kernel sentence

But as Chomsky himself remarked when he abandoned them with some reluctance as theoretical constructs, these kernel sentences actually have considerable intuitive appeal.

Consider, for example, that type of syntactic structure which Chomsky refers to as the kernel sentence, of which the following are examples:

To produce passive, negative, interrogative or complex sentences, one or more optional transformation rules must be applied in a particular order to the kernel sentences.

Because target structuring was generable directly by the powerful J-rule base component and its array of linguistic operators, structure-oriented transformations required to combine kernel sentences and/or otherwise manipulate constituent structure were no longer required.

The resulting "Ohmannized" Faulkner consists of a sequence of short, atomic sentences, not far removed from the most elementary sentences, or KERNEL sentences,"postulated by the theory of Transformational Grammar that Ohmann uses.