The format of this book is unusual, especially for a book about linguistics. The book is meant primarily as a research monograph aimed at linguists who have some background in formal semantics, e. g. Montague Grammar. However, I have two other audiences in mind. Linguists who have little or no experience of formal semantics, but who have worked through a basic mathematics for linguists course (e. g. using Wall, 1972, or Partee, 1978), should, perhaps with the help of a sympathetic (...) Montague gramma rian, be able to discover enough of how I have adapted some of the basic ideas in formal semantics to make the developments that I undertake in the rest of the book accessible. Logicians and computer scientists who know about model theoretic semantics and formal systems should be able to glean enough from Chapters I and II about linguistic concerns and techniques to be able to read the remainder of the book, again possibly with the help of a sympathetic Montague grammarian. However, readers should beware. Chapter II is not meant as a general introduction either to formal semantics or to linguistics and while much of the presentation there is going over ground that is already well covered in the literature, the particular formulation and the emphases are very much oriented to the developments to be undertaken later in the book. (shrink)

0. Introductory remarks. I assume that every serious theory of language must give some explicit account of the relationship between expressions in the language described and expressions in some interpreted language which spells out the semantics of the language.1 Let's call this relationship the translation relation. Theories differ as to how this relation is specified. In the Aspects theory of syntax, taken together with a Katz-Postal view of "semantic rules", it was assumed that the relation was defined on deep structures. (...) Serious problems led to modifications of this view in several directions. Chomsky's latest papers assume that a modified 'intermediate structure' is transformed by rules of interpretation to a level of representation called 'logical form'. Common to all of these approaches is the assumption that the translation rules are defined initially on syntactic structures of one sort or another. Let us call this assumption the configurational hypothesis: the translation rules all have the form: [183]. (shrink)