Peter Ludlow presents the first book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, including both Chomsky's government and binding theory and his minimalist ...

Evidence is presented to show that the role of a generative grammar of a natural language is not merely to generate the grammatical sentences of that language, but also to relate them to their logical forms. The notion of logical form is to be made sense of in terms a natural logic, a logical for natural language, whose goals are to express all concepts capable of being expressed in natural language, to characterize all the valid inferences that can be made (...) in natural language, and to mesh with adequate linguistic descriptions of all natural languages. The latter requirement imposes empirical linguistic constraints on natural logic. A number of examples are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that noun complement modality cannot be treated as dependent on the meanings of lexical embedding predicates or of abstract performatives. Using two types of complement modalities, I show that their meanings and restrictions remain distinct and invariable regardless of the meanings of their embedding predicates. Then, using embedding predicates that can take both types of modalities, I show that the embedding predicates retain their meanings, regardless of the different modalities of their complements, and they can (...) undergo deletions requiring their identity. (shrink)