Still more elegant is transformation

How does our grammar provide for this enormous variety and flexi­bility? If we merely want to reach infinity quickly, we need only allow ourselves to use the word and over and over again. There are, however, two far more elegant devices. One is that of embedding: putting a construction inside a construction, etc., like a Chinese puzzle. A classic example is the,

Still more elegant is transformation, whereby a basic sentence type may be transformed into a large variety of derived constructions. Thus the dog bites the man can be transformed into: the dog bit (has bitten, had bitten, isbiting,was biting, has been biting, can bite, etc.) the man; the man is bitten (was bitten, has been bitten, etc.) by the dog; (the dog) that bites (etc.) the man; (the man) that the dog bites; (the man) that isbitten by the dog; (the dog) that the man isbitten by; etc.