What Do We Understand from the Terms Deep Structure and Surface Structure?

According to the theory developed mostly by Port Royal school in the 17th century and later on formulated by Noam Chomsky, each sentence in a language has two levels of representation: a deep structure and a surface structure. The deep or underlying structure represents the semantic foundations of a sentence. Meanwhile the surface structure is the actual form of a sentence which essentially occurs in speech (the phonetic form) or writing. While the speaker or the writer is on the side of deep structure as he/she is the one supposed to know the semantic layer of the sentence, the listener or the reader is passively exposed to the surface structure of a sentence. The surface structure of a sentence may have empty categories and traces that are normally full and existing in the deep layer of representation. In this study we will examine the language-internal and cross-linguistic versions of deep and surface structures.

Keywords

Port Royal School, Chomsky, deep structure, surface structure, principles, parameters