RT Journal Article SR Electronic(1) A1 Perlman, Alan M. YR 1976 T1 Samuel Greene: The First Transformationalist? JF Historiographia Linguistica VO 3 IS 3 SP 293 OP 314 DO https://doi.org/10.1075/hl.3.3.03per PB John Benjamins SN 0302-5160, AB SUMMARYIn his studies of the structure of the English language, Samuel Green, a 19th-century grammarian and educator, made extensive use of paraphrase as a descriptive device. This paper argues that in doing so, Greene anticipated some of the methods and concepts of early transformational theory — and even some of the transformations themselves. It first presents a short history of the concept "transformation", then discusses the transformations in four of Greene's works. Greene's use of transformations follows plausibly from his view of language, as is shown by excerpts from the prefaces to his books. Greene's status as a transformationalist is then reconsidered with reference to the characteristics of transformations as inferred in the early part of this paper. Comparisons with other 19th- and early 20th-century grammarians demonstrate that Greene was unusual in his concern for underlying meaning and in his use of process in linguistic description.RESUMEDans ses etudes sur la structure de la langue anglaise, Samuel Greene, un grammairien et pedagogue du XIXe siècle, fit un emploi intensif de la paraphrase en tant que moyen descriptif. Cet article montre que Greene, en agissant de cette facon, annoncait quelques-uns des concepts et des methodes des debuts de la theorie transformationnelle — et meme quelques-unes des transformations elles-memes. II donne d'abord un apercu de revolution du concept de 'transformation', examine ensuite les transformations telles qu'elles apparaissent dans quatre ouvrages de Greene. L'utili-sation que Greene fait des transformations decoule logiquement de ses idees sur le langage, comme le demontrent des extraits des prefaces de ses livres. L'appartenance de Greene a la famille des transformationalistes est alors revue a la lumiere des caracteristiques des transformations, telles qu'analysees au debut de cet article. La comparaison avec les autres grammairiens du XIXe et du XXe siecle etablit la position originale de Greene dans son utilisation de la notion de signification implicite et des procédures de description linguistique., UL https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/hl.3.3.03per