In the 1960s, the semantics in vogue in linguistics seems to have favored some kind of decompositional approach. Consider kinship terms. Taking P to mean "parent of" and F to mean female you can analyze most kinship terms using first-order predicate logic. So "x is y's aunt" would come out as ∃z∃ w(Pwy & Pzw & Pzx & w ≠ x & Fx). Some linguists, notably George Lakoff (1971) and James McCawley (1972), championed what was called generative semantics, where the idea was that the base level was a semantic level of structures in something such as first-order logic, which could be converted to a surface level. Noam Chomsky's (1965) level of "deep structure" was thought to lie somewhere between what subsequently became known as the level of "logical form" and the surface level. There were then debates about how autonomous syntax is, and how much of it...