kinship, dominance, group membership, obligations, entitlements, and morals^135 ), and characterization of their beliefs
and motivations (so-called“theory of mind”). The third is a basic algebra of individuation, categorization, grouping,
and decomposition that undergirds both the previous systems as well as many others. We will see pieces of these
systems in chapters to come.
In short, conceptualist semantics should aspire to offer a common meeting ground for multiple traditions in studying
cognition, including not only linguistic semantics but also pragmatics, perceptual understanding, embodied cognition,
reasoning and planning, social/cultural understanding, primate cognition, and evolutionary psychology. A high
aspiration, but certainly one worth pursuing.
The rest of this chapter, alas, must be devoted to fending off various attempts to limit the scope of semantic theory. I
hope nevertheless that something positive will come of it—that the reader will get a feel for the enterprise, and that
these preliminary skirmishes will build some courage for the more difficult encounters in the next chapter.
9.4 Chomsky and Fodor on semantics
One reason that semantics has played such a relatively minimal role in mainstream generative grammar is Chomsky's
own apparent ambivalence.On the one hand, he has argued vigorously for an internalist (here called“conceptualist”)
approach to meaning, for instance in the papers collected in Chomsky (2000). On the other hand, aside from
presenting a few telling examples, he has never attempted to develop a systematic internalist approach.
Moreover, when pressed, Chomsky expresses strongly conflicted feelings about the term“semantics”itself. I want to
quote a few passages fro ma recent interview with hi m(Cela-Conde and Marty (1998).‘An Interview with Noam
Chomsky.’Syntax 1: 19 – 36, by permission of Blackwell Publishers).
From the outset, work in generative grammar was motivated primarily by issues that are usually called“semantic”...: the fact that a person
who has had limited experience with language somehow comes to understand new expressions in highly specific ways....
Personally, I prefer to use the term“syntax”to refer to these topics; others use the term“semantics,”which I would prefer to restrict to the
study of what are often called“language-world”connections—more properly, in my view, connections between language and other parts of
the world, some within the organism (presumably, the articulatory
SEMANTICS AS A MENTALISTIC ENTERPRISE 275
(^135) As in language, the innate component cannot specify particular social roles, morality, and so forth. It specifies only the design space within which human social systems are
located, thereby aiding children in learning the social syste min which theyfind themselves growing up. See Jackendoff (1994 : ch. 15).