Re: Matt. 12:32

From: Jonathan Robie (jonathan@texcel.no)
Date: Fri Jul 24 1998 - 22:31:48 EDT


My Transformational Grammar class was in 1979, so I'm not sure that I have
this all right, but I figure the real linguists like Micheal, Mari, Edward,
Rod, KTL will correct my errors here...

At 09:51 AM 7/23/98 -0700, Edgar Foster wrote:
 
>According to psychologists, sentences have both a surface and deep
>structure. Surface structure has reference to the words and phrases
>that make up a sentence. Deep structure is the underlying meaning of
>the words and phrases in a sentence. Deep structure per se isn't
>"new", but the application of deep structure to Biblical studies is a
>fairly "new" development.

Deep structure comes from Chomsky's Transformational Grammar. It is a form
of *structure*, not *meaning*. The basic idea is that the same basic
propositions may be expressed through different grammatical forms, e.g.
active and passive in sentences like this:

        I am writing this email.
        This email is being written by me.

Chomsky, back in the Transformational Grammar days, said that these
sentences have the same deep structure, which is basically a normalized
form which can be used to determine whether two different syntactic
structures ("surface structure") contain the same propositions. Both
surface structure and deep structure were represented by trees, and the
difference between a deep structure representation and the passive, for
instance, could be characterized mathematically by a tree transformation
operation. The transformations by which a deep structure is changed into a
given surface structure can be seen as representing changes in focus,
emphasis, etc.

In English, sentences transformed into their deep structure come out active
and direct.

I'm not sure which psychologists view deep structure as "the underlying
meaning" of the words and phrases of a sentence, but as I understand it,
deep structure is *structure*, not *meaning*. I guess the adjective "deep"
sounds mysterious and meaningful, but I don't think Chomsky taught that the
deep structure represents the "true inner meaning" of a sentence.

For what it's worth, Chomsky himself moved significantly away from deep
structure in his "Government and Binding Theory", the successor to
Transformational Grammar, and abandoned it altogether in his current
approach to linguistics, which is known as "Minimalism". Instead of deep
structure, he now focuses on "Logical Form", which infers the propositions
of a sentence directly from its surface structure.

Micheal Palmer tells me that some linguists, e.g. Nida, have suggested that
translators first change the sentence in the source language to the deep
structure, then translate it to its deep structure in the target language,
then examine the differences between the surface structure and deep
structure in the source language and attempt to find semantically
equivalent transformations in the target language.

>KAI (R) + QEOS (O) + HN (R) + hO (R) + LOGOS (O)
>
>>From this diagram, the translator then proceeds to understand the
>underlying meaning of the clause under discussion.

I would rather say that the diagram presents the propositions made in a
sentence in a normalized form. I'm uncomfortable with calling the set of
propositions made in a sentence the "underlying meaning" or with implying
that the deep structure is somehow closer to the underlying meaning of a
sentence than the surface structure. Of course, we can't talk meaningfully
about this without first establishing the meaning of the phrase "underlying
meaning" and determining how to assess the distance between various
graphical representation of a sentence and it's "underlying meaning".

The deep structure is simply a graphical representation of a sentence which
presents the propositions of the sentence in a direct, normalized form.

>This has some interesting implications for translation. the TEV
>follows this methodology, and translates Mark 1:4:
>
>"So John appeared in the desert, baptizing and preaching. 'Turn away
>from your sins and be baptized,' he told the people, 'and God will
>forgive your sin.'"
>
>Contrast this deep structural rendering with the RSV (which emphasizes
>the surface structure of Greek).

The deep structure is, of course, a graphical form. If you change this to a
"deep structural rendering", I suppose what you get is a lot of active,
simple, conventional sentences. When the TEV was translated, did the
translator really graph the Greek sentences and convert them to their deep
structure?

I don't think it's fair to say that the RSV emphasizes the surface
structure of Greek - it generally seeks to maintain grammatical forms as
close as possible to those found in the original, but I doubt very much
that Metzger ever made up the surface structure graphs for the Greek, then
analyzed them and used them as a basis for translation.

The more accurate statement would be this: the RSV tends to reflect the
words and syntactic forms of the Greek more directly than does the TEV.

>One work that briefly touches on deep structure is psychologist's
>Sydney Lamb's _Outline of Stratificational Grammar_. On. pp. 34-35,
>40, the development of deep structure is discussed in detail (from
>Harris, Chomsky, and Shaumyan).
 
Haven't read it - I know my Transformational Grammar mainly from Radford
and from Akmajian and Heny. But I'm getting old (grin!).

Jonathan
___________________________________________________________________________

Jonathan Robie jwrobie@mindspring.com

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