In any survey of recent developments in semantics, the game-theoretic approach to the semantics of both formal and of natural languages which has been developed by Jaakko Hintikka and his associates must loom large. It is indeed well known by this time that the semantics of the usual first-order logic can be spelled out in terms of games. What is not equally generally known is that this game-theoretical semantics can be augmented so as to apply also to natural languages and (...) not only to some of the artificial languages studied by logicians. The results already reached by Hintikka and his associates in this direction nevertheless show that many important phenomena of natural language can be handled in the game-theoretical framework. In this paper I shall first try to outline the basic ideas of the game-theoretical approach to semantics, then discuss briefly some problems which have so far been left untouched and thereby try to provide some new evidence for the naturalness and adequacy of a game-theoretical semantics. (shrink)

I relate plural quantification, and predicate logic where predicates do not need a fixed number of argument places, to the part-whole relation. For more on these themes see later work by Boolos, Lewis, and Oliver & Smiley.