Surface structure is the actual spoken sentence comprising phonemes, syllables, words, phrases, sentences, and deep structure the underlying meaning of the sentence. A single idea constituting a deep structure can be expressed in a number of different surface structures (and conversely similar surface structures can have completely different deep structures). For example:<\/p>\n
* John hits Fred (deep structure)<\/p>\n
* John hit Fred, John was hitting Fred, Fred was hit by John (surface structure)<\/p>\n
The deep structure then provides the semantic component of sentence, while the surface structure communicates the proper phonological information to express that thought. The distinction between deep and surface structure raised controversies in the middle 1960s and with them the onset of the so-called linguistic wars, especially with regard to the status of deep structure. One of the problems with deep structure is that it not always possible to interpret it unambiguously from surface structure as in the following newspaper headline “Drunk gets nine months in violin case”, and in this advert for a Hong Kong dentist “Teeth extracted by the latest Methodists”. <\/p>\n
See Competence (linguistics)<\/a>, Generative grammar approach<\/a>, Linguistics<\/a>, Performance (linguistics)<\/a>, Psycholinguistics<\/a>, Semantics<\/a>, Transformational grammar approach<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/body><\/html><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Surface structure is the actual spoken sentence comprising phonemes, syllables, words, phrases, sentences, and deep structure the underlying meaning of the sentence. A single idea constituting a deep structure can be expressed in a number of different surface structures (and conversely similar surface structures can have completely different deep structures). For example: * John hits … <\/p>\n