517 research outputs found
Formal Semantics: Origins, Issues, Early Impact
Formal semantics and pragmatics as they have developed since the late 1960\u27s have been shaped by fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration among linguists, philosophers, and logicians, among others, and in turn have had noticeable effects on developments in syntax, philosophy of language, computational linguistics, and cognitive science.In this paper I describe the environment in which formal semantics was born and took root, highlighting the differences in ways of thinking about natural language semantics in linguistics and in philosophy and logic. With Montague as a central but not solo player in the story, I reflect on crucial developments in the 1960\u27s and 70\u27s in linguistics and philosophy, and the growth of formal semantics and formal pragmatics from there. I discuss innovations, key players, and leading ideas that shaped the development of formal semantics and its relation to syntax, to pragmatics, and to the philosophy of language in its early years, and some central aspects of its early impact on those fields
Paracompositionality, MWEs and Argument Substitution
Multi-word expressions, verb-particle constructions, idiomatically combining
phrases, and phrasal idioms have something in common: not all of their elements
contribute to the argument structure of the predicate implicated by the
expression.
Radically lexicalized theories of grammar that avoid string-, term-, logical
form-, and tree-writing, and categorial grammars that avoid wrap operation,
make predictions about the categories involved in verb-particles and phrasal
idioms. They may require singleton types, which can only substitute for one
value, not just for one kind of value. These types are asymmetric: they can be
arguments only. They also narrowly constrain the kind of semantic value that
can correspond to such syntactic categories. Idiomatically combining phrases do
not subcategorize for singleton types, and they exploit another locally
computable and compositional property of a correspondence, that every syntactic
expression can project its head word. Such MWEs can be seen as empirically
realized categorial possibilities, rather than lacuna in a theory of
lexicalizable syntactic categories.Comment: accepted version (pre-final) for 23rd Formal Grammar Conference,
August 2018, Sofi
- …