Which term denotes the underlying structure of a sentence in transformational grammar?

Which term denotes the underlying structure of a sentence in transformational grammar?

• A. Deep Structure
• B. Surface Structure
• C. Tokens
• D. Phonemes

Answer: (A)

In transformational grammar, the key idea is that sentences have an abstract skeleton and a realized form. The underlying skeleton is the Deep Structure, which encodes the core syntactic relationships and meaning before any transformations are applied. For example, different surface forms like statements and questions can share the same deep structure, with transformations such as movement or inversion producing the surface form. Phonemes are sound units, and tokens are actual word instances, neither of which captures the sentence’s abstract syntactic backbone. So, the term for the underlying structure is Deep Structure.

In transformational grammar, the key idea is that sentences have an abstract skeleton and a realized form. The underlying skeleton is the Deep Structure, which encodes the core syntactic relationships and meaning before any transformations are applied. For example, different surface forms like statements and questions can share the same deep structure, with transformations such as movement or inversion producing the surface form. Phonemes are sound units, and tokens are actual word instances, neither of which captures the sentence’s abstract syntactic backbone. So, the term for the underlying structure is Deep Structure.