Re: grammar tricks

["MULLIN ANNE" <MULLANNE@AD.isu.edu>]

Margaret asked for a reference re: deep structures and punctuation -- 
I'm drawing on my impressions from Victoria Fromkin and Robert 
Rodman's "An Introduction to Language" (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 
1983) which was used in a linguistics class I took in '83 at the U. 
of Maine from Paul Bauschatz (yea, Paul!!!) -- these impressions 
(really deep, as you can see) were confirmed in using Klammer 
and Schultz ("Analyzing English Grammar "-- Allyn &Bacon, 1992) for 
the course in intro to grammar that I taught last year.  The thing 
is, when you do the phrase trees (which, BTW, I find make more sense 
backwards, but that's another issue), you can see  what elements are 
hanging off  what other elements, and you can then see where the 
punctuation goes to separate what would otherwise be confusing. 
But there is undoubtedly a far more scientific explanation (something 
seismic and tectonics-y, I'm sure) to get at what're really down 
there.