The Deep Structures of Philippine Languages

Abstract

Excerpt

In his book published in 1965 entitled Aspects of the theory of syntax, Noam Chomsky (p.16) defines a generative grammar as having three major components: the syntactic, phonological and semantic. The syntactic component, according to him (p.16), “must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”

This paper deals with the deep structures of the sentences of the Philippine languages. Specifically, it presents this writer’s formulation of the base or categorial rules of the ‘universal’ grammar of the Philippine languages. (pp. 64)