[3] Within functionalist approaches, research on the syntax–semantics interface has been aimed at disproving the formalist argument of the autonomy of syntax, by finding instances of semantically determined syntactic structures.
[4][10] Levin and Rappaport Hovav, in their 1995 monograph, reiterated that there are some aspects of verb meaning that are relevant to syntax, and others that are not, as previously noted by Steven Pinker.
[13] Van Valin and LaPolla, in their 1997 monographic study, found that the more semantically motivated or driven a syntactic phenomenon is, the more it tends to be typologically universal, that is, to show less cross-linguistic variation.
In the Heim and Kratzer model commonly adopted within generative linguistics, the input is taken to be a special level of syntactic representation called logical form.
In this period, the most prominent view of the interface was the Katz–Postal Hypothesis according to which deep structure was the level of syntactic representation which underwent semantic interpretation.