Word Meaning and Montague Grammar

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.

Contenu

1. Montague's General Theory of Languages and Linguistic Theories of Syntax and Semantics.- 1.1 The meaning of Universal in Universal Grammar.- 1.2 Syntax in the UG Theory and in Linguistic Theories.- 1.3 Semantics in UG.- 1.4 Interpretation by Means of Translation.- 1.5 Preliminaries to the Analysis of Word Meaning.- Notes.- 2. The Semantics of Aspectual Classes of Verbs in English.- 2.1 The Development of Decomposition Analysis in Generative Semantics.- 2.2The Aristotle-Ryle-Kenny-Vendler Verb Classification.- 2.3 An Aspect Calculus.- 2.4The Aspect Calculus as Restricting Possible Word Meanings.- Notes.- 3. Interval Semantics and the Progressive Tense.- 3.1 The Imperfective Paradox.- 3.2 Truth Conditions Relative to Intervals, not Moments.- 3.3 Revised Truth Conditions for BECOME.- 3.4 Truth Conditions for the Progressive.- 3.5 Motivating the Progressive Analysis Independently of Accomplishment Sentences.- 3.6 On the Notion of 'Likeness' Among Possible Worlds.- 3.7 Extending the Analysis to the Futurate Progressive.- 3.8 Another Look at the Vendler Classification in an Interval-Based Semantics.- Notes.- 4. Lexical Decomposition in Montague Grammar.- 4.1 Existing Lexical Decomposition in the PTQ Grammar.- 4.2 The General Form of Decomposition Translations: Lambda Abstraction vs. Predicate Raising.- 4.3 Morphologically Derived Causatives and Inchoatives.- 4.4 Prepositional Phrase Accomplishments.- 4.5 Accomplishments with Two Prepositional Phrases.- 4.6 Prepositional Phrase Adjuncts vs. Prepositional Phrase Complements.- 4.7 Factitive Constructions.- 4.8 Periphrastic Causatives.- 4.9 By-Phrases in Accomplishment Sentences.- 4.10 Causative Constructions in Other Languages.- Notes.- 5. Linguistic Evidence for the Two Strategies of LexicalDecomposition.- 5.1 Arguments that Constraints on Syntactic Rules Rule Out Impossible Lexical Items.- 5.2 Arguments that Familiar Transformations Also Apply Pre-Lexically.- 5.3 Pronominalization of Parts of Lexical Items.- 5.4 Scope Ambiguities with Almost.- 5.5 Scope Ambiguities with Adverbs: Have-Deletion Cases.- 5.6 Scope Ambiguities with Adverbs: Accomplishment Cases.- 5.7 Arguments from Re- and Reversative Un-.- 5.8 Accommodating the Adverb Scope Data in a PTQ Grammar.- 5.9 Overpredictions of the Generative Semantics Hypothesis.- 5.10 Concluding Evaluation.- Notes.- 6. The Syntax and Semantics of Word Formation: Lexical Rules.- 6.1 Montague's Program and Lexical Rules.- 6.2 A Lexical Component For a Montague Grammar.- 6.3 Lexical Rules and Morphology.- 6.4 Lexical Rules and Syntax.- 6.5 Examples of Lexical Rules.- 6.6 Problems for Research in the Pragmatics and in the Semantics of Word Formation.- Notes.- 7. The Syntax and Semantics of Tenses and Time Adverbials in English: An English Fragment.- 7.1 The Syncategorematic Nature of Tense-Time Adverbial Interaction.- 7.2 Rules for Main Tense Adverbials.- 7.3 Aspectual Adverbials: For an Hour and In an Hour.- 7.4 The Syntactic Structure of the Auxiliary.- 7.5 The Present Perfect.- 7.6 Negation.- 7.7 An English Fragment.- Notes.- 8. Intensions and Psychological Reality.- Notes.- References.