Generative Semanticsとは 意味・読み方・使い方

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.^[1] 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. The nature and genesis of the program are a matter of some controversy and have been extensively debated. Generative semanticists took Chomsky's concept of Deep Structure and ran with it, assuming (contrary to later work by Chomsky and Ray Jackendoff) 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, often without citation).