A selected bibliography of semantics-based generative grammar
Georgia M. Green, Rafael Castillo · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1972
T^SELECTED BIBLIOGPAPHY OF SEM;f\NTICS-Pr-'SEDHaving been 'commissioned' to nrenare a bibl ioaranhy of Generative Semantics, we soon discovered that what vre called 'Generative Semantics' was in reality at least seven or eipht different thinqs with, in many cases, little or no overlap.In the broadest sense, 'Generative Semantics' refers to the assumption that semantic representation provides the input to the transformational rules of a arammar, an idea which was unthinkably radical when Jeffrev Gruber proposed it in his 1965 MIT dissertation, but vThich now is taken almost for aranted bv many.However, onlv a relatively small part of the literature is concerned with elaborating and explicitly motivating this assumption.In another sense, the term 'Generative Semantics' is taken to refer to a theory in v/hich qlobal rules and other derivational constraints play a major role -although as G. Lakoff argued in "Global Rules", this theorv is locticallv ouite independent of the role of semantics in a grammar.In still a third sense, 'Generative Semantics' is used to refer to what was for a time called 'abstract syntax', which is not so much a theory or an assumption as a way of doing things: shov/ina how the apparently arbitrary distri- butions of grammatical constructions and relationships were predictable if one postulated imderlyina structures that were somewhat more 'abstract' than the surface structures they represented.The abstractness of these structures resided primarily in their containina elements which mioht not show up in surface structure and category labels that differed from those borne in surface structure, and in their expressing grammatical relationships which did not hold at surface structure.None of these characteristics was by itself a theoretical innovation; yet they resulted in a conception of deep structure that differed appreciably from that of Aspects .Ross' "On declarative sentences", his "Auxiliaries as main verbs' , and R. Lakoff 's Abstract syntax and Latin complementation are paradigm examples in this tradition.