Deep Structure Surface Structure And Semantic Interpretation

The theory of transformational grammars represents the linguists' most elaborate attempt to date to formalize the syntactic structure of English. The result of analyzing a sentence according to a transformational grammar is a so-called 'deep structure, ' which expresses various information about the constituent portions of the sentence in a treelike form. In view of the relatively high state of development of the transformational theory, it is natural to use it as the basis for the 'front end' of an English-understanding program. The system discussed in the report provides a general method of interpretation of transformationally parsed sentences for use in question-answering. It is based on a general scheme for using the information contained in the deep structures to interrogate a data base. The primary effort is aimed at handling a wide variety of complex syntactic structures, with particular concern for the problem of embedded structures. The system provides a general facility for handling syntactic sturctures, to which a user can add routines corresponding to the specific nouns, verbs, and adjectives he wants to use. The present implementation includes a vocabulary suitable for dealing with sets; the noun, verb, and adjective routines for this area of discourse constitute about 10% of the entire program.

In The Ideological Structure of Linguistic Theory Geoffrey J. Huck and John A. Goldsmith provide a revisionist account of the development of ideas about semantics in modern theories of language, focusing particularly on Chomsky's very public rift with the Generative Semanticists about the concept of Deep Structure.

Includes contributions by R.M.W. Dixon - A method of semantic description; K.L. Hale - A note on a Walbiri tradition of antonymy, both listed separetely in bibliography.

Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.