semantics

[Dick Hudson]

Alex Alsina says, re syntax/semantics in GB:
>Higginbotham, in his
>paper "Elucidations of meaning", is very clear about what I would
>consider to be the standard position regarding semantics in GB.  He
>says that all you have to learn about the meanings of sentences are
>the meanings of the words that make up the sentences: if you know the
>syntax and you know the meanings of the words, then you know the
>meanings of the phrases and sentences that these words make up.  This
>is a very clear statement of the NONindependence of semantics in GB.
>You can't take a more extreme position than this.  

dh: Surely we'd all agree that semantics is compositional in the sense that
the total meaning of the whole sentence is influenced by the sentence's
syntactic structure? If semantics was `independent' of syntax that wouldn't
be true, so no-one really believes in independence in that sense. Presumably
the debate is about two other things:

Q1. How simple is the mapping relation? (GB: simple, LFG: complex?)

Q2. Does the semantic structure include lexical semantic structures (e.g.
showing a result state for resultative verbs)? I know Chomsky used to assign
lexical semantics to the semantic structure (rather than LF, of course), but
I assume that people like Higginbotham would exclude it even from semantic
structure, now that this is identified with LF. I don't know what happens in
LFG (though I'd be interested). 

Richard Hudson
Department of Phonetics and Linguistics,
University College London,
Gower Street,
London WC1E 6BT
work phone +171 419 3152; work fax +171 383 4108
email dick at ling.ucl.ac.uk; web-site http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm