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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
It is with semantics and syntax that we should really begin if our study is to have results more interesting than lists of patterns.
(Adams, 1973: 215)Introduction
Semantics
It has become generally recognized over the past few years that syntax and semantics are inextricably linked. Indeed, the reason for the growth of the Generative Semantics school of linguistic thought was that many scholars felt that the two could not be distinguished at all. The fact that syntax and semantics are being dealt with here in the same chapter is meant to reflect the fact that it is frequently impossible in the study of word-formation to say whether one rather than the other is at issue. Syntax and semantics are distinguished in this introductory section purely for expository reasons, and even here the distinction is not absolutely clear.
In discussing current approaches to syntax it is possible to distinguish major approaches quite succinctly because although they diverge in many ways, they also have much in common: in particular, they all share theoretical assumptions about the general form of syntactic rules, and about the use of transformations. When semantics is considered, however, there is much less consensus about what a semantic component (if such a thing exists) should do and how. Indeed, there are even distinct schools of semantics dealing with what might be called word-semantics as distinct from sentence-semantics, and in the area of sentence-semantics there are many different approaches to meaning.
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