INTRODUCTION

The development of generativetransformational grammar beginning with

the late fifties of the 20th century has
brought about a strong revival of interest
in semantics.
Generative-transformational grammar
resumes many of the concerns of traditional
semantics.
should include an analysis of the way in
which words and sentences are related to
objects and processes in reality
reintroducing into the discussion the
analysis
of the
manner in denotation
which words
and
problems
of reference,
etc.
sentences are related to one another.
These include an account of synonymy,
antonym, entailment, contradiction,
paraphrase, implication, presupposition,
etc.

Generate
all wellformed
sentences
in a
language

Generative
Grammar

Synthetic
Model

Synthetic
Starting from an set of rules
arranged in a formalized
construction.
Synthetic models lead finally to a set
of utterances.

R
U
L
E
S

Rewriting rules

Transformationa
l rules
Applied to symbols which make up
the vocabulary and grammar

The organization of a generative grammar

Syntactic
Semantic
phonological

Syntactic

Deep
structure
Semantically
interpreted by the
semantic
component

Surface
structure

Further related to
sound aspect of
language by means
of the phonological
Semantic & phonology
components.
purely interpretative

Syntactic Component
base

syntactic subcomponent

Set of transformations

It has 2 rules
Phrase structure rules
-the form of constituent structure trees
convert one kind of tree structure into another (e.g. an active
structure into passive one)

Transformations rules
- that act on the phrase markers generated by the base,
mapping deep structures onto the surface structures of
sentences.

Scope and object of a semantic theory in

generative-transformational grammar

A semantic theory describes and

explains the interpretative
competence of the speaker
a speaker can interpret sentences in
the sense that he can relate them
appropriately to "states, processes
and objects in the universe.
A speaker can understand an infinite
number of sentences, some of which
he has never heard before.

The aims and objectives

to establish the meaning and the
degree of ambiguity of a sentence;
to detect semantic anomalies;
to state the paraphrase relation
between sentences;
to state other relevant semantic
properties of sentences.

The semantic component of generativetransformational grammar.

a dictionary that provides a meaning

for each of the lexical items of the
language;
a finite set of projection rules which
assign a semantic interpretation to
which string of formatives (or string
of words) generated by the syntactic
component.

 To arrive at a semantic interpretation

it is necessary for each lexical item in
a string of formatives to be assigned
a meaning on the basis of the
semantic information provided by the
dictionary.
The projection rules then combine
these meanings in a manner dictated
by the syntactic description of the
string to arrive at a characterization
of the meaning of the whole string
and of each of its constituents.