Deep structure as logical form

✍ Scribed by Gilbert Harman

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1970
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 994 KB
• Volume: 21
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0039-7857
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00484801

✦ Synopsis

A transformational derivation of a sentence is a sequence of labeled phrase structure trees. The last tree in the sequence represents the surface structure of the sentence. The first tree represents the deep structure of the sentence# Each later tree is derived from its predecessor via the application of exactly one transformational rule. The surface structure tree represents that syntactic structure relevant to the way in which the sentence is pronounced. It will be assumed here that the deep structure tree is a full semantic representation of the sentence# Until recently, transformational grammarians assumed that deep structures took the form subject phrase followed by predicate phrase. But considerable simplification results if deep structure takes the form predicate followed by one or more arguments. If auxiliary verb is ignored (as it will be throughout this paper), the difference is given in Figure 1.