to in the following way The for to intermediate structure (39) 439) John is too far away for John Equi NP Deletion applies to remove the to see anything agan John.
yielding (s0 applies to remove the second occurrence of J other rule applies to (40), the for Deletion Transformation will apply to which is one of the sentences we wish to produce, namely (28).
(40) John is 1oo far away for to see anything For most dialects, (40) is an intermediate structure, that is, not yet e prodaTh It the of (41) John is too far away to see anything But. in addition to the for Deletion rule, the optional Pro-Form Deletion T could apply. In this case, the result would be the other sentence we want to Transform.
e want to generate, sin tha sc th SL which is repeated here as (42) (42) John is too far away to see Again the transformations have produced several surface structures frorm structure. But note that, from the two different deep structures (31) and have produced a single surface structure, the ambiguous sentence (26), ated as (38) and again as (42) the same de (32), the rua biguou PROPERTIES OF DEEP STRUCTURES AND TRANSFORMATIONS The example of ambiguity we have just discussed, although complex and what difficult to follow. is important for several reasons.
First, it illustrates ho structures and transformations account for the existence of ambiguous sen language. Almost all ambiguous sentences result from similar situations deep structures and a number of transformations that may lead to a sing perhaps some sentences with sever surface structure Second, the example illustrates a point made throughout this bou namely, that many aspects of language are abstract and not immediately apparent from te surface Note that the deep structures represented by (3 1) and (32) are quite different rom the actual surface sentences, such as (26) and (27) on the one hand, (26) and (28) on the other, It is in this sense that deep structures are abstract, they may be substantaly different from the surface structures that occur in speech or writing. A third pas exemplified by our rather lengthy discussion of sentence (26) is that transformations indeed generalizations-they apply in the production of a variety of sentences with difle 2ent deep structures.
The same rules used in the discusion of (26) also account far b sentences mentioned in Chapters 12 and 13, that is: (43) John is eager to please.
- Jo'in is easy to please Following the same kind of argument used for (26), we can see that underlying (431a deep structure something like (45) £(45) John is eager-Joha please someone..