Chapter 6 - The Extended Standard Theory

Abstract

This chapter discusses the term Extended Standard Theory (EST) that has generally been used to refer to any model incorporating a set of transformational rules, the lexicalist hypothesis, and surface structure rules of semantic interpretation. The earliest versions of the EST hypothesized rules of semantic interpretation applying to both deep structure and surface structure. The most important treatment of semantics in the early EST was Ray Jackendoff's Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar. For Jackendoff, as for interpretivists in general, there was no single formal object called a semantic representation. Rather, different types of rules filled in different aspects of the meaning. Despite Jackendoff's work and the general importance that the counterexamples to the Katz–Postal hypothesis played in the development of the EST, most of the semantic analyses undertaken by generative grammarians before the mid 1970s were by generative semanticists. The neglect of semantics by interpretivists was partly a result of the all-absorbing work taking place constraining the syntactic rules, which seemed to be yielding such promising results. But it resulted as well from a lingering feeling that semantics was, for the time being at least, simply not doable—too nebulous and unsystemizable to admit formalization with the descriptive tools then available.