Memory, thinking and language.pdf

66
Figure 13 Chomsky’s (1965) theory of language.
structures’ into ‘surface structures’ and vice versa. One example
is a passive transformation which would re-order words so as to
‘transform’ the deep structure underlying John kicked the cat into
the passive surface word order The cat was kicked by John. The
basic idea was that deep structures are available for semantic
interpretation while surface structures provide the information
needed to turn the surface order of words into actual sounds.
Chomsky (1965) was interested in the relationship between
sounds at one end of the linguistic process and the interpretation
of meanings at the other, as shown in Figure 13.
Deep structures are generated in the first place by ‘phrase
structure’ rules of the kind given in Figure 10. It is the subject/
verb/object relationships in the deep structure Jane hit the boy
from which the meaning can be interpreted by the semantic
interpretation rules in the semantic component. The
transformational rules convert these deep structures into surface
structure word orders like The boy was hit by Jane. It is the
surface structure The boy was hit by Jane which can be input to
phonological rules for producing the actual sounds of the
sentence in the right order.
The crux of Chomsky’s theory is that the syntactic component
is central to the transformation of sounds into meanings. It is the
transformational rules in the syntactic component which perform
the important function of mapping the sounds of utterances on to
their meanings. Chomsky’s concern is with the grammar of a