Re: Obsessed with Mouth Noises

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.

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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
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Chicago, IL 60637