Some Transformational Extensions of Montague Grammar

Abstract

Richard Montague’s work on English, as represented in Montague (1970a), (1970b), (1972), represents the first systematic attempt to apply the logician’s methods of formal syntax and semantics to natural language. With few exceptions,¹ linguists and logicians had previously been agreed, although for different reasons, that the apparatus developed by logicians for treating the syntax and semantics of artificially constructed formal languages, while obviously fruitful within its restricted domain, was not in any direct way applicable to the analysis of natural languages. Logicians seem to have felt that natural languages were too unsystematic, too full of vagueness and ambiguity, to be amenable to their rigorous methods, or if susceptible to formal treatment, only at great cost.² Linguists, on the other hand, emphasize their own concern for psychological reality, and the logicians’ lack of it, in eschewing the logicians’ approach: linguists, at least those of the Chomskyan school, are searching for a characterization of the class of possible human languages, hoping to gain thereby some insight into the structure of the mind, and the formal languages constructed by logicians appear to depart radically from the structures common to actual natural languages.

This paper is a written version of a talk given in April, 1972, in the Linguistics and Semantics Workshop at the University of Western Ontario. A preliminary version was given in March at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a version was also given at a colloquium at UC San Diego. The first part of the paper, like the first part of the talks, is a condensation of a talk which I gave in various forms and places in the fall and winter 1971–72. A fuller treatment of the same subject can be found in my ‘Montague Grammar and Transformational Grammar’. My debts to others in this work are too numerous to list here, but I must at least mention Richmond Thomason, whose suggestions about the abstraction operator helped me get my first ideas about how to accommodate transformations in the Montague framework; Michael Bennett, whose continuing extensions of Montague’s work have fertilized and challenged my own; David Kaplan, who has given me constant encouragement and taught me a great deal about philosophy and logic; and of course Richard Montague and Noam Chomsky, without whom I wouldn’t have had a starting point. I am also grateful to all the students and other audiences who have given me helpful comments and criticisms, particularly the linguistics and philosophy students in my Montague seminar at UCLA, Winter-Spring, 1972.