Found:
Montague Grammar
SEMANTICS: cover term for the kind of syntactic and semantic work that
is directly inspired by the work of the American philosopher Richard Montague.
It is based on the idea that the meaning theories for natural languages and formal
languages can and should be based on the same principles, according to a Universal
Grammar, of which the
Compositionality Principle
is the most important one. The clearest and most influential concrete illustration
of Montague's ideas can be found in his article 'The Proper Treatment of
Quantification in Ordinary English' (usually referred to as PTQ) in which he
defined the syntax and semantics of a considerable fragment of English. The system
of rules and notations given there are the point of departure for Montague Grammar.
In PTQ, Montague does not interpret expressions of English directly, but he
translates English words and phrases into expressions of a logical language IL
which are interpreted in the usual model-theoretic way. PTQ employs some of the
most advanced logical instruments: the sentences of English are generated by a
categorial grammar, the syntactic counterpart of
type logic, the logical language IL is a
combination of intensional logic and
type logic with lambda-abstraction
which is interpreted relative to a model containing
possible worlds and moments of time,
and crucial use is made of #meaning
postulates. The range of constructions and phenomena treated in PTQ includes
quantifier scope, opaque contexts, conjunction, infinitival complements and
relative clauses.
LIT. | Gamut, L.T.F. (1991) Montague, R. (1974) |