Topicalization and passivisation in the English language

Abstract

The English language like any other language has rules of syntax. Many languages including English have a transformation that move constituents which according to Arts are “strings of one or more words that syntactically and semantically behave as a unit” (193). This in essence means that some sequence of words in a particular sentence can occur in a different position in the same sentence for different stylistic effects. Premised on the foregoing, this study attempts to explore topicalization and passivisation in the English language using basic Chomskyean movement transformation rule model. It is believed that this study will further highlight some of the basic stylistic effects of movement transformations inherent in topicalization and passivisation.