Constructs developed for the semantics of artificial languages are often proposed as the proper description of aspects of the semantics of natural languages. Most of us are familiar with the claims that conjunction, disjunction, negation, and material implication in standard versions of propositional calculus describe the meaning of “and”, “or”, “not”, and “if …, then …” in English. The argument for such claims is not only that these constructs account for meanings in English but that they offer the advantage of (...) well-understood formal apparatus for the explication of meaning in natural language. The argument against such claims is that explications based on this apparatus leave important aspects of the meaning of “and”, “or”, “not”, and “if …, then …” unexplicated. It is charged that the advantage of a well-understood formalism is secured at the expense of truth. Many of the most significant issues in philosophic logic are or depend on questions about whether constructs from artificial languages provide adequate semantic descriptions for natural languages. (shrink)

Record of papers given at a symposium held at the University of Texas at Austin, April 1967; includes; C.J. Fillmore - The case for case; E. Bach - Nouns and noun phrases; J.D. McCawley - The role of semantics in a grammar; P. Kiparsky Linguistic universals and linguistic change.

I ON THE PRIMITIVE TERM OF LOGISTICf IN this article I propose to establish a theorem belonging to logistic concerning some connexions, not widely known, ...

A study of the contribution semantics makes to the syntactic patterns of English: an intepretive theory of grammar.

Counterfactuals is David Lewis' forceful presentation of and sustained argument for a particular view about propositions which express contrary to fact conditionals, including his famous defense of realism about possible worlds and his theory of laws of nature.

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)

I reject the contention that an important theoretical difference exists between formal and natural languages.

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)

The goal of this paper is to argue for the fruitfulness for linguistic theory of an approach to semantics that has been developed primarily by logicians and philosophers. That the theory of possible worlds semantics has been extremely fruitful for logic and philosophy is widely if not universally accepted, and I will not try to convince remaining skeptics on that score. But the goals of linguistics are sufficiently different from those of philosophy and logic that there are independent and highly (...) reasonable grounds for skepticism about the appropriateness of such a theory for linguistics, and I will address what seem to me the most important of these in addition to offering positive evidence in favor of such an approach to semantics. (shrink)