GENERATIVE LINGUISTICS

Semantics is the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning, The meaning of a word, phrase, sentence, or text.

Generative semantics is a description of a language emphasizing a semantic deep structure that is logical in form, that provides syntactic structure, and that is related to surface structure by transformations.
(Merriam Webster)
Generative semantics is the name of a research program within linguistics, initiated by the work of various early students of Noam Chomsky:

• John R. Ross
• Paul Postal
• and later James McCawley.
• George Lakoff was also instrumental in developing and advocating the theory

The approach developed out of transformational generative grammar in the mid 1960s, but stood largely in opposition to work by Noam Chomsky and his later students.

Generative semanticists took Chomsky's concept of Deep Structure and ran with it, assuming that deep structures were the sole input to semantic interpretation. This assumption, combined with a tendency to consider a wider range of empirical evidence than Chomskian linguists, led generative semanticists to develop considerably more abstract and complex theories of deep structure than those advocated by Chomsky and his students — and indeed to abandon altogether the notion of “deep structure” as a locus of lexical insertion.
Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, there were heated debates between generative semanticists and more orthodox Chomskians. The generative semanticists lost the debate, insofar as their research program ground to a halt by the 1980s. However, this was in part because the interests of key generative semanticists such as George Lakoff had gradually shifted away from the narrow study of syntax and semantics.

A number of ideas from later work in generative semantics have been incorporated into:

• Cognitive linguistics
• Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG)
• Construction Grammar
• and indeed into Mainstream Chomskian linguistics

Transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition. Additionally, transformational grammar is the Chomskyan tradition that gives rise to specific transformational grammars.

In the 1960s, Chomsky introduced two central ideas relevant to the construction and evaluation of grammatical theories.
The first was the distinction between competence and performance. Chomsky noted the obvious fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic errors. He argued that these errors in linguistic performance were irrelevant to the study of linguistic competence (the knowledge that allows people to construct and understand grammatical sentences).
The second idea related directly to the evaluation of theories of grammar. Chomsky distinguished between grammars that achieve descriptive adequacy and those that go further and achieved explanatory adequacy. A descriptively adequate grammar for a particular language defines the (infinite) set of grammatical sentences in that language; that is, it describes the language in its entirety. A grammar that achieves explanatory adequacy has the additional property that it gives an insight into the underlying linguistic structures in the human mind; that is, it does not merely describe the grammar of a language, but makes predictions about how linguistic knowledge is mentally represented.

A transformational grammar has 3 major kinds of rules:

• Syntactic rules: which specify the deep structure into a surface structure of the sentence and then transform that deep structure into a surface structure.
• Semantic rules: which provide an interpretation for the sentence.
• Phonological rules: which specify information necessary in pronouncing the sentence.

The syntactic component.
Phrase structure rules and lexicon
If we wanted to divide the sentence the sentence the astronaut can walk into its constituent parts, it would be:



Transformations and the structure of the auxiliary
The structure of the auxiliary: (someone has eaten the garlic toast) the auxiliary word is a form of the verb to have.
AUX -> T + (M) + (HAVE + EN) + (BE + ING)
Should have been walking