Meaning and Partiality

by Reinhard Muskens

Overview

Muskens radically simplifies Montague Semantics and generalises the theory by basing it on a partial higher order logic resulting in a theory which combines important aspects of Montague Semantics and Situation Semantics. Richard Montague formulated the revolutionary insight that we can understand the concept of meaning in ordinary languages much in the same way as we understand the semantics of logical languages. Unfortunately, he formalised his idea in an unnecessarily complex way. The present work does away with unnecessary complexities, obtains a streamlined version of the theory, shows how partialising the theory automatically provides us with the most central concepts of Situation Semantics, and offers a simple logical treatment of propositional attitude verbs, perception verbs and proper names.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781881526803
Publisher:	Center for the Study of Language and Inf
Publication date:	06/01/1995
Series:	Center for the Study of Language and Information - Lecture Notes Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

Table of Contents

Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Two type logics; 3. The logic IL; 4. PTQ revisited; 5. Going Partial I: propositional logic and predicate logic; 6. Going Partial II: type theory; 7. Situations, persistence and weak consequence; 8. Propositional attitudes; 9. Names; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.