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Generative semantics

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Not to be confused with General semantics.

Generative semantics is the name of a research program within linguistics, initiated by the work of various early students of Noam Chomsky: John R. Ross, Paul Postal, and later James McCawley. George Lakoff and Pieter Seuren were also instrumental in developing and advocating the theory.[1]

The approach developed out of transformational generative grammar in the mid-1960s, but stood largely apart from, and in opposition to, work by Noam Chomsky and his later students. This move led to a more abstract framework and lately to the abandonment of the notion of the CFG formal grammar induced deep structure.

A number of ideas from later work in generative semantics have been incorporated into cognitive linguistics, head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), construction grammar, and into mainstream generative linguistics.[1]

Interpretive semantics and generative semantics

The controversy surrounding generative semantics stemmed in part from the competition between two fundamentally different approaches to semantics within transformational generative syntax. In the 1960s, work in the generative tradition assumed that semantics was interpretive in the sense that the meaning of a sentence was computed on the basis of its syntactic structure rather than the other way around. In these approaches, syntactic structures were generated by rules stated in terms of syntactic structure alone, with no reference to meaning. Once generated, these structures would serve as the input to a semantic computation which would output a denotation. This approach captured the relationship between syntactic and semantic patterns, while allowing the syntax to work independently of the semantics, as Chomsky and others had argued for on the basis of empirical observations such as the famous Colorless green ideas sleep furiously sentence.

The generative semantics framework took the opposite view, positing that syntactic structures are computed on the basis of meanings. In this approach, meanings were generated directly by the grammar as deep structures, and were subsequently transformed into recognizable sentences by transformations. This approach necessitated more complex underlying structures than those proposed by Chomsky, and thus more complex transformations. Despite this additional complexity, the approach was appealing in several respects. First, it offered a powerful mechanism for explaining synonymity. In his initial work in generative syntax, Chomsky motivated transformations using active/passive pairs such as "I hit John" and "John was hit by me", which have different surface forms despite their identical truth conditions.[2] Generative semanticists wanted to account for all cases of synonymity in a similar fashion, which proved to be a challenge given the tools available at the time. Second, the theory had a pleasingly intuitive structure: the form of a sentence was quite literally derived from its meaning via transformations. To some, interpretive semantics seemed rather "clunky" and ad hoc in comparison. This was especially so before the development of trace theory.

Notes

^ There is little agreement concerning the question of whose idea generative semantics was. All of the people mentioned here have been credited with its invention (often by each other).

^ Strictly speaking, it was not the fact that active/passive pairs are synonymous that motivated the passive transformation, but the fact that active and passive verb forms have the same selectional requirements. For example, the agent of the verb kick (i.e. the thing that's doing the kicking) must be animate whether it is the subject of the active verb (as in "John kicked the ball") or appears in a by phrase after the passive verb ("The ball was kicked by John").

See also

References

  1. ^ Newmeyer, Frederick, J. (1986). Linguistic Theory in America (Second ed.). Academic Press.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) See p. 138.

Bibliography

  • Brame, Michael K. (1976). Conjectures and refutations in syntax and semantics. New York: North-Holland Pub. Co. ISBN 0-7204-8604-1.
  • Chomsky (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
  • Chomsky (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
  • Chomsky (1965). Cartesian linguistics. New York: Harper and Row.
  • Dougherty, Ray C. (1974). Generative semantics methods: A Bloomfieldian counterrevolution. International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, 3, 255-286.
  • Dougherty, Ray C. (1975). Reply to the critics on the Bloomfieldian counterrevolution. International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, 4, 249-271.
  • Fodor, Jerry A.; & Katz, Jerrold J. (Eds.). (1964). The structure of language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
  • Harris, Randy Allen. (1995). The linguistics wars. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509834-X.
  • Huck, Geoffrey J.; & Goldsmith, John A.. (1995). Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the deep structure debates. New York: Routledge.
  • Katz, Jerrold J.; & Fodor, Jerry A. (1964). The structure of a semantic theory. In J. A. Fodor & J. J. Katz (Eds.) (pp. 479–518).
  • Katz, Jerrold J.; & Postal, Paul M. (1964). An integrated theory of linguistic descriptions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Lakoff, George. (1971). On generative semantics. In D. D. Steinberg & L. A. Jakobovits (Eds.), Semantics: An interdisciplinary reader in philosophy, linguistics and psychology (pp. 232–296). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Lakoff, George. (1976 [1963]). Toward generative semantics. In J. D. McCawley (Ed.) (pp. 43–61).
  • Lakoff, George; & Ross, John R. [Háj]. (1976). Is deep structure necessary?. In J. D. McCawley (Ed.), Syntax and semantics 7 (pp. 159–164).
  • McCawley, James D. (1975). Discussion of Ray C. Dougherty's "Generative semantics methods: A Bloomfieldian counterrevolution". International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, 4, 151-158.
  • McCawley, James D. (Ed.). (1976a). Syntax and semantics 7: Notes from the linguistic underground. New York: Academic Press.
  • McCawley, James D. (1976b). Grammar and meaning. New York: Academic Press.
  • McCawley, James D. (1979). Adverbs, vowels, and other objects of wonder. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Postal, Paul M. (1972). The best theory. In S. Peters (Ed.), Goals of linguistic theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
  • Ross, John R. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax. (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Free copy available at http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/15166. (Published as Ross 1986).
  • Ross, John R. (1986). Infinite syntax!. Norwood, NJ: ABLEX, ISBN 0-89391-042-2.
  • Ross, John R. [Háj]. (1970). On declarative sentences. In R. A. Jacobs & P. S. Rosenbaum (Eds.), Readings in English transformational grammar (pp. 222–272). Washington: Georgetown University Press.
  • Ross, John R. [Háj]. (1972). Doubl-ing. In J. Kimball (Ed.), Syntax and semantics (Vol. 1, pp. 157–186). New York: Seminar Press.
  • Seuren, Pieter A. M. (1974). Semantic syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-875028-5.
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