DEEP STRUCTURE, SURFACE STRUCTURE AND SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION

Flashcards about deep structure, surface structure, and semantic interpretation.

Grammar of a Language

A system of rules that expresses the correspondence between sound and meaning in a language.

Grammatical Transformation

A mapping of phrase-markers onto phrase-markers.

Conditions on Grammatical Rules

Conditions may be specific to the grammar or general, defining permissible sequences of transformations and how they map a phrase-marker P onto a phrase-marker P'.

Lexicon

A class of lexical entries, each specifying the grammatical (phonological, semantic, and syntactic) properties of some lexical item.

Lexical Transformation

Maps a phrase-marker P containing a substructure Q into a phrase-marker P' formed by replacing Q by I (the lexical item).

Condition (3)

For j < i, the transformation used to form Pj+1 from Pj is lexical, and for j ≥ i, the transformation used to form Pj+1 from Pj is nonlexical.

Post-Lexical Structure

Pi in the sequence Pi, …, Pn, where for j < i, the transformation used to form Pj+1 from Pj is lexical, and for j ≥ i, the transformation used to form Pj+1 from Pj is nonlexical.

Components of a Grammar (Chomsky, 1965)

A lexicon, a system of grammatical transformations, and a system of phonological rules; also contains a system of rules of semantic interpretation and a context-free categorial component with a designated terminal element Δ.

The Base of the Grammar

The categorial component and the lexicon.

Phonological Rules

Mapping surface structures into phonetic representations.

Semantic Rules

Mapping post-lexical structures into semantic representations.

Deep Structures

Post-lexical structures that contain all lexical items, each with its complement of grammatical features.

General Principle of Lexical Insertion

Formulated which interprets the features of lexical entries as lexical insertion transformations and applies these transformations to Pi giving, ultimately, Pi.

Lexical Insertion Transformation

Replace a particular occurrence of the designated symbol Δ of Pi by a lexical item.

Standard Theory

A syntactically-based framework that specifies, for each sentence, a syntactic structure Σ = (Pi, …, P{, …, Pn), a semantic representation S, and a phonetic representation P.

Syntactically-Based

In this theory, sound-meaning relation (P, S) to be determined by Σ.

Inherent Meaning of a Sentence

Characterized in some still-to-be-discovered system of representation, is related to various aspects of its form.

Surface Structures

Each of which is mapped onto a phonetic representation by a system of phonological rules.

Syntactic Structures

A sequence of phrase-markers Pi, …, Pn meeting specific conditions related to transformations and surface structures.

Lexical Entry

Incorporating a set of transformations that insert the item in question in phrase-markers.

Deep Structures Conditions

They determine semantic representation, are mapped into well-formed surface structures by grammatical transformations, and satisfy the set of formal conditions defined by base rules.

Syntactically-based Standard Theory

Assumes that a syntactic structure Σ is mapped onto the pair (P, S) (P a phonetic and S a semantic representation).

Semantically-based Theory

Supposes that S is mapped onto Σ, which is then mapped onto Ρ as in the standard theory.

Focus

The predicate of the dominant proposition of the deep structure.

Presupposition

The sentence expresses.

Surface Structure

These involve surface structure in an essential way, and thus to provide strong counter-evidence to the standard theory, which stipulates that semantic interpretation must be entirely determined by deep structure.

Rules of Phonological Interpretation

Assign an intonational contour to surface structures.

Lexical Insertion Operations

Where can the lexical insertion operations so that they insert uncle in place of the structure Q = brother of (father-or-mother) (the terms of Q being semantically primitive).

Structures C (Case systems)

Expresses semantically significant relations among phrases such as the relation of agent-action.

Focus

Is the phrase containing the intonation center.

Presupposition

Is determined by replacement of the focus by a variable.