Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specifically than ...

But Findlay's remark, like so much that has been written on the subject of time in the present century, was provoked in the first place by McTaggart's ...

Along the way, Zero Syntax also examines issues of broad significance to current theoretical linguistic research in syntax and lexical semantics.Zero Syntax ...

A more extensive discussion of certain of the more technical notions appears in my paper "On Binding" (Chomsky,; henceforth, OB). ...

In this theory, both adverbs and heads, which encode the functional notions of the clause, are ordered in a rigid sequence.

INTENSIONAL LOGIC §1. Natural Language and Intensional Logic When we speak of a theory of meaning for a natural language such as English, we have in mind an ...

Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this is a lucid and systematic introduction to semantics as applied to transformational grammars of the ...

This paper investigates different readings of plural and reciprocal sentences and how they can be derived from syntactic surface structures in a systematic way. The main thesis is that these readings result from different ways of inserting logical operators at the level of Logical Form. The basic operator considered here is a cumulative mapping from predicates that apply to singularities onto the corresponding predicates that apply to pluralities. Given a theory which allows for free insertion of such operators, it can (...) then be shown that the lexical semantics of the reciprocal expressions each other/one another consists of exactly two components, namely an anaphoric variable and a non-identity statement. This receives further support from the observation that it is exactly these two components that can be focused by only; all that remains to be done is to correctly manipulate these components at the level of LF. (shrink)

In these essays the minimalist approach to linguistic theory is formulated and progressively developed.

In this paper, we show how the problem of accounting for the semanticsof temporal preposition phrases (tPPs) leads us to some surprisinginsights into the semantics of temporal expressions ingeneral. Specifically, we argue that a systematic treatment of EnglishtPPs is greatly facilitated if we endow our meaning assignments with context variables, a device which allows a tPP to restrict domainsof quantification arising elsewhere in a sentence. We observe that theuse of context variables implies that tPPs can modify expressions intwo ways, and (...) we use this observation to predict the behaviour of tPPswhose complements are themselves modified by other tPPs. (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)

relations between events both require a more complex structure on the domain underlying the meaning representations than is commonly assumed. This paper proposes an ontology based on such notions as causation and consequence, rather than on purely temporal primitives. A central notion in the ontology..