SOME TRANSFORMATIONAL EXTENSIONS OF MONTAGUE GRAMMAR

Abstract

This chapter discusses some transformational extensions of Montague grammar. Montague's claim, as represented in the title of one of his papers, English as a Formal Language, is that English can be treated in a natural way within the logical tradition in syntax and semantics. It is held that an essential part of the semantic interpretation of any sentence is a specification, given in a metalanguage antecedently understood, of the conditions under which the given sentence is true. Thus, an essential part of semantics is the construction of a theory of truth for a language. The mechanism for doing this involves syntax in a fundamental way: a set of recursive syntactic rules are given defining the set of wffs (well-formed formulas), starting with the smallest, primitive elements and specifying how units of various categories can be combined to form larger units. Then, the task of the semantics is to assign interpretations to the smallest units and then to give rules that determine the interpretation of larger units on the basis of the interpretation of their parts. A key feature of this approach is that the part-whole analysis should be the same in the syntax and the semantics; the syntactic analysis should build up larger units from just those parts on the basis of which the meaning of the larger unit can be determined.