Originally published in 1973, this book shows that methods developed for the semantics of systems of formal logic can be successfully applied to problems about the semantics of natural languages; and, moreover, that such methods can take account of features of natural language which have often been thought incapable of formal treatment, such as vagueness, context dependence and metaphorical meaning. Parts 1 and 2 set out a class of formal languages and their semantics. Parts 3 and 4 show that these (...) formal languages are rich enought to be used in the precise description of natural languages. Appendices describe some of the concepts discussed in the text. (shrink)

Originally published in 1973, this book shows that methods developed for the semantics of systems of formal logic can be successfully applied to problems about the semantics of natural languages; and, moreover, that such methods can take account of features of natural language which have often been thought incapable of formal treatment, such as vagueness, context dependence and metaphorical meaning. Parts 1 and 2 set out a class of formal languages and their semantics. Parts 3 and 4 show that these (...) formal languages are rich enought to be used in the precise description of natural languages. Appendices describe some of the concepts discussed in the text. (shrink)

Since a human language consists of an infinite number of sentences, it cannot be adequately described by enumeration. Hence, as Chomsky wrote in the first paragraph of his first book, Syntactic Structures, an adequate description of a language is approached through the specification of a generative device that will generate and structurally describe all the sentences of a language. And since generative devices form a hierarchy in terms of descriptive power, the basic question of grammar is what is the minimum (...) of power needed to generate human languages. What this book does is describe the Chomsky hierarchy in a very clear and accessible way. Finite state grammars are shown to be equivalent in generative power to regular phrase structure grammars. After context free, and context sensitive phrase structure grammars, one finds at the top of the hierarchy transformational grammars, which Kimball has shown to be weakly equivalent to a universal phrase structure grammar, i.e., one in which rules can delete items. This last equivalence allows one to appreciate the central problem in current grammatical theory: that the "standard theory" of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax allows so much power for the construction of grammars that solutions become arbitrary and non-empirical, and hence the problem is to find a principled minimization of the power of transformational grammars. This is a clear, up-to-date, and elegant little book. One admirably suitable as a comparatively undemanding introduction to the abstract theory of grammar, or as a way of brushing-up on the subject.—J.L. (shrink)