Linguistics wars
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"[1](p70)—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.
The ideas in Syntactic Structures were a significant departure from the dominant paradigm among linguists at the time, championed by Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949).
[1](p20) By contrast, syntax was the central empirical concern of Syntactic Structures, which modeled grammar as a sets of rules that procedurally generate all and only the sentences of a given language.
[1](pp22–24) Moreover, Chomsky criticized Bloomfieldians as being "[t]axonomic linguists", mere collectors and cataloguers of language.
[1](p16) Early work in generative grammar attempted to go beyond mere description of the data and identify the fundamental underlying principles of language.
[2] Notably, generative semanticists eventually abandoned deep structures altogether for the semantic representation.
The formal features of deep structures include context-free phrase-structures grammar and lexical insertion point—the point where words enter the derivation.
Generative semanticists used this argument, first suggested by George Lakoff in his dissertation, to cement the idea that the underlying meaning (The door is OPEN) drives two different surface structures (Inchoative- causative), not the other way around.
In this analysis adjectives, negatives, and auxiliaries are reduced to one category which is Verb, and the other forms are derived transformationally.
[5] Lexical decomposition was used to draw the syntactic stretch of sentences relaying the semantic implication inherent to words.
[1] Chomsky and others conducted a number of arguments that are designed to demonstrate that generative semantics not only did not offer something new but was misconceived and misguided.
[2] In response to these challenges, Chomsky conducted a series of lectures and papers, known later as Remarks, which culminated in what was later known as the "interpretivist program".
Remarks contributed to what Chomsky terms the Extended Standard Theory, which he thought of as an extension to Aspects.
[4][1] The interpretive semanticist, Jerry Fodor, also criticized generative semanticists’ approach to lexical decomposition in which the word kill is derived from CAUSE TO BECOME NOT ALIVE in the work of Foder in a sentence such as: a Putin caused Litvinenko to die on Wednesday by having him poisoned three weeks earlier.
In these sentences (a) kill is derived from (b) caused to die, however, (a) is correct and causes no discrepancies but (b) which suggests a direct causal of killing contradicts the temporal qualifier “Wednesday by having him poisoned three weeks earlier” which suggests that lexical decomposition cloud fail to account for causal and temporal intricacies required for accurate semantic interpretation.
But this approach was criticized for creating an infinite loop of embedding— with he—in the deep structure “The man who shows he deserves it will get the prize he desires.”.
Thus, the interpretivists considered he as a base component, and finding the correct antecedents is achieved through interpretive rules.
[8] By contrast, generative analyses contained hypotheses concerning factors like the intent of speakers and the denotation and entailment of sentences.
Additionally, the generative framework was criticized for introducing irregularities without justification: the attempt to bridge syntax and semantics blurred the lines between these domains, with some arguing that the approach created more problems than it solved.
[9] Postal rejects the idea of generative semantics and embraces natural languages discarding aspects of cognition altogether and emphasizing grammaticality.
John R. Ross ventured to more literary-orientated endeavors such as poetry, though he maintained his transformationalist essence as his name existed in many of the Chomskyan works.
[10] The Linguistics Wars is the title of a 1993 book by Randy A. Harris that closely chronicles the dispute among Chomsky and other significant individuals (George Lakoff and Paul Postal, among others) and also highlights how certain theories evolved and which of their important features have influenced modern-day linguistic theories.
[1] The second edition also argues that Chomsky's minimalist program has significant homologies with early generative semantics.
