generative semantics

Generative semantics is a linguistic theory that describes a language by emphasizing a semantic deep structure. This deep structure is logical in form, provides syntactic structure, and relates to the surface structure through transformations.1

This approach emerged from developments in theoretical linguistics, particularly influenced by Noam Chomsky and the concept of generative grammar. Generative grammar, in Chomsky's sense, is a rule system that precisely generates all grammatical sentences of a language and assigns a structural description to each.23

Generative semantics, specifically, posits that the fundamental component of grammar should be rules for generating well-formed semantic representations. These representations are then transformed into strings of words with an assigned surface-structure syntactic analysis.2