Linguistics 490--Deep Structure
& Generative
Semantics
What is Generative Semantics?
• “The approach taken by
Katz, Fodor, and Postal has been to view a semantic theory as being necessarily interpretive, rather than
generative. The problem, as they see it, is to take
given sentences of a language and find a device to tell what they mean. A generative approach to the problem might be to find a device that could generate
meanings and could map those meanings onto syntactic structures” (p. 105, George Lakoff).