On Katz-Postal integrated theory of linguistic descriptions

Abstract

In 1963 J. J. Katz and J. A. Fodor in their »The Structure of a Semantic Theory« encouraged semantic studies and proposed to consider semantics as an integral part of generative grammar. Next year J. J. Katz and P. M. Postal in »An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Description« tried to integrate generative concepts of phonology and syntax proposed by Chomsky with semantics; they also aimed to provide an adequate means of incorporating grammatical and semantic description of a language into one integrated description. Of the three components of any linguistic description syntactic component represents generative source, generates the abstract formal structures that underlie actual sentence; semantic and phonological components operate on the syntactic output, perform independent operations on the syntactic structures and provide respectively semantic interpretation and phonological representation to each of the formal structures generated by the syntactic component. The syntactic component must be a system of rules that enumerates the infinite set of abstract formal structures; the rules assign one or more structural descriptions to each sitring of formatives. The semantic component consists of a dictionary, containing meanings of each lexical item of a language, and a finite set of projection rules. String of formatives is given the meaning from the dictionary; projection rules provide semantic interpretation of each element of the string, combining the meanings according to the syntactic description of the string. This paper explains their theory and proceedings in detail.