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Where did generative semantics go wrong? Why was their conception of language faulty?
What were the main weaknesses of generative semantics adherents' claim that "a grammar starts with a description of meaning of the sentence and then generates syntactical rules through introduction of syntactical rules and lexical rules?
Well, it was transformations. In generative semantics, transformations are/were taken to mediate between logical form and speech. The problem was, there turned out not to be any transformations. So much for that idea, then.
Probably amongst you all there are some readers who have not yet given up on TG. So I'll just say very briefly how I became disillusioned with transformations. It was Gerald Gazdar's account using phrase structure grammar of Ross's across-the-board condition for the coordinate structure constraint. That hardly even makes sense in TG (how can things move out of several places to wind up in just one place?), while it's predicted in Gazdar's treatment from the condition on coordination that only like categories can be conjoined.
I'm very fond of McCawley's The Syntactic Phenomena of English, and I think McCawley was headed in a good direction when he formulated the purpose of transformations as fitting conceptual structures into the templates that permit them to be pronounced in the way we humans have learned to do. It's just that the transformations don't work. Just look at that the very strange way Conjunction Reduction has to apply so as to yield structures that could have been produced directly by phrase structure rules. It's awful.
I think "going wrong" is probably not a good way to characterize the development of Generative Semantics. What happened is that it's various proponents went in different directions - neither Ross, McCawley nor Postal were interested in pursuing the programmatic work and spent the rest of their careers on more wide ranging contributions but ultimately partial to the study of language.
George Lakoff never really abandoned the Generative Semantic program of putting meaning at the center of linguistic inquiry but left the generative, formal linguistic approach. His assessment of Generative Semantics (which can be found most clearly in 'Women, Fire and Dangerous Things') is that it was making unwarranted assumptions about meaning as being subject to formal mechanisms contained in mathematical logic - which Lakoff calls 'objectivism'. Lakoff rejected that in favor of an enriched version of 'frame semantics' having also jettisoned formal syntax in favor of construction/cognitive grammar. So you can say that generative semantics simply evolved into 'cognitive grammar'.
If you look at some of Lakoff's writing from the early 1970s (e.g. hedges), you can see a clear continuity of his overall program in the things he's concerned with.
