Generative semantics is the name of a research program within linguistics, initiated by the work of various early students of Noam Chomsky: John R. Ross, Paul Postal, and later James McCawley. George Lakoff was also instrumental in developing and advocating the theory.
The approach developed out of transformational generative grammar in the mid 1960s, but stood largely apart from, and in opposition to, work by Noam Chomsky and his later students. This move led to a more abstract framework and lately to the abandonment of the notion of deep structure.
A number of ideas from later work in generative semantics have been incorporated into cognitive linguistics, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), Construction Grammar, and into mainstream Chomskyan linguistics.
Read more about Generative Semantics: History, “Interpretive” Vs. “generative” Semantics
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“Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)