ABSTRACT
The linguist Noam Chomsky first used the term as part of a theory of grammar that identified levels of structure in language from deep to surface. As part of structuralism and its linguistic theory, it claims that we all possess an innate capacity for creating sentences. That capacity resides at the level of deep structures that represent certain fundamental understandings of the world. Those deep structures of language underlie every sentence it is possible to utter. The mechanism for creating meaning involves raising deep structures to the surface to form surface structures using prescribed generative rules.
