The linguistics wars were extended disputes among American theoretical linguists that occurred mostly during the 1960s and 1970s, stemming from a disagreement between Noam Chomsky and several of his associates and students. The debates started in 1967 when linguists Paul Postal, John R. Ross, George Lakoff, and James D. McCawley —self-dubbed the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"—proposed an alternative approach in which the relation between semantics and syntax is viewed differently, which treated deep structures as meaning rather than syntactic objects. While Chomsky and other generative grammarians argued that meaning is driven by an underlying syntax, generative semanticists posited that syntax is shaped by an underlying meaning. This intellectual divergence led to two competing frameworks in generative semantics and interpretive semantics. Eventually, generative semantics spawned a different linguistic paradigm, known as cognitive linguistics, a linguistic theory that correlates learning of languages to other cognitive abilities such as memorization, perception, and categorization, while descendants of interpretive semantics continue in the guise of formal semantics.
Background In 1957, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) published Syntactic Structures, his first influential work. The ideas in Syntactic Structures were a significant departure from the dominant paradigm among linguists at the time, championed by Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949). The Bloomfieldian approach focused on smaller linguistic units such as morphemes and phones, and had little to say about how these units were organized into larger structures such as phrases and sentences. By contrast, syntax was the central empirical concern of Syntactic Structures, which modeled grammar as sets of rules that procedurally generate all and only the sentences of a given language. This approach is referred to as transformational grammar. Moreover, Chomsky criticized Bloomfieldians as being "[t]axonomic linguists", mere collectors and cataloguers of language. Early work in generative grammar attempted to go beyond mere description of the data and identify the fundamental underlying principles of language. According to Chomsky, semantic components created the underlying structure of a given linguistic sequence, whereas phonological components formed its surface-level structure. This left the problem of ‘meaning’ in linguistic analysis unanswered. Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) developed his theory further by introducing the concepts of deep structure and surface structure, which were influenced by previous scholarship. First, Chomsky drew from Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), specifically his dichotomy of langue (the native knowledge of a language) versus parole (the actual use of language). Secondly, Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) later argued parole is observable and can be defined as the arrangement of speech, whereas langue comprises the systems within actual speech that underpin its lexicon and grammar. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax also addressed the issue of meaning by endorsing the Katz–Postal hypothesis, which holds that transformations do not affect meaning, and are therefore “semantically transparent”. This attempted to introduce notions of semantics to descriptions of syntax. Chomsky's endorsement resulted in further exploration of the relation between syntax and semantics, creating the environment for the emergence of generative semantics.
Dispute
The point of disagreement between generative semantics, known at the time as Abstract Syntax, and interpretive semantics was the degree of abstractness of deep structure. This refers to the distance between deep structures and the surface structure. Generative semantics views deep structure and transformations as necessary for connecting the surface structure with meaning. Whereas Chomsky’s paradigm considers the deep structure and transformation that link the deep structure to the surface structure essential for describing the structural composition of linguistic items—syntactic description—without explicitly addressing meaning. Notably, generative semanticists eventually abandoned deep structures altogether for the semantic representation.
Generative semantics approach Generative semantics was inspired by the notions of Chomsky in Aspects, in which he highlights two notions: deep structures determine the semantic representations, and selectional restrictions—rules that govern what follows and precedes words in a sentence—are stated in deep structures. These restrictions include the ‘semantic’ nature of the verb eat which necessitates that it should be followed by something edible. Generative semanticists initially misinterpreted Chomsky’s ideas about the relation between semantic representation and used the arguments of selectional restrictions to draw a direct and bilateral relation between meaning and surface structures, where semantic representations are mapped onto surface structures, thereby conflating the two levels of semantic representation and deep structures. Generative semantics analysis evolved to favor an approach where deep structures reflect meaning directly through semantic features and relations—semantic representations. Thus, the formal characteristics of deep structures are considered insufficient and meaning drives the surface structures. The formal features of deep structures include context-free phrase-structures grammar and lexical insertion point—the point where words enter the derivation. Generative semantics' view of the transformations and deep structures contrasted sharply with those of Chomsky's. Generative semanticists believed that deep structures are meaning representation and transformations apply to deep structures to create different surface structures while preserving meaning. Chomsky's model suggests that deep structure pertains to the organization of linguistic items while transformations apply to and manipulate deep structure but sometimes alter the meaning.
Generative semantics' model
deep structure: [AGENT] boy,[ACTION] hitting, [PATIENT]the ball
Transformation active: The boy hit the ball.
Chomsky's model
deep structure: S ((NP the boy) (VP [hit]) (NP the ball))
Transformation passive: The ball was hit by the boy.
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