Toward Generative Semantics
George P. Lakoff · 1976
Reprintea 1rom: SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS, VOL 7 Notes from the Linguistic Underground ACADEMIC I'II2SS. INC. N- York San Fronci•~o loncloo TOWARD GENERATIVE SEMANTICS GEORGELAKOFF University of caf/tornla, Berkeley This paper was circulated in office-duplicated form as an internal memorandum of the Mechanical Translation Group, Research Laboratory of Electronics, M.I.T., in August 1963; the research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, the u.s. Army Signal Corps, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Office of Naval Reseach. It is the earliest work to use the term generative semantics or to propose that the base component of a transformational grammar generate a set of semantic structures. Nonetheless it played only a very peripheral role in the development of generative semantics, namely that of involving Lakoff in a number of issues (such as the syntax and semantics of causative constructions, and the syntactic correlates of the notions of act, event, and affect) that Lakoff later treated in greater detail in works that proved more influential (Lakoff, 1965, l968d; Lakoff and Ross, 1966). When a spate of papers were written three or four years later, arguing that deep structures had to be close to or identical to semantic structures, this paper had been largely forgotten. The brief final section entitled Some Loose Ends is omitted here.