in the context of theAspectstheory, which took Deep Structure to be directly connected to meaning. For many years
Jerry Fodor (e.g. 1975; 2000a) has made a significant attempt to establish theoretical foundations for semantics in
concurrence with(whathetakes tobe)thegoalsofgenerativegrammar. But, as wewillsee, hisconclusions are at such
odds with all detailed empirical work on meaning as to discredit the enterprise in the eyes of practical semanticists.
In the wake of the Generative Semantics dispute (section 4.2), most mainstream generative grammarians turned away
fro mthe syste matic study of meaning, leaving thefield largely to practitioners of the newly emerging disciplines of
formal semantics, computational linguistics, cognitive psychology/ neuroscience, and, somewhat later, Cognitive
Grammar. Although all these approaches have made important advances in understanding meaning, none makes full
contact with the overall goals of generative linguistics discussed in Part I. In fact, in many instances they espouse
wholesalerejectionof generative grammar because of its neglect of meaning. Often thismanifests itself as rejectingthe
notionof an“autonomous formal syntactic component”and in some cases eventhe notionof grammar itself.Usually
the notion of innateness is vilified; and some traditions even question the notion that language is in the mind.
I suspect that the underlying reason for this crashing wave of rejections is the syntactocentris mof mainstrea m
generativegrammar: the assumptionthat the syntactic componentis the sole source of generativecapacity in language
(Chapter 5). This assumption, so fundamental that it was already subliminal by 1975, has the impliciteffect of (pardon
the term) emasculating semantics—of giving the messages conveyed by language a far lesser role than the messenger.
The alternative approaches, in revenge, have shot the messenger.
This is really a mistake. Consider our poor little sentence from Chapter 1, repeated here as (1). It is certainly a fact
about meaning that (1) must be differentiated from infinitely many other sentences that mean different things, for
example those in (2).
(1) The little star's beside a big star.
(2) a. A little star's beside the big star.
b. Every big star is beside some little star.
c. Is the little star beside a big star?
d. The little goat is inside a big tent.
e. John falsely believes that the little star's beside a big star.
f. Throw Momma from the train.But it is a fact about English syntax, not about meaning, that (1) must be differentiated from the strings of words in
(3)—which could be the way the same meaning is conveyed in some other language.