Semantics of Compounding

"In the history of generative grammar, the question of the semantics of compounds was caught up in what Newmeyer (1986) called the "Linguistic Wars", the conflict between generative semantics and interpretive semantics. An important difference between the two sides was the place they attributed to semantics in the architecture of grammar. In generative semantics, the semantic representation was the starting point for syntactic processing. The syntactic level of Deep Structure had been merged with the underlying semantic representation. In interpretive semantics, the semantic representation was derived from a syntactic representation by means of interpretation rules"--