Deep structure and surface structure
architecture of early generative grammar
Deep structure and surface structure (also D-structure and S-structure although those abbreviated forms are sometimes used with distinct meanings) are concepts used in linguistics, specifically in the study of syntax in the Chomskyan tradition of transformational generative grammar.
The deep structure of a linguistic expression is a theoretical construct that seeks to unify several related structures. For example, the sentences "Pat loves Chris" and "Chris is loved by Pat" mean roughly the same thing and use similar words. Some linguists, Chomsky in particular, have tried to account for this similarity by positing that these two sentences are distinct surface forms that derive from a common (or very similar) deep structure.
Origin
Chomsky coined and popularized the terms "deep structure" and "surface structure" in the early 1960s. American linguist Sydney Lamb wrote in 1975 that Chomsky "probably [borrowed] the term from Hockett". American linguist Charles Hockett first used the dichotomous pair "deep grammar" vs "surface grammar" in his 1958 book titled A Course in Modern Linguistics. Chomsky first referred to these Hockettian concepts in his 1962 paper The Logical Basis of Linguistic Theory (later published as Current Issues in Linguistic Theory in 1964). In it Chomsky noted that "the difference between observational
and descriptive adequacy is related to the distinction drawn by Hockett (1958) between 'surface grammar' and 'deep grammar', and he is unquestionably correct in noting that modern linguistics is largely confined in scope to the former." The phrases 'depth grammar' and 'surface grammar' had been used by Ludwig Wittgenstein to denote the same ideas in his Philosophical Investigations (1953).
In Chomskyan linguistics
In early transformational syntax, deep structures are derivation trees of a context-free language.
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