SURFACE STRUCTURE AND THE CENTRALITY OF SYNTAX

This paper examines the status of surface structure in transformational grammar, and the way that surface structure mediates the contacts between the phonological and semantic components of the grammar. Surface structure refers not to a single but to at least four distinct notions that do not necessarily define a homogeneous level of representation: output of the syntactic component, input to the phonological component, phonetic structure, and the level at which surface structure constraints are stated. Based on a survey of the literature, the conclusions include the necessity of direct links between deeper syntax and phonology, the influence of phonology on various syntactic operations, the need for phonetic information in certain semantic interpretation rules, and the lack of homogeneity among surface structure constraints. Finally, there is a recurrent influence of prosodic and morphological phenomena which motivate the revisions needed in the general organization of a grammar because they limit the types of interaction between the various grammatical domains. *