Semantics of Context-Free Fragments of Natural Languages

Abstract

The search for a rigorous and explicit semantics of any significant portion of a natural language is now intensive and far-flung — far-flung in the sense that wide varieties of approaches are being taken. Yet almost everyone agrees that at the present time the semantics of natural languages are less satisfactorily formulated than the grammars, even though a complete grammar for any significant fragment of natural language is yet to be written.

This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation under grant NSFGJ-443X. I am indebted to Pentti Kanerva for help in the computer analysis and organization of the data presented in Section 4. and I am indebted to Elizabeth Gammon for several useful ideas in connection with the analysis in Section 4. D. M. Gabbay and George Huff have made a number of penetrating comments on Section 3, and Richard Montague trenchantly criticized an unsatisfactory preliminary version.