Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 425-6):
Jackendoff (1983) presents a major study of semantics and cognition from a generativist point of view. As part of that study, he presents an ontology of conceptual types that are linguistically motivated. While his purpose is theoretical rather than descriptive, and the ontology is not very extensive, it has become a frame of reference for work in this area.
Jackendoff sees semantic organisation as part of conceptual organisation — that part which can be verbalised; this is a position that distinguishes him from a number of other generativists. He identifies two possible positions on the relationship between semantic organisation and conceptual organisation (1983: Section 1.7; interpreted by us in Figure 10-3):
(1) "conceptual structure could be a further level beyond semantic structure, related to it by a rule component, often called pragmatics, that specifies the relation of linguistic meaning to discourse and to extralinguistic setting."(2) "semantic structures could be simply a subset of conceptual structures — just those conceptual structures that happen to be verbally expressible".
