Transformational Grammar - Deep Structure and Surface Structure

Deep Structure and Surface Structure

Linguistics
Theoretical linguistics
  • Cognitive linguistics
  • Generative linguistics
  • Functional theories of grammar
  • Quantitative linguistics
  • Phonology
  • Morphology
  • Morphophonology
  • Syntax
  • Lexis
  • Semantics
  • Pragmatics
  • Graphemics
  • Orthography
  • Semiotics
Descriptive linguistics
  • Anthropological linguistics
  • Comparative linguistics
  • Historical linguistics
  • Etymology
  • Graphetics
  • Phonetics
  • Sociolinguistics
Applied and
experimental linguistics
  • Computational linguistics
  • Evolutionary linguistics
  • Forensic linguistics
  • Internet linguistics
  • Language acquisition
  • Language assessment
  • Language development
  • Language education
  • Linguistic anthropology
  • Neurolinguistics
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Second-language acquisition
Related articles
  • History of linguistics
  • Linguistic prescription
  • List of linguists
  • List of unsolved problems in linguistics
Portal

In 1957, Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, in which he developed the idea that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation — a deep structure and a surface structure. The deep structure represented the core semantic relations of a sentence, and was mapped on to the surface structure (which followed the phonological form of the sentence very closely) via transformations. Chomsky believed there are considerable similarities between languages' deep structures, and that these structures reveal properties, common to all languages that surface structures conceal. However, this may not have been the central motivation for introducing deep structure. Transformations had been proposed prior to the development of deep structure as a means of increasing the mathematical and descriptive power of context-free grammars. Similarly, deep structure was devised largely for technical reasons relating to early semantic theory. Chomsky emphasizes the importance of modern formal mathematical devices in the development of grammatical theory:

But the fundamental reason for inadequacy of traditional grammars is a more technical one. Although it was well understood that linguistic processes are in some sense "creative," the technical devices for expressing a system of recursive processes were simply not available until much more recently. In fact, a real understanding of how a language can (in Humboldt's words) "make infinite use of finite means" has developed only within the last thirty years, in the course of studies in the foundations of mathematics. —Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

Read more about this topic:  Transformational Grammar

Famous quotes containing the words deep, structure and/or surface:

    So hills and valleys into singing break;
    And though poor stones have neither speech nor tongue,
    While active winds and streams both run and speak,
    Yet stones are deep in admiration.
    Thus praise and prayer here beneath the Sun
    Make lesser mornings when the great are done.
    Henry Vaughan (1622–1695)

    Why does philosophy use concepts and why does faith use symbols if both try to express the same ultimate? The answer, of course, is that the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful.
    Paul Tillich (1886–1965)

    Night City was like a deranged experiment in Social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone ... though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.
    William Gibson (b. 1948)