Publications
Publication details [#41801]
McCawley, James D. 1995. Generative semantics. In Verschueren, Jef, Jan-Ola Östman and Jan Blommaert, eds. Handbook of Pragmatics. Manual. John Benjamins.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
The term ‘generative semantics’ (GS) is an informal designation for the school of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic research that was prominent from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s and whose best-known practitioners were George Lakoff, James D. McCawley, Paul M. Postal, and John Robert Ross. It was not until the GS community was already in a period of decline that many GS-ists came to do pragmatics as pragmatics rather than to assimilate it to semantics. Accordingly, the body of research that is both unequivocally generative semantic and unequivocally pragmatic is relatively small. Still, the GS literature includes papers devoted to a broad range of pragmatic issues, such as the meanings of a number of English ‘interjections’ (James 1972, 1973), conversational strategies in which the intentional use of ambiguous sentences enables a speaker to shift conversational risks to his interlocutor (Weiser, 1974,1975), the linguistic implications of the division of labor among different dimensions of politeness (R. Lakoff, 1973), ways in which the choice between reflexive and simple pronouns reflects whose viewpoint is being taken (Cantral 1974), ways which the choice of tenses depends not only on time relations but on the role of speech act participants in what is said (R. Lakoff 1970), and how the division of labor among linguistic forms reflects which if any of the speech participants a given piece of information ‘belongs to’ (Forman, 1974).. Even GS works in which the author did not specifically do pragmatics usually concerned themselves with issues that had pragmatic aspects.