The articles contained in this volume are either theoretical or descriptive contributions to the field of linguistic inquiry known as transformational linguistics. The issues considered are general in scope although some area of English syntax is the concern of each writer. The articles, conceived and written between mid-1964 and mid-1968, represent some fundamental reconsideration of the nature and role of deep structure.
By the summer of 1964, the formalization of the distinction between deep and surface levels of sentence representation had been developed by researchers at MIT including Chomsky, Halle, Katz, Postal, and a number of MIT graduate students in linguistics. This theory was presented formally in Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965. During the period from 1964 through early 1967, much research was devoted to theoretical extension and descriptive application of the notions proposed in Aspects. Toward the end of this period, a phase emerged in which evidence that the Aspects model was unsatisfactory began to accumulate. This led to a more serious questioning of that model, and eventually to a third stage where various proposals envisaging relatively fundamental revisions of the model were advanced. The articles in this book have been arranged to reflect each of these three stages in the development of transformational syntax.