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Full Idea
Chomsky and his followers (whose position was labelled 'interpretative semantics') claimed that a sentence is first assigned a syntactic structure by an autonomous syntactic module, and this structure is then provided as input for semantic interpretation.
Gist of Idea
Chomsky's 'interpretative semantics' says syntax comes first, and is then interpreted
Source
report of Noam Chomsky (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax [1965]) by Ofra Magidor - Category Mistakes 1.3
Book Ref
Magidor,Ofra: 'Category Mistakes' [OUP 2013], p.18
A Reaction
This certainly doesn't fit the experience of introspecting speech, but then I suppose good pianists focus entirely on the music, and overlook the finger movements which have obvious priority. But I don't know the syntax of the sentence when I begin it.
Related Idea
Idea 18008 Generative semantics says structure is determined by semantics as well as syntactic rules [Magidor]
| 18006 | Chomsky's 'interpretative semantics' says syntax comes first, and is then interpreted [Chomsky, by Magidor] |
| 18007 | Syntax is independent of semantics; sentences can be well formed but meaningless [Chomsky, by Magidor] |
| 3507 | Universal grammar doesn't help us explain anything [Searle] |
| 2581 | Intuition may say that a complex sentence is ungrammatical, but linguistics can show that it is not [Block] |
| 8073 | How do we parse 'time flies like an arrow' and 'fruit flies like an apple'? [Devlin] |
| 21638 | Syntactic form concerns the focus of the sentence, as well as the truth-conditions [Hofweber] |
| 15347 | A theory of syntax can be based on Peano arithmetic, thanks to the translation by Gödel coding [Horsten] |
| 18008 | Generative semantics says structure is determined by semantics as well as syntactic rules [Magidor] |
| 18010 | 'John is easy to please' and 'John is eager to please' have different deep structure [Magidor] |