 | This article has multiple issues. Please helpimprove it or discuss these issues on thetalk page.(Learn how and when to remove these messages) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
|
Generative semantics was a research program intheoretical linguistics which held thatsyntactic structures are computed on the basis ofmeanings rather than the other way around. Generative semantics developed out oftransformational generative grammar in the mid-1960s, but stood in opposition to it. The period in which the two research programs coexisted was marked by intense and often personal clashes now known as thelinguistics wars. Its proponents includedHaj Ross,Paul Postal,James McCawley, andGeorge Lakoff, who dubbed themselves "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse".
Generative semantics is no longer practiced under that name, though many of its central ideas have blossomed in thecognitive linguistics tradition. It is also regarded as a key part of the intellectual heritage ofhead-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) andconstruction grammar, and some of its insights live on in mainstream generative grammar.Pieter Seuren has developed asemantic syntax which is very close in spirit to the original generative semantics framework, which he played a role in developing.[1][2]
The controversy surrounding generative semantics stemmed in part from the competition between two fundamentally different approaches tosemantics withintransformationalgenerative syntax. In the 1960s, work in the generative tradition assumed that semantics wasinterpretive 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.[3] In this approach, meanings were generated directly by the grammar asdeep 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 usingactive/passive pairs such as "I hit John" and "John was hit by me", which have different surface forms despite their identical truth conditions.[1] Generative semanticists wanted to account forall 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 literallyderived from its meaning via transformations. To some, interpretive semantics seemed rather "clunky" andad hoc in comparison. This was especially so before the development oftrace theory.
Despite its opposition to generative grammar, the generative semantics project operated largely in Chomskyan terms. Most importantly, the generative semanticists, following Chomsky, were opposed tobehaviorism and accepted his idea that language isacquired and not learned.[4] Chomsky and Lakoff were united by their opposition to the establishment offormal semantics in the 1970s.[5] The notion that meaning generates grammar is itself old and fundamental to thePort-Royal Grammar (1660),Saussure'sCourse in General Linguistics (1916), andTesnière'sdependency grammar (1957) among others. By contrast, generative semantics was faced with the problem of explaining the emergence of meaning inneuro-biological rather than social and rational terms. This problem was solved in the 1980s by Lakoff in his version ofCognitive Linguistics, according to which language generates throughsensory experience. Thus, engaging with the physical world provides the person withvisual,tactile and other sensory input, which crystallizes into language in the form ofconceptual metaphors, organizingrational thinking.[6] Such a view of the mind has not been fully approved by neuroscientists.[7]
^ 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 aresynonymous that motivated the passive transformation, but the fact that active and passive verb forms have the sameselectional requirements. For example, the agent of the verbkick (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 aby phrase after the passive verb ("The ball was kicked byJohn").
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) See p. 138.{{cite journal}}:Cite journal requires|journal= (help)