Generative semantics

The Generative semantics is a generative grammar model, which was developed in the 1960s by George Lakoff, James D. McCawley, Paul M. Postal and John Robert Ross, in response to Noam Chomsky's neglect of semantics in the transformational grammar (TG ). Chomsky had generative grammar in the context of his criticism of the American taxonomic structuralism designed ( More information: The development of the debate ), who analyzed only objectified phenomena of grammar by classifying and segmenting the basic ingredients, but not the language -organizing abstract rule system ( deep structure ) derived from the transformation by various normal language sentences ( surface structure ) ( be generated ). This process would represent Chomsky in his TG, but first difficult without the exact tangible word meanings. However, he extended his model in 1965 with the interpretative semantics. Discussion of this semantic component dissolved as Linguistics Wars - from Lakoff against Chomsky became known discussion of North American scientists and led to the conception of generative semantics, some with recourse to European linguists (eg, Louis Hjelmslev and Lucien Tesnière ). In contrast to Chomsky's TG the sentences of a language underlying deep structures are understood not as a syntactic rule system, but as semantic representations ( predicate -argument structures - as in predicate logic).

Comparison with the interpretative semantics of transformational grammar

→ see also: Comparison with the generative semantics (GS) by George Lakoff, The Linguistics Wars - Lakoff against Chomsky, The semantic theory in the discussion

Lakoff, among others criticized that Chomsky Generative grammar is composed of two different control devices: from a generative syntactic deep structure and an interpretative semantics which interprets the built up by the syntax structures. Instead, the Generative semantics is based on a semantic deep structure, which are associated with the syntactic features and working among others with various rule formats: selection rules ( well-formedness conditions or restrictions), logical implications and Frege (self- evident precondition for linguistic utterances) assumed presuppositions that were not used in Chomsky's transformational grammar declared as universal.

Chomsky and his staff complained in turn to the generative semantics (see also: Linguistics Wars: Lakoff against Chomsky ) that it does not distinguish the semantic- generative derivations between phenomena, which are based on speech act knowledge and those which spoke of a systematic nature ( cf. Fries 1983).

Through refinements to the extended standard theory and clarify the principle of autonomy ( autonomy of special control systems for voice systems ) some of the criticism of the generative semantics on the aspect model points were considered ( More information: Lakoff against Chomsky: Development of the debate ). The debate about the semantic components also influenced the design of new language theories in pragmatics and cognitive linguistics.