3 AN ELEMENTARY LINGUISTIC THEORY 一个初级的语言理论 A Assuming the set of grammatical sentences of English to be given, we now ask what sort of device can produce this set (equivalently, what sort of theory gives an adequate account of the structure of this set of utterances)
We can think of each sentence of this set as a sequence of phonemes of finite length
A language is enormously involved system, and it is quite obvious that any attempt to present directly the set of grammatical phoneme sequences would lead to a grammar so complex that it would be practically useless
一种语言是一个极其庞杂的系统
如果想要把这个语言中符合语法的音位序列的集合直接描述出来,这种语法将会复杂而没有实际用处
For this reason, linguistic description proceeds in terms of a system of “levels of representations”(多平面描述\代表平面) The linguist sets up such “higher level” elements as