Exploring Syntax: Surface Structure, Deep Structure, and Ambiguity, Lexical Ambiguity and Generative Grammar

Syntax:

The word syntax comes from Greek meaning to put together. It is the analysis of structure of sentences and order of words in the sentences across languages.

Surface Structure:

These two concepts were given by Noam Chomsky in 1957 in his book Syntactic Structures. According to him, in a  language a sentence is represented at two levels: Surface and Deep structures.. Surface level is the actual form of the sentence, which is either uttered or written. In contrast, Deep structure is the abstract form of the sentences that exist in the minds of the speakers that help them to understand the meaning of the sentence. So, it can be interpreted that surface structure is determined by phonetic form, and deep structure is defined by semantics.

Structural Ambiguity:

When a sentence has more than one interpretation, it is called structurally ambiguous due to the structure of the sentence.

For example, She hit the man with an umbrella.

This sentence has either two meanings: the woman hit the man with the help of an umbrella or the man had an umbrella and he was hit by the woman.

Lexical Ambiguity:

When a particular word in a sentence has more than one meaning and it causes the interpretation to change according to different meanings of that word, this is called lexical Ambiguity.

For example, She has grown another foot. The word foot either interprets that the girl's height has increased by a foot, or that the girl has got another foot besides two on her both legs. The different meanings are only possible to interpret when the sentence is analyzed at a deeper level, which is called the deep structure.

Generative Grammar:

It is a theory which claims that there are a finite set of rules of creating sentences, which are used to create an infinite number of sentences.