The author finds Katz and Postal's 1964 generative semantic theories concerning the organization of grammar incorrect and proposes an interpretive approach to semantics in which syntactic structures are given interpretations by an autonomous semantic component. The research reported leads the author to describe a generative grammar consisting of five major components: the lexicon, the base component, the transformational component, the phonological component, and the semantic-component. The semantic component, in turn, includes at least four subcomponents, interpreted as functional structure, modal structure, coreference relations, and focus and presupposition. The book describes the four subcomponents and also focuses on problems in the analysis of adverbs, intonation contours, and negation. (VM)