Deep Structure or The Principles of Semantic Investigation of Sentences in The Syntactic Doctrine of N. Chomsky

Abstract

The presented article studies the concept of the deep structure of a sentence in the syntactic doctrine of Noam Chomsky, one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century and one of the leaders of linguistic theory to date. The concept of “deep and surface structures” was formed in the terminological repertoire of linguistics at the end of the '50s. The concepts of “internal” and “external” grammar was first introduced to the science by Ch. Hockett in 1958. In the transformational grammar, deep structures are generated by phrase-structure rules and surface structures are derived from deep structures by a series of transformations. Nevertheless, "the same sentence or phrase may consist of a two-level structure: “deep and surface structures”. The surface structure is generated by the use of appropriate morphological and phonological rules. So, the surface structure of a sentence is presented as phonetic representation. The article primarily explains in detail deep structure as the principal form of a sentence, the specific features of the deep structure, the role of deep structure in language acquisition, its application before the rules, such as auxiliary inversion and wh- fronting.