GENERATIVE SEMANTICS

*Semantics is the branch of linguistic and logic concerned with meaning.

*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.

*Transformational grammar is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition.

*In the 1960s, Chomsky introduced two central ideas relevant to the construction and evaluation of grammatical theories:
- Distinction between competence and performance, Chomsky noted the obvious fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic errors.
- Evaluation of theories of grammar. Chomsky distinguished between grammars that achieve descriptive adequacy and those that go further and achieved explanatory adequacy.
-Grammar rule which provide an interpretation for the sentence is semantic rule.
-Grammar rule which specify the deep structure into a surface structure of the sentence and the transform that deep structure into a surface structure is syntactic rule.
-Grammar rule which specify information necessary in pronouncing the sentence is phonological rule.
-Charles Fillmore introduced what was termed case structure, grammar and this representation subsequently had considerable influence on psychologists as well as computational linguists.
-The semantic structure is the result of a process by which real entities inside the mind of the speaker-concepts-are translated into semantic units that are combined in varying configurations of complexity.


Activity about Generative Semantics