LIN 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Deep Structure And Surface Structure
Linguistics
• “Wanna” and “Want to”
• You might object that we have invented traces precisely to explain when want to cannot
contract; that we will simply hypothesize that every uncontractable example has a trace in
the middle.
• This is a fair objection but remember that we are not putting traces wherever we want,
but only where we expect the answer to the question to fit.
• You are encouraged to try more examples on yourself and your friends.
• This step of introducing traces to explain when want to may be contracted is a serious
and profound piece of theory-building.
• We are saying that sentences in the mind are not exactly like their counterparts spoken
aloud.
• They are not mere mental tape-recordings — they can possess aspects, like traces, that
cannot be heard.
• As soon as we take this theoretical step, we open up a new question: 'How is language
represented in the mind?'.
• Linguists use the term deep structure to discuss the way sentences are represented in the
mind. In contrast, surface structure means sentences as we hear or read them.
• This leads to the third principle of linguistics: Sentences have deep structure in the mind,
that is not directly observable, but may be inferred indirectly from patterns of language
behavior.
• As we throw various examples at you, we are either marking them with asterisks —
starring them, as linguists say — or we are not. In essence, we are asking you to go along
with our judgment about whether or not the examples are natural, native English
• We would prefer to be scientific about it; one way of doing this would be to perform a
study in which we present our examples to a few hundred native English users, and have
our subjects tell us whether they thought the examples were good English
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