History
The nature and genesis of the program are a matter of some controversy and have been extensively debated. Generative semanticists took Chomsky's concept of Deep Structure and ran with it, assuming (contrary to later work by Chomsky and Ray Jackendoff) that deep structures were the sole input to semantic interpretation. This assumption, combined with a tendency to consider a wider range of empirical evidence than Chomskyan linguists, led generative semanticists to develop considerably more abstract and complex theories of deep structure than those advocated by Chomsky and his students—and indeed to abandon altogether the notion of "deep structure" as a locus of lexical insertion.
Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, there were heated debates between generative semanticists and more orthodox Chomskyans. The generative semanticists lost the debate, insofar as their research program ground to a halt by the 1980s. However, this was in part because the interests of key generative semanticists such as George Lakoff had gradually shifted away from the narrow study of syntax and semantics.
Read more about this topic: Generative Semantics
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