surface structure

A central theoretical term in TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR, opposed to DEEP STRUCTURE. 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. Analyzing a surface STRING of MORPHEMES through CONSTITUENT analysis is a universal procedure which indicates many important facts about LINGUISTIC structure; but it by no means indicates everything, e.g. it cannot explain how we recognize certain AMBIGUOUS sentences, or how we INTUITIVELY relate sentences which have different surface FORMS but the same basic MEANING (e.g. Cats chase mice and Mice are chased by cats). For such reasons, linguists in the late 1950s postulated a deep or ‘underlying’ structure for sentences – a LEVEL of structural organization in which all the factors determining structural interpretation are defined and interrelated. The standard view was that a grammar operates by generating a set of abstract deep structures, subsequently converting these UNDERLYING REPRESENTATIONS into surface structures by applying a set of TRANSFORMATIONAL RULES. This two-level conception of grammatical structure came to be much criticized in later GENERATIVE studies. An alternative conception related surface structure directly to a SEMANTIC level of representation, bypassing deep structure altogether. Later models introduce a modified notion known as S-STRUCTURE. The term surface grammar is sometimes used as an informal term for the superficial properties of the sentence.