). Transformational linguistics has been influential in psycholinguistics, particularly in the study of language acquisition by children.