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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 52
refuted, e.g. by Gazdar et al. (1985), but was generally accepted for many years.
It seemed, however, that separate rules would be required to move constituents
in pairs like (5) and (6) if the relationships holding between these pairs was to
be recognised by the grammar. These movement rules are different in type
from the phrase-structure rules (also known as rewrite rules), and are called
transformational rules. The form and nature of movement rules have
changed considerably over the various versions of Chomskyan grammar, but
we still have an underlying order of elements created by phrase-structure rules,
and transformational or movement rules which produce the actually occurring
sentence structure. The underlying order of elements was originally called
deep structure, and the observable output of the full set of rules was called
the surface structure. The term deep structure was often used informally to
mean any level more abstract than the actually occurring surface form. In later
versions this was reformulated in terms of D-structure and S-structure, where
D-structure is equivalent to deep structure, but S-structure differs from
surface structure. Surface structure is the immediate input into the rules
which provide a pronunciation of the sentence under consideration, while Sstructure
is the input to the semantic component, and still contains some
empty elements such as traces, which are not pronounced at all.
(5) a. I can put up Kim
b. I can put Kim up.
(6) a. I can’t stand olives.
b. Olives, I can’t stand.
The evaluation of grammars
According to Chomsky (1964), grammars can hope to achieve one of three
levels of adequacy. A grammar that is observationally adequate contains
sufficient information to reproduce just the data on which it is based. A
grammar is descriptively adequate if it contains sufficient information not
only to account for the input data, but to assign a structure which reflects precisely
those patterns in the data that are captured by the intuitions of the native
speaker. Finally, a grammar is explanatorily adequate if it derives from a linguistic
theory which allows the selection of the best possible descriptively adequate
grammar from those which are compatible with the data. Chomsky has
consistently sought explanatory adequacy. However we may phrase this
requirement, what it translates as is a push to find out why particular patterns
should occur in individual languages, why languages should differ in the
observed patterns, and what fundamental principles govern the kinds of
pattern that are observed. Examples are provided by the pairs in (7) and (8),
where one language allows a pattern which a neighbouring language does not