Definition of Deep Structure

Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms

"A deep structure," wrote Noam Chomsky, "is a generalized Phrase-marker underlying some
well-formed surface structure" (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965). aeduard/Getty Images
by Richard Nordquist
Updated April 09, 2018

In transformational and generative grammar, deep structure (also known as deep

grammar or D-structure) is the underlying syntactic structure—or level—of a sentence.
In contrast to surface structure (the outward form of a sentence), deep structure is an
abstract representation that identifies the ways a sentence can be analyzed and
interpreted. Deep structures are generated by phrase-structure rules, and surface
structures are derived from deep structures by a series of transformations.

In The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar (2014), Aarts, Chalker, and Weiner
point out that, in a looser sense:

"deep and surface structure are often used as terms in a simple binary opposition, with
the deep structure representing meaning, and the surface structure being the actual
sentence we see."

The terms deep structure and surface structure were popularized in the 1960s and '70s
by American linguist Noam Chomsky, who eventually discarded the concepts in his
minimalist program in the 1990s.

Properties of Deep Structure

"Deep structure is a level of syntactic representation with a number of properties that

need not necessarily go together. Four important properties of deep structure are:

1. Major grammatical relations, such as subject of and object of, are defined at deep
structure.
2. All lexical insertion occurs at deep structure.
3. All transformations occur after deep structure.
4. Semantic interpretation occurs at deep structure.

The question of whether there is a single level of representation with these properties
was the most debated question in generative grammar following the publication
of Aspects [of the Theory of Syntax, 1965]. One part of the debate focused on whether
transformations preserve meaning."
(Alan Garnham, Psycholinguistics: Central Topics. Psychology Press, 1985)
Examples and Observations

 "[Noam] Chomsky had identified a basic grammatical structure in Syntactic

Structures [1957] that he referred to as kernel sentences. Reflecting mentalese,
kernel sentences were where words and meaning first appeared in the complex
cognitive process that resulted in an utterance. In [Aspects of the Theory of
Syntax, 1965], Chomsky abandoned the notion of kernel sentences and identified
the underlying constituents of sentences as deep structure. The deep structure
was versatile insofar as it accounted for meaning and provided the basis for
transformations that turned deep structure into surface structure, which
represented what we actually hear or read. Transformation rules, therefore,
connected deep structure and surface structure, meaning and syntax."
(James D. Williams, The Teacher's Grammar Book. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999)
 "[Deep structure is a] representation of the syntax of a sentence distinguished by
varying criteria from its surface structure. E.g. in the surface structure
of Children are hard to please, the subject is children and the infinitive to
please is the complement of hard. But in its deep structure, as it was understood
especially in the early 1970s, is hard would have as its subject a subordinate
sentence in which children is the object of please: thus, in outline [please
children] is hard."
(P.H. Matthews, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford University
Press, 2007)

Evolving Perspectives on Deep Structure

"The remarkable first chapter of Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of

Syntax (1965) set the agenda for everything that has happened in generative linguistics
since. Three theoretical pillars support the enterprise: mentalism, combinatoriality,
and acquisition...

"A fourth major point of Aspects, and the one that attracted most attention from the
wider public, concerned the notion of Deep Structure. A basic claim of the 1965
version of generative grammar was that in addition to the surface form of sentences (the
form we hear), there is another level of syntactic structure, called Deep Structure, which
expresses underlying syntactic regularities of sentences. For instance, a passive sentence
like (1a) was claimed to have a Deep Structure in which the noun phrases are in the
order of the corresponding active (1b):

(1a) The bear was chased by the lion.

(1b) The lion chased the bear.

Similarly, a question such as (2a) was claimed to have a Deep Structure closely
resembling that of the corresponding declarative (2b):

(2a) Which martini did Harry drink?

(2b) Harry drank that martini.
...Following a hypothesis first proposed by Katz and Postal (1964), Aspects made the
striking claim that the relevant level of syntax for determining meaning is Deep
Structure.

"In its weakest version, this claim was only that regularities of meaning are most directly
encoded in Deep Structure, and this can be seen in (1) and (2). However, the claim was
sometimes taken to imply much more: that Deep Structure is meaning, an
interpretation that Chomsky did not at first discourage. And this was the part of
generative linguistics that got everyone really excited—for if the techniques
of transformational grammar could lead us to meaning, we would be in a position to
uncover the nature of human thought...

"When the dust of the ensuing 'linguistic wars' cleared around 1973 . . ., Chomsky had
won (as usual)—but with a twist: he no longer claimed that Deep Structure was the sole
level that determines meaning (Chomsky 1972). Then, with the battle over, he turned his
attention, not to meaning, but to relatively technical constraints on movement
transformations (e.g. Chomsky 1973, 1977)."
(Ray Jackendoff, Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure. MIT
Press, 2007)

Surface Structure and Deep Structure in a Sentence by Joseph Conrad

"[Consider] the final sentence of [Joseph Conrad's short story] 'The Secret Sharer':

Walking to the taffrail, I was in time to make out, on the very edge of a darkness thrown
by a towering black mass like the very gateway of Erebus—yes, I was in time to catch an
evanescent glimpse of my white hat left behind to mark the spot where the secret sharer
of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself
into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a
new destiny.

I hope others will agree that the sentence justly represents its author: that it portrays a
mind energetically stretching to subdue a dazzling experience outside the self, in a way
that has innumerable counterparts elsewhere. How does scrutiny of the deep
structure support this intuition? First, notice a matter of emphasis, of rhetoric.
The matrix sentence, which lends a surface form to the whole, is '# S # I was in time # S
#' (repeated twice). The embedded sentences that complete it are 'I walked to the
taffrail,' 'I made out + NP,' and 'I caught + NP.' The point of departure, then, is
the narrator himself: where he was, what he did, what he saw. But a glance at the deep
structure will explain why one feels a quite different emphasis in the sentence as a
whole: seven of the embedded sentences have 'sharer' as grammatical subjects; in
another three the subject is a noun linked to 'sharer' by the copula; in two 'sharer'
is direct object; and in two more 'share' is the verb. Thus thirteen sentences go to the
semantic development of 'sharer' as follows:

1. The secret sharer had lowered the secret sharer into the water.
2. The secret sharer took his punishment.
 3. The secret sharer swam.
4. The secret sharer was a swimmer.
5. The swimmer was proud.
6. The swimmer struck out for a new destiny.
7. The secret sharer was a man.
8. The man was free.
9. The secret sharer was my secret self.
10. The secret sharer had (it).
11. (Someone) punished the secret sharer.
12. (Someone) shared my cabin.
13. (Someone) shared my thoughts.

In a fundamental way, the sentence is mainly about Leggatt, although the surface
structure indicates otherwise...

"[The] progression in the deep structure rather precisely mirrors both the rhetorical
movement of the sentence from the narrator to Leggatt via the hat that links them, and
the thematic effect of the sentence, which is to transfer Leggatt's experience to the
narrator via the narrator's vicarious and actual participation in it. Here I shall leave this
abbreviated rhetorical analysis, with a cautionary word: I do not mean to suggest that
only an examination of deep structure reveals Conrad's skillful emphasis—on the
contrary, such an examination supports and in a sense explains what any careful reader
of the story notices."
(Richard M. Ohmann, "Literature as Sentences." College English, 1966. Rpt. in Essays
in Stylistic Analysis, ed. by Howard S. Babb. Harcourt, 1972)

GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

In linguistics, generative grammar is a grammar (or set of rules) that indicates the
structure and interpretation of sentences which native speakers of a language accept as
belonging to the language.

Adopting the term generative from mathematics, linguist Noam Chomsky introduced
the concept of generative grammar in the 1950s. Also known as transformational-
generative grammar.

See the observations below.

Also, see:

 Case Grammar
 Chomskyan Linguistics
 Context Sensitivity
 Deep Structure and Surface Structure
 Linguistic Competence
 Linguistic Performance
 Optimality Theory (OT)
  Phrase Structure Grammar
 Poverty of the Stimulus
 Recursion
 Ten Types of Grammar
 Transformational Grammar
 Universal Grammar

Observations

 "Generative grammar can be regarded as a kind of confluence of long-

forgotten concerns of the study of language and mind, and new understanding
provided by the formal sciences."
 "A generative grammar of, say, English is an attempt at providing a fully
explicit and mechanical statement of the rules governing the construction of
English sentences. That is, the rules of the grammar must tell us exactly what can
be counted as a grammatical sentence of English while excluding everything that
is not a sentence of English."
 The Evolution of Generative Grammar
- "A significant break in linguistic tradition came in 1957, the year American
Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures appeared and presented the concept of a
'transformational generative grammar.' A generative grammar is essentially
one that 'projects' one or more given sets of sentences that make up the language
one is describing, a process characterizing human language's creativity. Modified
in its theoretical principles and methods over succeeding years by many linguists,
principally in the USA, a transformational generative grammar attempts to
describe a native speaker's linguistic competence by framing linguistic
descriptions as rules for 'generating' an infinite number of grammatical
sentences.

 A Theory of Competence
"Simply put, a generative grammar is a theory of competence: a model of the
psychological system of unconscious knowledge that underlies a speaker's ability
to produce and interpret utterances in a language. . . . A good way of trying to
understand [Noam] Chomsky's point is to think of a generative grammar as
essentially a definitionof competence: a set of criteria that linguistic structures
must meet to be judged acceptable."

Sources

Noam Chomsky, The Minimalist Program. The MIT Press, 1995

R.L. Trask and Bill Mayblin, Introducing Linguistics, 2000

Frank Parker and Kathryn Riley, Linguistics for Non-Linguists. Allyn and Bacon, 1994

CITE
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surface structure (generative grammar)

Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms
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(Nick Pedersen/Getty Images)

by Richard Nordquist
Updated March 23, 2018

In transformational and generative grammar, surface structure is the outward form of

a sentence. In contrast to deep structure (an abstract representation of a sentence),
surface structure corresponds to the version of a sentence that can be spoken and heard.
A modified version of the concept of surface structure is called S-structure.

In transformational grammar, deep structures are generated by phrase-structure rules,

and surface structures are derived from deep structures by a series of transformations.

In The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar (2014), Aarts et al. point out that, in a
looser sense, "deep and surface structure are often used as terms in a simple binary
opposition, with the deep structure representing meaning, and the surface structure
being the actual sentence we see."

The terms deep structure and surface structure were popularized in the 1960s and '70s
by American linguist Noam Chomsky. In recent years, notes Geoffrey Finch, "the
terminology has changed: 'Deep' and 'surface' structure have become 'D' and 'S'
structure, principally because the original terms seemed to imply some sort of
qualitative evaluation; 'deep' suggested 'profound,' whilst 'surface' was too close to
'superficial.' Nevertheless, the principles of transformational grammar still remain very
much alive in contemporary linguistics" (Linguistic Terms and Concepts, 2000).

Examples and Observations

 "The surface structure of a sentence is the final stage in

the syntactic representation of a sentence, which provides the input to
the phonological component of the grammar, and which thus most closely
corresponds to the structure of the sentence we articulate and hear. This two-
 level conception of grammatical structure is still widely held, though it has been
much criticized in recent generative studies. An alternative conception is to relate
surface structure directly to a semantic level of representation, bypassing deep
structure altogether. The term 'surface grammar' is sometimes used as an
informal term for the superficial properties of the sentence."
(David Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, 6th ed. Wiley, 2011)

 "A deep structure is . . . the underlying form of a sentence, before rules

like auxiliaryinversion and wh-fronting apply. After all raisings apply, plus
relevant morphologicaland phonological rules (as for forms of do), the result . . .
is the linear, concrete, surface structure of sentences, ready to be given
phonetic form."
(Grover Hudson, Essential Introductory Linguistics. Blackwell, 2000)

 Surface Structure Cues and Strategies

"The surface structure of the sentence often provides a number of obvious
cues to the underlying syntactic representation. One obvious approach is to use
these cues and a number of simple strategies that enable us to compute the
syntactic structure. The earliest detailed expositions of this idea were by Bever
(1970) and Fodor and Garrett (1967). These researchers detailed a number
of parsing strategies that used only syntactic cues. Perhaps the simplest example
is that when we see or hear a determinersuch as 'the' or 'a,' we know a noun
phrase has just started. A second example is based on the observation that
although word order is variable in English, and transformations such
as passivization can change it, the common structure noun-verb-noun often maps
on to what is called the canonical sentence structure SVO (subject-verb-object).
That is, in most sentences we hear or read, the first noun is the subject, and the
second one the object. In fact, if we made use of this strategy we could get a long
way in comprehension. We try the simpler strategies first, and if they do not
work, we try other ones."
(Trevor A. Harley, The Psychology of Language: From Data to Theory, 4th ed.
Psychology Press, 2014)

 Chomsky on Deep and Surface Structures

"[T]he generative grammar of a language specifies an infinite set of structural
descriptions, each of which contains a deep structure, a surface structure,
a phonetic representation, a semantic representation, and other formal
structures. The rules relating deep and surface structures--the so-called
'grammatical transformations'--have been investigated in some detail, and are
fairly well understood. The rules that relate surface structures and phonetic
representations are also reasonably well understood (though I do not want to
imply that the matter is beyond dispute: far from it). It seems that both deep and
surface structures enter into the determination of meaning. Deep structure
provides the grammatical relations of predication, modification, and so on, that
enter into the determination of meaning. On the other hand, it appears that
matters of focus and presupposition, topic and comment, the scope of logical
elements, and pronominal reference are determined, in part at least, by surface
structure. The rules that relate syntactic structures to representations of meaning
are not at all well understood. In fact, the notion of 'representation of meaning' or
'semantic representation' is itself highly controversial. It is not clear at all that it
is possible to distinguish sharply between the contribution of grammar to the
determination of meaning, and the contribution of so-called 'pragmatic
considerations,' questions of fact and belief and context of utterance."
(Noam Chomsky, lecture given in January 1969 at Gustavus Adolphus College in
Minnesota. Rpt. in Language and Mind, 3rd ed. Cambridge University Press,
2006)