Dependency Syntax: Surface Structure and Deep Structure
Guillaume Bonfante, Bruno Guillaume, Guy Perrier · 2018
This chapter begins by considering dependency syntax. However, the way in which certain aspects of language are represented using dependencies is strongly influenced by the notion of constituents. The key element presented in this chapter is the distinction between surface syntax and deep syntax. Surface syntax connects all words in a phrase, including grammatical words and semantically full words, only taking account of the direct and explicit dependencies between these words. In general terms, surface structure reflects the syntactic structure underpinning the phonological form of a phrase, while deep syntax is an abstraction in the direction of semantics. The set of dependencies between words in a sentence makes up the dependency structure of the sentence. There is a correspondence between constituent structure and dependency structure, meaning that the dependency-based syntactic surface structure is always a tree.