Not very elegant. The computations can be pretty complicated. There's no good reason to explain the particular set of transformations that people seem to use. They ignore meaning. Sentences always come in a context that can help you understand them.
Semantic grammars are different in spirit.
The syntactic representation of a sentence is based on the meaning of the sentence. Cases and roles are the parts each element of the sentence plays in conveying the meaning. You have roles like agent and patient, and cases like location and time. The verb is the organizing unit. Everything else in the sentence is related to the verb.