Recent developments in the semantics of natural language seem to lead to a genuine synthesis of ideas from linguistics and logic, producing novel concepts and questions of interest to both parent disciplines. This book is a collection of essays on such new topics, which have arisen over the past few years. Taking a broad view, developments in formal semantics over the past decade can be seen as follows. At the beginning stands Montague's pioneering work, showing how a rigorous semantics can (...) be given for complete fragments of natural language by creating a suitable fit between syntactic categories and semantic types. This very enterprise already dispelled entrenched prejudices concerning the separation of linguistics and logic. Having seen the light, however, there is no reason at all to stick to the letter of Montague's proposals, which are often debatable. Subsequently, then, many improvements have been made upon virtually every aspect of the enterprise. More sophisticated grammars have been inserted (lately, lexical-functional grammar and generalized phrase structure grammar), more sensitive model structures have been developed (lately, 'partial' rather than 'total' in their com position), and even the mechanism of interpretation itself may be fine-tuned more delicately, using various forms of 'representations' mediating between linguistic items and semantic reality. In addition to all these refinements of the semantic format, descriptive coverage has extended considerably. (shrink)

This volume contains a collection of research papers centered around the concept of quantifier. Recently this concept has become the central point of research in logic. It is one of the important logical concepts whose exact domain and applications have so far been insufficiently explored, especially in the area of inferential and semantic properties of languages. It should thus remain the central point of research in the future. Moreover, during the last twenty years generalized quantifiers and logical technics based on (...) them have proved their utility in various applications. The example of natu rallanguage semantics has been partcularly striking. For a long time it has been belived that elementary logic also called first-order logic was an ade quate theory of logical forms of natural language sentences. Recently it has been accepted that semantics of many natural language constructions can not be properly represented in elementary logic. It has turned out, however, that they can be described by means of generalized quantifiers. As far as computational applications oflogic are concerned, particulary interesting are semantics restricted to finite models. Under this restriction elementary logic looses several of its advantages such as axiomatizability and compactness. And for various purposes we can use equally well some semantically richer languages of which generalized quantifiers offer the most universal methods of describing extensions of elementary logic. Moreover we can look at generalized quantifiers as an explication of some specific mathematical concepts, e. g. (shrink)