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Full Idea
The sentences 'John is easy to please' and 'John is eager to please' can have very different deep structure (with the latter concerning John as a pleaser, while the former concerns John as the one being pleased).
Gist of Idea
'John is easy to please' and 'John is eager to please' have different deep structure
Source
Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 2.1)
Book Ref
Magidor,Ofra: 'Category Mistakes' [OUP 2013], p.26
A Reaction
This demolishes the old idea of grammar as 'parts of speech' strung together according to superficial rules. The question is whether we now just have deeper syntax, or whether semantics is part of the process.
Related Ideas
Idea 18006 Chomsky's 'interpretative semantics' says syntax comes first, and is then interpreted [Chomsky, by Magidor]
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] |