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Re: Obsessed with Mouth Noises

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Wednesday, April 14, 2004, 5:44
From:    Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
> Indeed, altho deep structure is a central > theoretical term of most versions of transformation grammar, some > generative studies, I understand, have called into question the role of > deep structure, suggesting that a separate level of underlying syntactic > organization between surface and meaning is unnecessary and misleading.
That's more or less right. Although Chomsky's Minimalist Program has also done away with the notion of "Deep-structure" or "D-structure", it's still derivational: the single rule "movement-alpha" is held to occur automatically as a result of feature checking at various structurally defined positions in a syntactic tree. Most other versions of generative grammar, especially the Lexicalist family of theories, generate grammatical sentences with each module running in parallel. A number of constraints (very many, in Optimality theoretic syntax) determine which mappings from one module to another are grammatical or not. ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637