1/23/2019 Portable Booklets (THIRD STAGE) LTM.

Deep structure and Surface Structure

On the basis of Generative Grammar we are able to differentiate between

deep and surface structures.
If you want to express information linguistically, you can, for example, produce a sentence like
"The dog is chasing the mailman." This is the "surface" layer: it consists of the words and
sounds produced by a speaker (or writer) and perceived by a listener (or reader).

Surface Structure:

The formal structure of a sentence as it actually occurs in speech. It is the

apparent structure of a sentence.

Deep Structure:

The deep structure is a direct representation of the basic semantic relations

underlying a sentence. It is the underlying meaning of the sentence.

Let’s take an example to understand the difference between deep and surface
structures.

i) I ate a banana.
ii) A banana was eaten by me.
In this example i) is active voice and ii) is passive voice. Structures of the sentences
are different but the meanings are same. In the above example there are two surface
structures but one deep structure or underlying meaning. It means that a sentence can
have two or many surface structure but one deep structure.

Now take another example;

“The lady beat a man with an umbrella.”

What we read is the surface structure of this sentence, but when we ponder on its
meaning we feel ambiguity in getting its meaning. Whether it means that the lady is
having an umbrella and she is beating the man with it or that the lady is beating the man
who is having an umbrella. This ambiguity leads to two different meanings of one
sentence. It means that a sentence can have on surface structure but more deep
structures.

Free and Bound Morphemes

All morphemes are either free or bound. A free morpheme is one that can
stand on its own as a word(e.g. "nation"). A bound morpheme is one that
cannot stand on its own and must be attached to another morpheme to
convey meaning (e.g. "-al," "-iz" and "-ation"). Know that free morphemes are
further classified as either open-class or closed-class. Open-class (also known
as lexical morphemes) are nouns, verbs and adjectives to which additional
morphemes can be added. Closed-class (also known as functional)
morphemes are conjunctions, prepositions and determiners which cannot take
an additional morpheme. Understand that bound morphemes are further
classified as either inflectional or derivational affixes or roots.

Phonemes and Morphemes

The difference between phonemes and morphemes is that phonemes are

individual sound units, while morphemes are distinct units of a word that have
their own meaning. A phoneme does not have to have a distinct meaning
because it is simply a sound. For example, in the word 'unbroken', 'un' is a
morpheme because it has its own distinct meaning ('not') and it cannot be
broken down further. 'Un' is made up of two phonemes: /u/ and /n/. Neither of
these phonemes have a distinct meaning; they are simply the sounds that
make up the morpheme 'un'.
Morphemes can change the meaning of a word. For example, 'broken' is a distinct
word. If you add the morpheme 'un', you then have the word 'unbroken', which
changes the meaning of 'broken' to 'no longer broken' or 'not broken'.