Deep structure and surface structure (also D-structure and S-structure although those abbreviated forms are sometimes used with distinct meanings) are concepts used in
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
, specifically in the study of
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...
in the
Chomskyan
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
tradition of
transformational generative grammar
In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combi ...
.
The deep structure of a linguistic
expression
Expression may refer to:
Linguistics
* Expression (linguistics), a word, phrase, or sentence
* Fixed expression, a form of words with a specific meaning
* Idiom, a type of fixed expression
* Metaphorical expression, a particular word, phrase, o ...
is a theoretical construct that seeks to unify several related structures. For example, the sentences "Pat loves Chris" and "Chris is loved by Pat" mean roughly the same thing and use similar words. Some linguists, Chomsky in particular, have tried to account for this similarity by positing that these two sentences are distinct ''surface forms'' that derive from a common (or very similar) deep structure.
Origin
Chomsky coined and popularized the terms "deep structure" and "surface structure" in the early 1960s. American linguist
Sydney Lamb
Sydney MacDonald Lamb (born May 4, 1929 in Denver, Colorado) is an American linguist and professor at Rice University, whose stratificational grammar is a significant alternative theory to Chomsky's transformational grammar.
He has specialize ...
wrote in 1975 that Chomsky "probably
orrowedthe term from Hockett". American linguist
Charles Hockett
Charles Francis Hockett (January 17, 1916 – November 3, 2000) was an American linguist who developed many influential ideas in American structuralism#Structuralism in linguistics, structuralist linguistics. He represents the post-Leonard Bloomfi ...
first used the
dichotomous
A dichotomy is a partition of a whole (or a set) into two parts (subsets). In other words, this couple of parts must be
* jointly exhaustive: everything must belong to one part or the other, and
* mutually exclusive: nothing can belong simultan ...
pair "deep grammar" vs "surface grammar" in his 1958 book titled ''A Course in Modern Linguistics''. Chomsky first referred to these Hockettian concepts in his 1962 paper ''The Logical Basis of Linguistic Theory'' (later published as ''
Current Issues in Linguistic Theory
''Current Issues in Linguistic Theory'' is a 1964 book by American linguist Noam Chomsky. It is a revised and expanded version of "The Logical Basis of Linguistic Theory", a paper that Chomsky presented in the ninth International Congress of Ling ...
'' in 1964). In it Chomsky noted that "the difference between observational
and descriptive adequacy is related to the distinction drawn by Hockett (1958) between 'surface grammar' and 'deep grammar', and he is unquestionably correct in noting that modern linguistics is largely confined in scope to the former."
In Chomskyan linguistics
In early transformational syntax, deep structures are
derivation tree
A parse tree or parsing tree or derivation tree or concrete syntax tree is an ordered, rooted tree (data structure), tree that represents the syntax, syntactic structure of a string (computer science), string according to some context-free grammar ...
s of a
context-free language
In formal language theory, a context-free language (CFL) is a language generated by a context-free grammar (CFG).
Context-free languages have many applications in programming languages, in particular, most arithmetic expressions are generated by ...
. These trees are then transformed by a sequence of tree rewriting operations ("transformations") into surface structures. The
terminal yield
In formal language theory, the terminal yield (or fringe) of a tree is the sequence of leaves encountered in an ordered walk of the tree.
Parse trees and/or derivation trees are encountered in the study of phrase structure grammars such as cont ...
of a surface structure tree, the surface form, is then predicted to be a grammatical sentence of the language being studied. The role and significance of deep structure changed a great deal as Chomsky developed his theories, and since the mid-1990s deep structure no longer features at all
(see
minimalist program
In linguistics, the minimalist program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky.
Following Imre Lakatos's distinction, Chomsky presents minima ...
).
It is tempting to regard deep structures as representing meanings and surface structures as representing sentences that express those meanings, but this is not the concept of deep structure which Chomsky favoured. Rather, a sentence more closely corresponds to a deep structure paired with the surface structure derived from it, with an additional
phonetic form In the field of linguistics, specifically in syntax, phonetic form (PF), also known as phonological form or the articulatory-perceptual (A-P) system, is a certain level of mental representation of a linguistic expression, derived from surface struc ...
obtained from processing of the surface structure. It has been variously suggested that the interpretation of a sentence is determined by its deep structure alone, by a combination of its deep and surface structures, or by some other level of representation altogether (
logical form
In logic, logical form of a statement is a precisely-specified semantic version of that statement in a formal system. Informally, the logical form attempts to formalize a possibly ambiguous statement into a statement with a precise, unambiguo ...
), as argued in 1977 by Chomsky's student
Robert May. Chomsky may have tentatively entertained the first of these ideas in the early 1960s, but quickly moved away from it to the second, and finally to the third. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the
generative semantics
Generative semantics was a research program in theoretical linguistics which held that syntactic structures are computed on the basis of meanings rather than the other way around. Generative semantics developed out of transformational generati ...
movement put up a vigorous defence of the first option, sparking an acrimonious debate, the "
Linguistics Wars
The linguistics wars were a protracted academic dispute inside American theoretical linguistics which took place mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, stemming from an intellectual falling-out between Noam Chomsky and some of his early colleagues and doct ...
".
Chomsky noted in his early years that by dividing deep structures from surface structures, one could understand "slip of the tongue" moments (where someone says something that he did not intend) as instances where deep structures do not translate into the intended surface structure.
[
Carlson ]t al.
T, or t, is the twentieth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''tee'' (pronounced ), plural ''tees''. It is deri ...
Neil R. (2005). Psychology: The Science of Behaviour 3rd Canadian Edition. Pearson. pp. 310–311. .
Extension to other fields
The "surface" appeal of the deep structure concept soon led people from unrelated fields (architecture, music, politics, and even ritual studies) to use the term to express various concepts in their own work. In common usage, the term is often used as a synonym for
universal grammar
Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible hum ...
—the constraints which Chomsky claims govern the overall forms of linguistic expression available to the human species. This is probably due to the importance of deep structure in Chomsky's earlier work on universal grammar, though his concept of universal grammar is logically independent of any particular theoretical construct, including deep structure.
According to Middleton (1990),
Schenkerian analysis Schenkerian analysis is a method of analyzing tonal music based on the theories of Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935). The goal is to demonstrate the organic coherence of the work by showing how it relates to an abstracted deep structure, the ''Ursatz' ...
of music corresponds to the Chomskyan notion of deep structure, applying to a two-level generative structure for melody, harmony, and rhythm, of which the analysis by Lee (1985) of rhythmical structure is an instance. (See also:
Chord progression § Blues changes.)
See also
*
Underlying representation
In some models of phonology as well as morphophonology in the field of linguistics, the underlying representation (UR) or underlying form (UF) of a word or morpheme is the abstract form that a word or morpheme is postulated to have before any phono ...
Notes
References
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*C. S. Lee (1985). "The rhythmic interpretation of simple musical sequences: towards a perceptual model", in P. Howell, I. Cross and R. West (eds.), ''Musical Structure and Cognition'' (Academic Press), pp. 53–69.
*Richard Middleton (1990). ''Studying Popular Music''. Open University Press.
*Sakai, Yuko (2017a). ''Sentence Generation: Syntax Tree Diagram in English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Ainu''. Createspace.
*Sakai, Yuko (2017b). ''English Syntax Tree Diagram: Based on Universal Sentence Structure''. Createspace. {{ISBN, 978-1547232208
*L. Samovar & R. Porter (2003). ''Communication between Cultures''. Wadsworth Publishing.
Syntactic transformation
Generative syntax