MONTAGUE GRAMMAR AND THE LEXICAL DECOMPOSITION OF CAUSATIVE VERBS

Abstract

This chapter discusses Montague grammar and the lexical decomposition of causative verbs. The theories of the syntax and semantics of natural language proposed by Montague and like-minded logicians share two important methodological premises with the school of American linguistics known as generative semantics: (1) no serious theory of the syntax of a natural language can be constructed apart from a semantic theory of that language, and (2) the analysis of the semantics of natural language is best approached through the existing theoretical framework of mathematical logic. The grammar of PTQ (Proper Treatment of Quantification) provides for the specification of the set of well-formed sentences of a fragment of English, the specification of the set of well-formed formulas of a certain artificial language, a procedure for mapping sentences of English onto formulas of the artificial language, and a model-theoretic interpretation of the formulas of the artificial language. In actuality, it is as yet quite unclear that all the words of a natural language or all natural languages will yield themselves to exhaustive decomposition into expressions formed out of some small set of semantic primitives.