  In the late 1960s category mistakes played a central role in the chasm between the followers of Chomsky (whose view was labelled ‘Interpretative Semantics’), and proponents of a new movement in linguistics labelled ‘Generative Semantics’, whose key proponents were Lakoff, McCawley, Ross, and Postal. Interpretative semanticists claimed that sentences were assigned a syntactic structure by an autonomous syntactic module, a structure which could then be provided as input for semantic interpretation. By contrast, generative semanticists eschewed the sharp distinction between syntax and semantics, maintaining that the structure of a sentence was determined by a combination of so-called syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic considerations. In particular, they labelled infelicitous sentences such as category mistakes as simply ‘ill-formed’, resisting the attempt to pin down the precise  source of the  ill-formedness.[8]