Abstract
In this chapter, we illustrate the basic functioning of Richard Montague’s model-theoretic approach to natural language meaning by exemplifying it on a small set of expressions of English including proper names, intransitive verbs, and the declarative sentence that can be constructed from them. We provide a simple compositional account of the interpretation of these grammatical categories and use it to illustrate the mechanism of functional application, that is core to Montague’s theory.
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Fiorin, G., Delfitto, D. (2020). Meaning and Functions. In: Beyond Meaning: A Journey Across Language, Perception and Experience. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46317-5_7
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