Page 324 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics Gowher Ahmad Naik, Lovely Professional University

Notes
Unit 25: Transformational Rules: Application-Tree Diagrams

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
25.1 Deep Structure and Surface Structure
25.2 Development of Basic Concepts
25.3 Transformations
25.4 Constituency-Based Parse Trees
25.5 Dependency-Based Parse Trees
25.6 Summary
25.7 Review Questions
25.8 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this Unit students will be able to:
• Explain deep structure and surface structure
• Illustrate tree diagrams

Introduction
In linguistics, a transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is a
generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in the Chomskyan
tradition of phrase structure grammars (as opposed to dependency grammars). Additionally,
transformational grammar is the tradition that gives rise to specific transformational grammars.
Much current research in transformational grammar is inspired by Chomsky's Minimalist Program.

25.1 Deep Structure and Surface Structure

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 [the] 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.

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