ABSTRACT
The practice of (oral) translation of one language into another. Two types of interpreting are distinguished: (a) simultaneous interpreting, in which smaller semantic units are translated in synchrony with the actual production of the foreign language text; and (b) consecutive interpreting in which a large portion of closed text is translated. ( also translation)
In the framework of generative grammar, position held by N.Chomsky, J.J.Katz, and others according to which syntax is considered an autonomous generative component, while the semantic component has a purely interpretive character in that it interprets the syntactically motivated abstract deep structures through semantic rules, i.e. gives them one or more readings. The aim of interpretive semantics is to describe the competence of the ideal speaker/hearer who ‘can semantically interpret any sentence…under any of its grammatical derivations. He can determine the number and content of the readings of a sentence, tell whether or not a sentence is semantically anomalous, and decide which sentences…are paraphrases of each other’ (Katz and Fodor 1963:182). The semantic representation of interpretive semantics rests initially and above all upon three now widely debated hypotheses: (a) the meaning of linguistic expressions can be completely described on the basis of a limited inventory of semantic features of a largely universal nature; (b) the syntactically motivated deep structure supplies all the necessary semanticsyntactic information for the semantic interpretation; and (c) transformations between deep and surface structures are semantically neutral. The semantic theory of interpretive semantics consists of two components, the lexicon3 and projection rules. The lexicon supplies both syntactic and semantic information. The semantic information is composed of (a) systematic semantic relationships between individual lexemes and the rest of the vocabulary of the language ( semantic feature); (b) the idiosyncratic, non-systematic features ( distinguisher); and (c) selectional features. The lexicon entries are placed in the syntactic deep structure, with polysemic lexemes ( polysemy) having a corresponding number of readings. These potential readings are selected via projection rules on the basis of conditions of grammaticality, and the individual lexical elements are summarized with consideration of their grammatical relations (as depicted in their tree) to the whole meaning of the sentence, that is, they are ‘amalgamated’ ( amalgamation).
