An application of an extended generative semantic model of language to man-machine interaction
Robert I. Binnick · 1969
This paper discusses the feasibility of applying a model of language use based on a modification and extension (to be discussed below) of the generative semantic (transformational) theory of language competence recently developed by Paul Postal, George Lakoff, John Robert Ross, ~ames D. McCawley, and others, to problems of computational linguistics.The theory of generative semantics, to be discussed in section II, is an outgrowth of, and reaction to, Chomsky's 1965 theory of transformational linguistics.It is a radical theory which deals with a very great range of problems with very abstract methods.Trose working in this paradigm hold that there is a linguistic level reflecting conceptual or semantic structure which is directly convertible into surface syntax by a single set of garden-variety transformations, with no O significant intermediary level, that is, no deep structure".These of us working in generative semantics believe that methods substantially those long familiar in linguistics can achieve very absract , very general results which treat semantics in a more serious and enlightening way than ever before.I do not, I think, support this very strong claim very well in section II, but I provide summaries of several studies and a lengthy bibliogrpahy of works which when consulted will hopefully give some feeling for what is being attempted, I think not without results.But generative semantics is a model, or rather, a theory, of competence, like most serious theories of language now held to by American linguists.~ven if, as might be claimed, our semantic structures are to be merely variants of the structures long familiar from formal logic, so that if our assumptions are correct, we will ultimately be able to directly transform surface structures into underlying semantic structures, the majority of actual sentences, as well as all hypersentential structures, the treatment of which has been swept under the rug of "performance", will remain unhandleable.Accordingly, I propose initially cert@in extensions and modifications of the theory to make it in some sense