Generative Semantics

J D McCawley and R A Harris

_ 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This article is reproduced from the previous
edition article by
James D McCawley, volume 3, pp. 13981403, (c)
1994,
Elsevier Ltd., with a foreword by Randy Harris.

Foreword (by Randy Harris)

There is little that can or should be
added to the definitive epitome of
generative semantics you are about to
read, by James D. McCawley (1938
1999),except (1) a few words about the
importance
of McCawley to the
movement, which is perhaps, less
prominent in an article of his own
authorship than it may have been from
anyone elses pen, and (2) a few
additional citations.
Each of the four main figures McCawley
associates with generative semantics
George Lakoff (b. 1941), John Robert
(Ha j) Ross (b. 1938), Paul Postal (b.
1936), and himself contributed very
substantial elements to its identity, but
McCawley embodied the approach, from
his feet to his very lively eyebrows, and
especially above. He was, in all senses
of the phrase, its presiding genius. He
helped bring it to life in lengthy,
rollicking, mid-1960s telephone calls
with
Lakoff
between
Cambridge,
Massachusetts,
and
Chicago.
He
supplied what many regarded as its
strongest arguments and its most
compelling analyses, some of which
brought Postal into the program.
He spent his entire career in the
movements epicenter, the University of
Chicago. He continued to publish
comprehensive works in the generative
semantics spirit long after the label had
fallen
into
disrepute,
especially
Syntactic Phenomena (1993a) and
Everything That Linguists Have Always
Wanted to Know about Logic (1993b).
He believed in generative semantics to
the very end, not in all of its specific
proposals (relentlessly honest, he
cheerfully
and
publicly
dropped
analyses that no longer fit his evolving
views and cheerfully welcomed views
that did, no matter what their origin),
and certainly not in the label itself

(indeed, he renounced all theoretical

labels), but in its substance.
Further reading in generative semantics
include
Lakoff (1971), McCawley (1976, 1979),
Postal
(1972), Ross (1972, 1973), Newmeyer
(1980,
McCawley cites the 1986 second
edition; the 1980
first edition has more on generative
semantics),
Lakoff (1989), Harris (1993a, 1993b),
Huck and
Goldsmith
(1996),
and
McCawley
(1981). Also of
note are the two festschrifts for
McCawley: Brentari
et al. (1992) and Zwicky et al.
(1970/1992).

Generative Semantics (by James D

McCawley)
The term generative semantics (GS) is
an informal
designation for the school of syntactic
and semantic
research that was prominent from the
late 1960s
through the mid-1970s and whose bestknown practitioners
were
George
Lakoff,
James
D.
McCawley,
Paul M. Postal, and John Robert Ross.

GS Positions on Controversial Issues

The name GS gives undue prominence

to one of
many issues on which GS-ists took
positions that
conflicted with those of more orthodox
generative
grammarians, an issue that in hindsight
seems arcane because it is intelligible
only against the background of the once
widely accepted assumption (shared
then by GS-ists and their adversaries)
that there must be a single level of
linguistic structure for which It is
appropriate to give a system of
generative rules (i.e., rules giving a
complete
specification
of
what
structures are well-formed on that level)
and to which all other levels of structure
are related by interpretive rules. The
issue commemorated in the name GS
was that of whether the privileged level

was semantic structure (the GS

position) or was a level of syntactic
structure as distinct from semantic
structure (the position of Chomsky and
other interpretive semanticists). The
prominence that has been given to that
arcane issue should not obscure the
fact that GS-ists disagreed with other
generative grammarians on many far
more substantial issues, such as the
following:
a.
Whether
sentences
were
grammatical or ungrammatical
in themselves rather than relative
to
(linguistic
and
extralinguistic)
contexts and to
possible
interpretations.
GS-ists
rejected the then
popular idea that a language can be
identified with
a set of sentences and took syntactic
derivations as
implying that the surface form in
question was
grammatical not absolutely but only
relative to
the meaning represented in its deep
structure and
to any contextual factors to which steps
in the
derivation are sensitive.
b. The nature of semantic structure. GSists held that
semantic structures have the same
formal nature
as syntactic structures, except for
having semantic
rather than morphological entities as
their ultimate
constituents,
while
interpretive
semanticists
either were reluctant to make any
concrete claims
about the nature of semantic structure
(e.g.,
Chomsky, 1972: 137) or adopted a
conception
of semantic structure that differed
considerably
in
formal
nature
from
syntactic
structure (e.g.,
Jackendoff, 1972).
c. The nature of syntactic categories.
Much work inGS attempted to reduce
syntactic
category
distinctions
to

distinctions
of
logical
category,
supplemented by lexical exception
features (e.g., verbs and adjectives
would both belong to the category
predicate, usually confusingly called
V by GSists, with adjectives differing
from verbs in bearing a feature
licensing
the
application
of
a
transformation that inserts a copula),
while other generative grammarians
took syntactic categories to have at
most a tangential relation to semantic
categories.
d. The linguistic level or levels relevant
to the choice
of the lexical material of a sentence.
One who
holds that there is no level of syntactic
deep structure
as distinct from semantic structure is
forced to
recognize syntactic structures whose
ultimate
units
are
semantic
rather
than
morphological in
nature, such as a syntactic structure
[Brutus DO
SOMETHINGx (X CAUSE (BECOME (NOT
(Caesar ALIVE))))] underlying Brutus
killed
Caesar. (Here and below, capitalization
is used as
an informal way of representing
semantic units
corresponding roughly to the words in
question.)
GS-ists
accordingly
proposed
transformations that
combined
semantic
units
into
complexes that
could potentially underlie lexical items,
e.g., predicateraising (proposed in McCawley, 1968)
adjoined a predicate to the immediately
superordinate
predicate, thus allowing the derivation
of
such complexes as NOT-ALIVE, BECOMENOTALIVE
(die), BECOME-NOT (cease), and
CAUSE-BECOME-NOT-ALIVE or CAUSEdie
(kill). Intermediate derivational stages
involving

both lexical and semantic units (such as

CAUSEdie)
needed to be recognized in order to
account
for, e.g., the parallelism between
idiomatic combinations
with come (come about, around, to . . .)
and their counterparts with bring: as
Binnick
(1971) noted, bring corresponded not to
CAUSE
plus some determinate complex of
semantic material
but to CAUSE plus come, irrespective of
whether come was used as an
independent lexical
unit or as part of such combinations as
come
about. Consequently, lexical insertion
could
not be restricted to a single linguistic
level:
applications of certain transformations
had to be
interspersed between lexical insertions.
The combinations
that could be derived through the
application
of
predicate-raising
and
other
prelexical
transformation
were
supposed
to
underlie possible
lexical items. Since there are infinitely
many
such combinations but only finitely
many actual
10 Generative Semantics

lexical items in any given language,

most correspond
to no actual lexical item of the language
and
were supposed to reflect accidental
gaps in the
lexicon of the language.
Lexical decomposition analyses were
criticized in
such works as Fodor (1970), where it
was argued that
the simple and complex surface forms
that supposedly
corresponded to the same deep
structure (e.g.,
Brutus killed Caesar and Brutus caused
Caesar to die)

did not in fact have the same meanings.

It was noted
subsequently (McCawley, 1978) that
such discrepancies
in interpretation can be explained by a
version of
Grices (1967/1989) maxim of manner
according to
which a simple surface form is preferred
to a more
complex alternative except when the
referent is a peripheral
instance of the category defined by the
given
semantic structure, e.g., using indirect
means to cause
someone to die would be a peripheral
instance of the
category defined by cause to cease to
be alive and
thus would not be in the part of that
category where
kill would preempt the use of cause to
die. (Syntactic
analyses
involving
lexical
decomposition also figured
prominently in Gruber, 1965, a work
that early
GS-ists found congenial despite some
important
differences between its framework and
theirs.)

GS Policies
Research

on

the

Conduct

of

Of equal importance to these points of

theory in their
influence on the directions that GS
research took and
the reception that GS work received
were several
policies about the conduct of linguistic
research, of
which the following deserve mention
here:
a. A lack of concern about the
compartmentalization
of the parts of a linguistic analysis or of
a linguistic
theory, as contrasted with the concern
among
Chomskyan generative grammarians
with the
drawing of boundaries among, e.g.,
syntax, semantics,
and pragmatics. One important facet of

this lack of concern was an egalitarian

position
regarding the different kinds of data
that had a
bearing on a linguistic analysis:
whereas most generative
grammarians
held
that
syntactic
analyses
needed to be supported by arguments
in which
only syntactic facts figured, GS-ists held
that
facts about truth conditions, possible
denotations,
etc., were as relevant as any other kind
of facts to
evaluating analyses that purported to
specify how
meanings corresponded to surface
forms in the
given language, and that supposed
syntactic facts
were usually at least partly semantic in
nature, in
that what a speaker of a language
judges acceptable
is not a sentence in itself but that
sentence
relative to an assumed understanding
of it.
Another facet of this policy was GS-ists
insistence
that all parts of a linguistic analysis
were subject to
the same standards of explicitness,
simplicity, and
factual accuracy, irrespective of how
one might
wish
to
demarcate
syntax
and
semantics; by contrast,
interpretive semantics has come only
gradually
and often grudgingly to subject the
semantic
parts of analyses to the same standards
of appraisal
as the syntactic parts.
b. Rejection of the dogma of generative
grammar that
a fixed notational system is essential to
a linguistic
theory and that precision can be
achieved only by
formulating ones analyses in the
privileged notational

system.
c. Adoption of a static conception of
linguistic rules:
rules were thought of not in terms of
the popular
metaphor of assembling linguistic
structures
and converting structures on one level
into
corresponding structures on another,
but as derivational
constraints, that is, as specifications of
what a structure may or may not
contain and
of how a structure on one level may not
contain
and of how a structure on one level may
or must
differ from the corresponding structure
on another
level. This difference in the conception
of rules
resulted in difference with regard to
what theoretical
notions posed conceptual problems
(Laudan,
1976) for each approach; thus GS-ists
readily accepted
rules that specified relations among
nonadjacent
levels of structure (what Lakoff, 1970b
dubbed global rules), a notion that was
unproblematic
from their conceptual vantage point but
outlandish from the vantage point of
the operation
metaphor for rules, while rejecting the
idea of
ordering among rules, a notion that was
unproblematic
for those who accepted the operation
metaphor
but was difficult to make coherent with
the
GS conception of rules as derivational
constraints.
d. Disdain for those concerns of
Chomskyan generative
grammarians that had little connection
with
linguistic facts or with detailed linguistic
description,
such as mathematical models and
speculation

about the extent to which linguistic

structure is
biologically determined. While GS-ists
were receptive
to the idea that linguistic structure is
profoundly
influenced by neuroanatomy, they
demanded (e.g., Lakoff, 1974: 171) that
claims
to that effect be backed up with solid
linguistic
and solid biology rather than with what
they dismissed
as arguments from ignorance (i.e.,
hasty
leaps from ones failure to see how
some characteristic
of languages could be learned to the
conclusion
that it must be innate).
e. Eagerness to put in practice in their
professional
lives many of the ideas of the 1960s
counterculture,
Generative Semantics 11

such as policies of antiauthoritarianism,

antielitism,
and demystification of science and
scholarship,
and a belief that ones work should be
pleasurable. One of many facets of the
GS ethos
that these policies helped to shape is
what Newmeyer
(1986: 133) has disparaged as datafetishism:
joy in the unearthing of novel and
intriguing
facts for which one is not yet in a
position to
provide a satisfactory analysis; GS-ists,
by contrast,
regarded
Chomskyan
generative
grammarians as
scientific Calvinists (McCawley, 1980:
918).

Prominent and Influential Analyses

Proposed within the GS Approach

Kuhn (1970) notes that one major

component of the
paradigm of a scientific community is a
set of exemplars:
prestigious solutions to problems,
presented to

neophytes in the field as paragons of

good science,
and serving as models for solutions to
new problems.
(For discussion of the history of
generative grammarians
analyses of English auxiliary verbs in
terms of
Kuhnian notions such as paradigm and
exemplar,
see McCawley, 1985.) The exemplars
for the GS
community included a number of
analyses that bore
an intimate relation to central tenets of
GS, for example,
lexical decomposition analyses such as
were discussed
in, First section of this article, and
analyses of
quantified expressions as being external
to their host
sentences in deep structure (e.g., John
has read many
booksmany booksJohn has read x)
and as being
moved into their surface positions by a
transformation
of Quantifier-Lowering (QL). (The term
QL was
in fact applied indiscriminately to a
variety of transformations
that differed according to the specific
deep
structure that was assumed; proposals
differed with
regard to whether just a quantifier or a
whole quantified
expression was external to the host S,
what filled
the deep structure position into which
the quantified
expression was to be moved, and where
the quantifier
or quantified expression was in relation
to the host S.)
The best-known arguments given for a
QL analysis
consisted in demonstrations that the
many syntactic
rules that were problematic when
applied to structures
that contained quantified elements
became

unproblematic if the deep structure

position of a quantified
expression was external to its host
sentence
and consequently (in virtue of the
principle of the
cycle) the rule had as its domain of
application a
structure that does not contain the
quantified expression;
for example, this view of the interaction
between
QL
and
the
transformation
of
Reflexivization
explained why such pairs of sentences
as Every
philosopher admires himself and Every
philosopher
admires every philosopher differed in
meaning in the
way in which they did, and why
reflexivization was
applicable only in the derivation of the
former.
A thorough survey of arguments for a
QL analysis is
given in McCawley (1988: Ch. 18).
Several other GS exemplars were in fact
as consistent
with
the
substantive
claims
of
interpretivist
transformational grammar as with those
of GS, but
were embraced by GS-ists and rejected
by interpretive
semanticists as much because of
policies on the conduct
of research (see previous section) as
because of
any points of linguistic theory, or simply
because
of the historical quirk that a particular
idea occurred
to a member of the one camp before it
occurred to any
of his counterparts in the other camp.
One such exemplar
is the analysis of English auxiliary verbs
as being
verbs that take nonfinite sentential
complements in
the manner of such verbs as seem
(Ross, 1969;
McCawley, 1971), which Pullum and
Wilson (1977)

subsequently argued for from within an

interpretive
semantic
framework.
(A
similar
treatment of auxiliary
verbs is found in Jespersen, 1937: 92). A
second was
the
proposal
(McCawley,
1970,
subsequently disavowed
by the author) that English had
underlying
verbsubjectobject (SVO) word order, a
hypothesis
that is, if anything, harder to reconcile
with the
assumptions of GS than with those of
interpretive
semantics in view of the dubious nature
of the assumption
that the order of elements is significant
in semantic
structure; by contrast, there is no
general policy in
interpretive
semantic
versions
of
generative grammar
against discrepancies between deep
and surface constituent
order, and indeed languages with
surface VSO
word order are commonly analyzed by
interpretive
semanticists as having deep VSO word
order. Another
such exemplar is the performative
analysis (Ross,
1970), in which sentences are assigned
underlying
structures in which a hypersentence
(Sadock, 1969,
1974) specifies the illocutionary force of
the sentence,
e.g., Birds fly would have an underlying
structure of
the form [I tell you [birds fly]].

The History of GS

The term generative semantics first

appears in
Lakoff (1963/1976), a work that
antedates the development
of the KatzPostalAspects approach to
syntax
and prefigures some of Lakoffs
subsequent GS
work. GS originated in attempts by
Postal and Lakoff

to exploit novel possibilities that were

opened up
by the revisions of the transformational
syntactic
framework proposed in Katz and Postal
(1964)
and Chomsky (1965) and to fill gaps in
the evolving
framework. For example, Lakoffs Ph.D.
thesis
(Lakoff, 1965/1970) originated as an
attempt to develop
a precise and coherent account of the
way in
12 Generative Semantics

which a lexical item could affect the

applicability of
transformations to structures containing
the given
item, and thereby to put on a solider
footing those
analyses in Chomsky (1965) in which
the choice of
lexical items affected the possibilities
for derivations.
In the course of providing such a theory
of rule model
theory.) Coincidentally, the radical
revisions that
interpretive semanticists were making
in their versions
of generative syntactic theory included
the
adoption of the X-bar conception of
syntactic categories
(see X-Bar Theory (see X-Bar Theory),
which
identified two of the factors that affect
the syntactic
behavior of a linguistic unit, namely, the
difference
between a word unit and a phrasal unit,
and the part
of speech of the unit or of its head.
Once a descriptive
framework was available that allowed
linguistic generalizations
to be stated in terms of those factors,
considerable progress was made in the
analysis of
the many syntactic phenomena in
which those factors
play a role.
No important tenets of GS rule out the
adoption of

a conception of syntactic categories as

defined by
these factors in addition to logical
categories, and
indeed a conception of syntactic
categories as reducible
to those and other factors (with logical
category
being merely one of several factors that
influence a
units syntactic behavior) is adopted in
McCawley,
1977/1982 and subsequent works.
However, in the
1960s and early 1970s, an assumption
shared by GSists
and interpretive semanticists impeded
GS-ists
from adopting such a conception of
categories, namely
the
assumption
that
syntactic
categories must remain
constant throughout derivations: a word
(with a
determinate part of speech) that
replaced a complex
of semantic material (thus, a unit not
having a part of
speech) could not differ in category
from the replaced
unit and thus parts of speech could not
be part of the
category system. (The widespread
misconception that
GS analyses allowed linguistic units to
change category
in the course of derivations in their
analysis of,
for example, nominalizations overlooks
the fact that,
according to GS-ists assumptions,
verbs and their
nominalizations belonged to the same
category. Anyway,
analyses of any kind in which the verb
invent is a
constituent of the noun invention are
not committed
to any assumption that the former
changes its category
in the derivation of the latter: it is
whatever it is,
regardless of what it is contained in.)
Since interpretive

semanticists did not require that deep

structures
match semantic structures (and indeed
took delight in
arguing that they did not match), there
was no obstacle
to their having the same categories in
deep as in
surface structures while drawing the full
range of
category distinctions provided for by Xbar syntax.
The interpretive semantic research
program was thus
able to become progressive in the
sense of Lakatos
(1978)
because
of
something
extraneous to the issues
that were the loci of the substantive
disputes between
GS and interpretive semantics.

See also: McCawley, James (19381999); X-

Bar Theory.

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