points of contrast with Chomskyan linguistics, and its distinctive way of imple- menting the cognitive agenda. Of particular relevance to our topic is the turmoil within the Chomskyan camp during the late 1960s and early 1970s. At around that time, a number of linguists closely associated with Chomsky pushed the generative enterprise in the direc- tion of what came to be known as ‘‘Generative Semantics.’’ As is well known, early Generative Grammar proposed a ‘‘deep’’ level of syntactic structure, which was converted into a ‘‘surface’’ structure by means of transformations. The generative semantic view was that all aspects of the meaning of a sentence, even its pragmatic force, had to be represented in the deep structure. Moreover, sentences which are (roughly) synonymous on the surface, even though they might differ in their wording, had to share the same deep structure. Regarding deep structure itself, it was usual for it to be represented in the format of predicate logic and to incor- porate what were supposed to be semantic primitives. An often-cited example was the representation of kill in terms of the abstract elements [ cause ] and [ become not alive ]. 5 Such an approach, as will be evident, necessitated a vast inventory of transformational rules, many of them entirely ad hoc, which added, deleted, re- arranged, and replaced material as the deep semantic structure got transformed into a surface syntactic structure. There was a time in the early 1970s when it seemed that Generative Semantics was going to conquer the field. After a particularly vi- cious and acrimonious period (narrated from different perspectives by Newmeyer 1980 and Harris 1993), the Generative Semantics movement collapsed, largely, it would seem, under the weight of the unconstrained transformations which it pos- tulated. Henceforth, ‘‘orthodox’’ Generative Grammar would severely restrict both the kinds of transformations that were admissible and the range of data that the theory was intended to account for. In the end, only one transformation came to be recognized, that of movement, and even this became an option of ‘‘last resort’’ (Chomsky 1995: 150). At the same time, the empirical scope of the theory came to be restricted to ‘‘core’’ grammatical phenomena, to the exclusion of pragmatics and all manner of ‘‘idiosyncratic’’ syntactic and lexical data.