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Generative Semantics 1: The Model

This chapter follows the emergence of Generative Semantics from the Transformational Grammar developments codified in Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. It was on George Lakoff’s mind from before Aspects but it only achieved the rhetorical, sociological, and theoretical conditions to thrive with that codification. Generative Semantics looked like a natural extension of Transformational Grammar, rooting itself in the semantic subsoil of Deep Structure and aligning closely with Universal Grammar. But that subsoil quickly proved to be less fertile than it had seemed, so Generative Semantics imported concepts from logic and philosophy of language; and Universal Grammar proved less substantial than it had seemed, so Generative Semantics solidified it with a Universal Base hypothesis. The resulting model was an extraordinarily elegant theory in which language passed through a homogeneous system of rules from thought and meaning to structure and expression, but it contained multiple seeds, both attitudinal and technical, of a challenge to Chomsky’s work.