Much of the recent work in linguistics has focused on the problem of giving a precise syntax for English. There is now an increasing awareness of the need for some kind of semantic theory. Some recent work of the logician Richard Montague has great promise in this regard. Montague's main goal was to give a completely successful analysis of logical consequence for ordinary language. He approached this end by giving such an analysis for what may be regarded as limited portions of English, or fragments of English. A fragment is a formal language in that it has a rigorous syntax and a model-theoretic semantics. The semantics provides a characterization of the notions of a true sentence (under a given interpretation) and of logical consequence. There are three papers by Montague where he presents such fragments: Montague [3], Montague [4], and Montague [6]. (Henceforth, we shall refer to these papers as EFL, UG, and PTQ, respectively.)
Compositionality in Formal SemanticsSelected Papers by Barbara H. Partee
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