Word Meaning and Montague Grammar: The Semantics of Verbs and Times in Generative Semantics and in Montague’s PTQ

Description

The most general goal of this book is to propose and illustrate a program of research in word semantics that combines some of the methodology and results in linguistic semantics, primarily that of the generative semantics school, with the rigorously formalized syntactic and semantic framework for the analysis of natural languages developed by Richard Montague and his associates, a framework in which truth and denotation with respect to a model are taken as the fundamental semantic notions. I hope to show, both from the linguist's and the philosopher's point of view, not only why this synthesis can be undertaken but also why it will be useful to pursue it. On the one hand, the linguists' decompositions of word meanings into more primitive parts are by themselves inherently incomplete, in that they deal only in distinctions in meaning without providing an account of what mean­ ings really are. Not only can these analyses be made complete by a model­ theoretic semantics, but also such an account of these analyses renders them more exact and more readily testable than they could ever be otherwise. Front Matter....Pages i-xxv Montague’s General Theory of Languages and Linguistic Theories of Syntax and Semantics....Pages 1-36 The Semantics of Aspectual Classes of Verbs in English....Pages 37-132 Interval Semantics and the Progressive Tense....Pages 133-192 Lexical Decomposition in Montague Grammar....Pages 193-234 Linguistic Evidence for the Two Strategies of Lexical Decomposition....Pages 235-293 The Syntax and Semantics of Word Formation: Lexical Rules....Pages 294-321 The Syntax and Semantics of Tense and Time Adverbials in English: An English Fragment....Pages 322-374 Intensions and Psychological Reality....Pages 375-395 Back Matter....Pages 396-418