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Home , Barbara Partee, Intension, Intensional logic, Linguistic philosophy

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Introduction

! “” can mean many different things, since there are many ways to be interested in “”. One 20th century debate: how much common ground across , , and ? The History of ! Formal semantics, which says “much!”, has been shaped over the last 40+ years by fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration among linguists, Formal Semantics philosophers, and logicians. . ! In this talk I’ll reflect mainly on the development of formal semantics and to a lesser extent on formal in linguistics and philosophy starting in the 1960’s. Barbara H. Partee ! I’ll describe some of the innovations and “big ” that have shaped the MGU, May 14, 2011 development of formal semantics and its relation to and to (= Lecture 13, Formal Semantics Spec-kurs) pragmatics, and draw connections with foundational issues in linguistic theory, philosophy, and cognitive science.

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Introduction “Semantics” can mean many different things

! I’m not trained as a historian of linguistics (yet) or of philosophy; what I know best comes from my experience as a graduate student of Chomsky’s ! “Semantics” used to mean quite different things to linguists in syntax at M.I.T. (1961-65), then as a junior colleague of Montague’s at and philosophers, not surprisingly, since different fields have UCLA starting in 1965, and then, after his untimely death in 1971, as one different central concerns. of a number of linguists and philosophers working to bring Montague’s " Philosophers of have long been concerned with truth and semantics and Chomskyan syntax together, an effort that Chomsky , with logic, with how compositionality works, with how himself was deeply skeptical about. meanings are connected with objects of attitudes like belief, with the of philosophically important terms, with the ! But I’m trying to ‘become’ a bit of a historian: I’m starting work on a book nature and ontological status of “meanings”. on the history of formal semantics, going beyond what I know first-hand. I am still in the early stages of research and interviewing; I expect that the " Linguists at least since the Chomskian revolution have been concerned project will take several years. with human linguistic competence; what’s “in the head” of the speaker of a language, and how it’s acquired.

" And here I’m really only speaking of ‘’ and ‘formal linguistics’, two relatively compatible and ‘science-friendly’ schools of thought within those fields.

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“Semantics” can mean many different things, The principal sources of formal semantics cont’d

! Different research methodologies in different fields also lead Formal semantics has roots in to different research: several disciplines, most importantly logic, philosophy, and " influenced the use of “semantic features” in early linguistic linguistics. work. The most important figure in its " Field linguists and anthropologists have used componential analysis and structural methods to study kinship systems and other systematic history was undoubtedly Richard patterns, usually within the lexicon. Montague (1930-1971), whose seminal works in this area date " Psychologists experimentally study discrimination, concept from the late 1960's and the acquisition, emphasis on lexical level. beginning of the 1970’s. " Syntax has strongly influenced linguists’ notions of “”; ‘structure’ of meaning suggests ‘tree diagrams’ of some sort. (There were of course many other important contributors, as I’ll " Logicians build formal systems; axioms, model theoretic interpretation. mention.) ‘Structure’ suggests ‘inferential patterns’.

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The principal sources of formal semantics Semantics and : from before Syntactic Structures to the linguistic ‘wars’.

! The development of formal semantics over the past 40+ years has been a story of fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration among linguists, ! Before Syntactic Structures – philosophers, logicians, psychologists, and others, and by now formal " Starting from linguistics within philology (Europe) /anthropology (US), semantics can be pursued entirely within linguistics as well as in various adding a mathematics-influenced “science” perspective, linguistics interdisciplinary settings (cognitive science, informatics,...) emerged as a science. Part of the Chomskyan revolution was to view ! In the U.S. it’s mostly within linguistics departments now, but in parts of linguistics as a branch of psychology (cognitive science). th Europe (e.g. Amsterdam) it’s still strongly embedded in the of logic " Negative attitudes to semantics in American linguistics in the 20 and philosophy. century, probably influenced by (cf. behaviorism in

! But now let me back up and take a more historical perspective. Partly in psychology). Rather little semantics in early American linguistics. linguistics, partly in philosophy, and especially about how they’ve come Fieldwork tradition: start with , then phonology, then together. , then perhaps a little syntax … " Semantics in logic and : much progress, but relatively unknown to most linguists.

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Semantics and generative grammar: before Syntactic Semantics and generative grammar: before Syntactic Structures, cont’d. Structures, cont’d.

! 1954: Yehoshua Bar-Hillel wrote

an article in Language inviting ! 1955: Chomsky wrote a reply in Language arguing that the artificial cooperation between linguists and invented by logicians were too unlike natural languages for any logicians, arguing that advances methods the logicians had developed to have any chance of being useful in both fields would seem to make for developing linguistic theory. the time ripe for an attempt to combine forces to work on syntax ! Later note: Bar-Hillel in 1967 wrote to Montague, after receipt of one of and semantics together. Montague’s pragmatics papers: “It will doubtless be a considerable contribution to the field, though I remain perfectly convinced that without taking into account the recent achievements in theoretical linguistics, your contribution will remain one-sided.” I.e., Bar-Hillel hadn’t given up trying to get the logicians and linguists together …

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Syntactic Structures (Chomsky 1957) Syntactic Structures, cont’d.

! Paraphrasing: We don’t understand anything about ! Chomsky 1957: semantics, but deep structure ! Sometimes transformations change meaning: The following reveals semantically relevant structure that is obscured in active-passive pair have different meanings, with the first surface structure. having wider in each case: (2) a. Everyone in this room speaks two languages. ! Surface structure: b. Two languages are spoken by everyone in this room. (1) a. John is easy to please ! In later years, those judgments about (2) came to be questioned; some argued that (2b) is ambiguous, some ! Deep structure: argued that both are. No good methodologies for settling such (1) b. (for someone) to please debates. John is easy

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From Syntactic Structures to Aspects: Katz, Fodor, Postal From Syntactic Structures to Aspects: Katz, Fodor, Postal, cont’d.

! Katz and Fodor, early 60’s, ! So meaning depended on the entire transformational history. started working on adding a semantic component to “P-markers” (phrase structure) were extended to “T-markers”, generative grammar. to which semantic Projection rules applied. ! They were concerned with what ! Katz and Fodor’s of computing the meaning on the basis we call compositionality, which of the whole T-marker can be seen as aiming in the same they called the Projection Problem: how to get the meaning direction as Montague’s derivation trees. of a sentence from meanings of its parts. ! (3a) [The airplanes [will [fly ]]] (deep structure) ! At that time, “” and !T-NEG (3b) [The airplanes [will not [fly ]]] “Question Formation” were transformations of affirmative ! (4) T-marker for (3b) includes P-marker for its deep structure declaratives. They were prime (3a) plus a graph showing what transformations have been examples of meaning-changing applied in its derivation. transformations.

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From Syntactic Structures to Aspects: Katz, Fodor, Postal, cont’d. Philosophers’ reactions to linguists’ “semantic

! But their semantics was very primitive. Katz and representations” Fodor worked with “semantic features”, and their David Lewis (1970, p.1):

semantic representations were “bundles of features” ! “But we can know the Markerese – suitable at best for decompositions of one-place translation of an English sentence predicates. without knowing the first thing about the meaning of the English sentence: ! Quine (1970):“Logic chases truth up the tree of namely, the conditions under which it grammar”; Katz and Fodor’s position might be would be true. Semantics with no characterized: “Semantic projection rules chase treatment of truth conditions is not semantic features up the tree of grammar.” semantics.” ! “Translation into Markerese is at best ! What they were trying to capture had nothing to do a substitute for real semantics, relying with truth-conditions, but rather properties like either on our tacit competence (at , synonymy, anomaly, analyticity, some future date) as speakers of Markerese or on our ability to do real characterized in terms of ‘how many readings’ a semantics at least for the one sentence has, whether two sentences ‘share a language Markerese.” reading’, etc.

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Philosophers’ reactions to linguists’ “semantic From Syntactic Structures to Aspects: representations”, cont’d. Katz, Fodor, Postal, cont’d.

! But linguists did presuppose tacit competence in Markerese; they took it to ! In a theoretically important move, separable from the “Markerese” issue, be universal and innate, and many still do take that or some kind of and related to the problem of compositionality, Katz and Postal (1964) semantic representation language to be universal and innate (e.g. made the innovation of putting such morphemes as Neg and a Question Jackendoff; also Jerry Fodor). morpheme Q into the Deep Structure, as in (5), arguing that there was ! To philosophers and logicians doing formal semantics, the language of independent syntactic motivation for doing so, and then the meaning could Markerese looked empty, since it was uninterpreted. be determined on the basis of Deep Structure alone. ! To linguists, concern with truth looked puzzling. Linguists were trying to figure out mental representations that would underlie linguistic ! (5) a. [NEG [Mary [has [visited Moscow]]]] !T-NEG competence. “Actual truth” was (correctly) considered irrelevant, and truth [Mary [has not [visited Moscow]]] conditions were not really understood or appreciated.

! When the linguistic relevance of truth conditions finally penetrated (later), b. [Q [Mary [has [visited Moscow]]]] !T-Q the very nature of linguistic semantics changed – not just in terms of the [Has [Mary [visited Moscow]]] tools used, but also in the questions asked and the criteria of adequacy for semantic analyses.

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From Syntactic Structures to Aspects: From Syntactic Structures to Aspects: Katz, Fodor, Postal, cont’d. Katz, Fodor, Postal, cont’d.

! This led to a beautiful architecture. ! This big change in architecture rested on the claim that

! Deep Structure is the input to semantics. transformations should be meaning-preserving. ! Syntax maps Deep Structure to Surface Structure. ! It was an interesting and provocative claim, and even without any ‘real semantics’ at the foundation, it led to interesting ! Surface Structure is the input to phonology. debates about apparent counterexamples.

! ! And the architecture of the theory (syntax in the middle, mediating between semantics on one end and phonology on the other) was elegant and attractive.

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Garden of Eden period Garden of Eden period, cont’d.

! Chomsky’s thinking about semantics evolved from Syntactic ! The idea that meaning was determined at this “deep” level Structures (1957) to Aspects (1965). There he tentatively was undoubtedly part of the appeal of the notion of Deep accepted Katz and Postal’s hypothesis of a systematic Structure beyond linguistics (cf. Leonard Bernstein’s Norton connection between syntax and semantics at the level of Lectures, The Unanswered Question) and probably Deep Structure. contributed to the aura surrounding the notion of “language as ! During the brief period when Aspects held sway, there was a a window on the mind.” rosy optimism that the form of syntactic theory was more or ! So around 1965, there was very widespread optimism about less understood and we could start trying to figure out the the Katz-Postal hypothesis that semantic interpretation is “substantive universals”. determined by deep structure, and the syntax-semantics ! In that period, roughly the mid-60’s, before the linguistic wars interface was believed to be relatively straightforward (even broke out in full force, I think generative grammarians without having any really good ideas about the nature of generally believed the Katz and Postal hypothesis. semantics.)

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Expulsion from Garden of Eden and the roots of The linguistic wars the linguistic wars ! Two responses by linguists to the problematic relation between classic transformational derivations and semantics: ! What happened to upset that lovely view? Linguists discovered quantifiers! Transformations that preserved meaning (more or less) when applied to ! Generative semantics (Lakoff, Ross, McCawley, Postal, early Dowty, names clearly did not when applied to some quantifiers. Larry Horn, sometimes Bach): In order for deep structure to capture semantics, it needs to be deeper, more abstract, more like “logical ! “Equi-NP Deletion” form” (first-order-logic). The syntax seemed implausible to some (but rules " With names: John wants John to win ! John wants to win. like “Quantifier Lowering” were later reproduced “upside down” by the ! But with quantifiers, should we derive: “interpretivists”). But semantics was taken seriously, much more so than " Everyone wants everyone to win ! Everyone wants to win ?? by Chomsky.

" (We’ll return to this in discussing early MG & TG efforts.) ! Interpretive semantics (Jackendoff, Chomsky): Keep syntax beautiful and ‘independently motivated’. Different semantic modules may work at ! Similar problems for derivation of different levels. The semantics often seemed architecturally ad hoc, " Every candidate voted for himself though with many insights as well. " Every number is even or odd ! So with the battles of the late 60’s and early 70’s raging in linguistics, let’s turn to philosophy and logic.

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Antecedents to Montague’s work Antecedents to Montague’s work, cont’d.

! Leibniz (1646-1716) dreamed of a characteristica univeralis, based on an ! The greatest foundational figure for ars combinatoria, a system of symbolization that would have simple forms formal semantics is for simple , and unambiguous logical forms displaying the logical (1848-1925). His crucial ideas include structure of all complex expressions, together with a calculus ratiocinator, the idea that function-argument a complete system of deduction that would allow new knowledge to be structure is the key to semantic derived from old. Leibniz’s program aimed to encompass the three compositionality. relationships between language and reality, language and thought, and ! Example: for John is happy, the language and knowledge. is happy denotes the

! With the rise of mathematics in the 19th century, George Boole (1815-64) characteristic function of the of had an algebraic conception for a system governing the “Laws of happy entities; that function applies to Thought”, a kind of calculus ratiocinator independent from the vagaries of John to give ‘true’ or ‘false’, the natural language. (Boolean algebra turns out to have widespread () of the sentence. application to natural language semantics, whether Boole would like that ! ||Happy|| (||John||) = T (or F) or not.)

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Antecedents to Montague’s work, cont’d. Antecedents to Montague’s work, cont’d.

! Another of Frege’s great contributions was the logical structure of ! Russell (1872-1970) largely followed Frege, but to avoid paradox he quantified sentences. That was part of the design of a “concept- introduced logical types, and used them to impose restrictions on well- script” (Begriffschrift), a “logically perfect language” to satisfy Leibniz’s formed function-argument expressions. goals; he did not see himself as offering an analysis of natural language, but a tool to augment it, as the microscope augments the eye. ! Early Carnap (1891-1970) used the theory of types for the ‘logical ! Frege is also credited with the Principle of Compositionality: construction of the world’ and ‘the logical construction of language’. ! The Principle of Compositionality: The meaning of a complex ! Carnap was a founding member of the Vienna Circle, a group who sought expression is a function of the meanings of its parts and of the way they to unify the sciences within a common logico-linguistic framework based are syntactically combined. on ; their primary method was logical analysis, and one of their ! And Frege introduced the distinction between (Sinn targets was the elimination of ‘meaningless’ metaphysics. ‘Meaningful’ and Bedeutung), which later philosophers of language tried to formalize sentences should be either analytic – true by virtue of their meaning and adequately, e.g. as the distinction between and extension. logic – or knowable on the basis of experience – ‘verifiable.’ Frege’s own formalization was open to Russell’s paradox. ! (Quine admired Carnap greatly, but found a deep circularity in the notions of ‘analytic’ and ‘meaning’ and related notions.)

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Antecedents to Montague’s work, cont’d. The Ordinary Language – Formal Language war.

! Around the time of these advances, ! Later Carnap saw the need for previously excluded non-extensional language, and developed a semantic approach, where meaning = truth and perhaps in light of increasing conditions. (Quine, for one, distrusted all non-extensional language.) attention to pragmatics and the real use of real languages, a major war ! Carnap introduced possible worlds as state-descriptions, and analyzed began within philosophy of language, as functions from possible worlds to extensions. (His the “Ordinary Language” vs “Formal metalanguage remained extensional.) Language” war. ! Later still, Carnap recognized the importance of adding pragmatics to his ! Ordinary Language Philosophers: a theorizing, with issues of gaining and communicating knowledge: not new generation who rejected the everything important about language could be expressed with pure logical formal approach, and urged closer syntax and semantics. attention to the functions of ordinary ! Tarski (1902-1983) developed model theory based in set theory and with it language and its uses. Late made major advances in providing a semantics for logical languages, Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Strawson including a semantical of truth, still with an extensional (1919-2006). metalanguage.

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The Ordinary Language – Formal Language war. The Ordinary Language – Formal Language war.

! Strawson ‘On referring’ (1950): ! Russell, ‘Mr. Strawson on referring’ (1957): ! “The actual unique reference ! “I may say, to begin with, that I am made, if any, is a matter of the totally unable to see any validity particular use in the particular whatever in any of Mr. Strawson’s context; …” arguments.” …

! “Neither Aristotelian nor ! “I agree, however, with Mr. Russellian rules give the exact Strawson’s that ordinary language has no logic.” logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary ! Note!: both sides in this ‘war’ (and language has no exact logic.” Chomsky!) were in agreement that logical methods of formal language analysis did not apply to natural languages.

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The OL– FL war and responses to it Kanger, Kripke: Important Contributors to Possible Worlds Semantics

! In some respects, that war continues. But the interesting response of some formally oriented philosophers was to try to analyze ordinary language better, including its context-dependent features.

! The generation that included Prior, Bar-Hillel, Reichenbach, and Montague and his students, gradually became more optimistic about being able to formalize the crucial aspects of natural language.

! (1914-1969) made great progress on the analysis of tense, one central source of context-dependence in natural languages, which had been omitted from earlier logical languages.

! Montague, a student of Tarski’s, was an important contributor to these developments. His Higher Order Typed unified tense logic and (extending Prior’s work) and more generally unified "formal pragmatics" with intensional logic.

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Montague’s work Montague’s work, cont’d.

! ! Montague unified Carnap’s work and Kripke and Kanger’s; he In ‘Pragmatics and Intensional Logic’, Montague distinguished treated both worlds and times as components of "indices”, between ‘possible worlds’ and ‘possible contexts’, and applied and intensions as functions from indices (not just possible his logic to the analysis of a range of philosophically important worlds) to extensions. notions (like event, obligation); this was all before he started working directly on the analysis of natural language. ! Strategy of “add more indices” from Dana Scott’s “Advice on modal logic”. ! That work, like most of what had preceded it, still followed the tradition of not formalizing the relation between natural ! Montague also generalized the intensional notions of language constructions and their logico䇳semantic analyses or , , individual concept, etc., into a fully ‘reconstructions’: the philosopher䇳analyst served as a bilingual typed intensional logic, extending the work of Carnap speaker of both English and the formal language used for (1956), Church (1951), and Kaplan (1964), putting together analysis, and the goal was not to analyze natural language, the function䇳argument structure common to type theories but to develop a better formal language. since Russell with the treatment of intensions as functions to extensions.

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A note on the Kalish and Montague textbook. Notes from Nino Cocchiarella (RM’s student)

! The first edition of Kalish and Montague's logic textbook (1964, but drafted much ! (Cocchiarella, e-mail Dec 2010): [Montague’s] early work on pragmatics earlier) contains the following passage (p.10): and intensional logic had not yet [in the mid 60’s] affected [his] basic ! "In the realm of free translations, we countenance looseness...To remove philosophical view: namely, that all philosophical analyses can be carried this source of looseness would require systematic exploration of the English out within a definitional extension of set theory, which explains why in language, indeed of what might be called the 'logic of ordinary English', and “English as a Formal Language” Montague uses set theory to construct would be either extremely laborious or impossible. In any case, the authors the syntax and semantics of a fragment of English in a way that resembles of the present book would not find it rewarding." (p.10) the construction of the syntax and semantics of a first-order modal ! On page 10 of the 2nd ed., 1980, the passage is altered: predicate calculus. ! "In the realm of free translations, … would be extremely laborious or perhaps ! But Montague did not remain satisfied with set theory as a lingua impossible. In any case, we do not consider such an exploration appropriate material for the present book (however, see Montague [4 [Formal philosophica, nor with unprincipled ‘paraphrasing’ between natural Philosophy]] and Partee [1 [ed., ]]).” language and logical language, and in the end he proposed instead the construction of an intensional logic as a new theoretical framework within ! Thanks to Nick Drozd (p.c.) for alerting me to this quotation and its revision. which to carry out philosophical analyses. … ! So Montague’s attitude evidently underwent a change in the late 60’s. ! Once Montague moved on to an intensional logic we have a distinctive new tone about English and natural language in his papers … .

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Montague’s turn to “linguistic” work. Montague’s turn to “linguistic” work, cont’d.

! A new clue about Montague’s motivations: from an early talk version of ! The first result of Montague’s work on natural language was that "English as a Formal Language”, July 31, 1968, UBC, Vancouver: provocatively titled paper "English as a Formal Language" (Montague ! (I hope I’m deciphering RM’s shorthand right; I’m still working on it.) 1970b), which begins with the famous sentence, "I reject the contention

! “This talk is the result of 2 annoyances: that an important theoretical exists between formal and natural

" The distinction some philosophers, esp. in England, draw between “formal” and languages.” “informal” languages; ! As noted by Bach (1989), the term "theoretical" here must be understood " The great sound and fury that nowadays issues from MIT [i.e. Chomsky and his from a logician's perspective and not from a linguist's. associates] about a “mathematical linguistics” or “the new grammar” -- a clamor not, to the best of my knowledge, accompanied by commensurate ! What Montague was denying was the logicians' and philosophers' accomplishments. common belief that natural languages were too messy to be formalizable; ! I therefore sat down one day and proceeded to do something that I previously what he was proposing, here and in his “Universal Grammar”, was a regarded, and continue to regard, as both rather easy and not very important -- framework for describing syntax and semantics and the relation between that is, to analyze ordinary language*. I shall, of course, present only a small them that he considered compatible with existing practice for formal fragment of English, but I think a rather revealing one.” languages and an improvement on existing practice for the description of ! *Montague’s inserted note: Other creditable work: Traditional grammar, natural language. Ajdukiewicz, Bohnert and Backer, JAW Kamp.

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Montague’s turn to “linguistic” work, cont’d. Montague’s work, cont’d.

! The Fregean principle of compositionality was central to Montague’s ! Details of Montague’s own analyses of the semantics of theory and remains central in formal semantics. English have in many cases been superseded, but in overall ! The Principle of Compositionality: The meaning of a complex impact, PTQ was as profound for semantics as Chomsky’s expression is a function of the meanings of its parts and of the way they Syntactic Structures was for syntax. are syntactically combined. ! (1989) summed up their cumulative innovations ! Montague’s syntax-semantic interface: Syntax is an algebra of ‘forms’, thus: Chomsky’s Thesis was that English can be described as semantics is an algebra of ‘meanings’, and there must be a homomorphism mapping the syntactic algebra into the semantic algebra. a formal system; Montague's Thesis was that English can be Compositionality is the homomorphism requirement. described as an interpreted formal system.

! The nature of the elements of both the syntactic and the semantic algebras is left open; what is constrained by compositionality is the relation of the semantics to the syntax.

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Montague’s work, cont’d. Montague’s work, cont’d.

! Truth䇳conditions and entailment relations are basic. ! As Cresswell showed, many decisions about semantic

! These are minimal data that have to be accounted for to analysis, both in general architecture and in particular reach “observational adequacy”. That principle, inherited from instances, can be seen to follow from that principle. the traditions of logic and model theory, is at the heart of ! It may be hard to remember or realize how surprising and Montague's semantics and is one of the defining principles of controversial an idea it was to linguists in the early 1970’s to formal semantics. think about truth conditions rather than just ambiguity,

! Cresswell (1978) put this in the form of his "Most Certain semantic anomaly, and synonymy. Principle": we may not know what meanings are, but we know that if two sentences are such that we can imagine a situation in which one of them is true and the other false, then they do not have the same meaning.

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Montague’s work, cont’d. Joint work by linguists and philosophers: Montague Grammar and the development of formal semantics ! Montague did not work single䇳handedly or in a vacuum; his papers include acknowledgements to suggestions from David ! Montague was doing his work on natural language at the height of the Lewis, David Kaplan, Dana Scott, , Alonzo "linguistic wars" between generative and interpretive semantics, though Church, Terence Parsons, , Dan Gallin, the Montague and the semanticists in linguistics had no awareness of one author, and others. another.

! And there were of course other important early contributors to ! PTQ (Montague 1973) gave recursive of well-formed the development of formal semantics as well. Let me expressions and of their interpretations, illustrating what Bach christened 䇳 䇳 䇳 emphasize that I can’t strive for completeness here; see my the "rule by rule" approach to syntax semantics correspondence. That was quite different from both generative and interpretive semantics, which past papers relating to the history of the field. And with the looked for some “level” or “levels” of syntactic description to interpret. help of many colleagues, I aim to increase coverage in my (That approach can also be seen in the role played by “LF” in later planned book project. Chomskyan theories. Perhaps somewhat less so in Minimalism.)

! Back to the story …

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Linguistic-philosophy interactions – east and west Linguistic-philosophy interactions – a vignette

! 1967-69 -- Davidson and Harman both at Princeton, intensely interacting, both optimistic about potential fruitfulness of linguistics-philosophy ! Spring 1970 - There was a small conference of linguists and philosophers at UCLA in 1970, memorable in part because it was moved to the basement of a church interactions. Optimistic about generative semantics. Influenced each after Reagan closed the University of California in the wake of protests over the other’s work; and together they produced some exciting conferences and bombing of Cambodia. I don’t have a list of who-all was there, but I know it influential edited collections – more on those below. included Montague, Julius Moravcsik, George and Robin Lakoff, Bruce Vermazen, ! David Lewis and Montague both at UCLA then, also interacting; David Lauri Karttunen, Bob Wall, and Jack Vickers; and the students attending included introduced me to Montague and I first sat in on a seminar of Montague’s at Michael Bennett and Larry Horn. UCLA (with David and Frank Heny) in 1968. I had a lot of dumb questions ! That was the time when I intervened in an argument between Lakoff and at the beginning, and David was the one I could ask them to; he always Montague about whether it was crazy to derive prenominal adjectives from relative answered patiently and well. clauses or crazy not to, explaining to each of them where the other’s position was coming from, and during the coffee break got the closest to a compliment I ever ! 1968 – circulation of first version of Terry Parsons’ “A Semantics for got from Montague – “Barbara, I think that you are the only linguist who it is not the English” case that I can’t talk to.”

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Linguistic-philosophy interactions, cont’d. One more bit of timeline

! Fall 1970 – the Moravcsik, Hintikka and Suppes conference at Stanford at ! Spring 1973 – Formal Semantics conference organized by Ed Keenan at which Montague presented PTQ. (Volume published in 1973.) Cambridge University – the first international conference on formal semantics. Included papers by David Lewis, , R.D. Hull, ! When “part 2” was held a few months later, in December, we were all to make comments on as many of the other participants’ papers as we Altham & Tennant, John Lyons, Pieter Seuren, Östen Dahl, Colin Biggs, wished. I decided to put all my efforts into commenting on Montague’s Hans Kamp, Renate Bartsch, Carl Heidrich, Arnim von Stechow, Timothy paper. Potts, George Lakoff, Stephen Isard, Petr Sgall, Theo Vennemann, Yorick Wilks, Joe Emonds, Maurice Gross, Ed Keenan, Haj Ross, and a few ! I commented on Montague’s syntax, comparing it with transformational others. Collection Formal Semantics of Natural Language published in grammar. I recall David Kaplan saying that by listening ‘inversely’, he was 1975. [The term ‘formal semantics’ (new then?) soon gained ground able to understand something about how transformational grammars among like-minded semanticists who weren’t all strictly Montagovian, worked. And Montague didn’t to my description of what he was Keenan being a prime example.] doing – that was reassuring. ! 1974: Publication of Montague’s Formal Philosophy, edited and with ! March 7, 1971 – Montague’s death extended introduction by Rich Thomason. That introduction was one of the earliest pedagogical pieces that helped people understand Montague’s work.

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Joint work by linguists and philosophers, cont’d. Joint work by linguists and philosophers, cont’d.

! Let me describe an obstacle I faced when I started trying to put MG and TG together, whose solution is related to a leading idea that came into ! The earliest introduction of Montague's work to linguists came linguistics from philosophy and logic in this period, namely the (Fregean) via Partee (papers starting in 1973) and Thomason (who idea that recursion must be done on open sentences.

published Montague’s collected works with a long introductory ! Obstacle: what to do about deletion rules? In classical TG, (13a) was chapter in 1974). derived from something like (13b) by “Equi-NP Deletion”. ! Partee and Thomason argued that Montague's work might (13) a. Mary was eager to win. allow the syntactic structures generated to be relatively b. [S Mary was eager for [S Mary to win]] conservative ("syntactically motivated") and with relatively minimal departure from direct generation of surface structure, ! But given the principle of compositionality, and given the way MG works while offering a principled way to address many of the by building up the meanings of constituents from the meanings of their semantic concerns that motivated some of the best work in subconstituents, there is nothing that could correspond to “deleting” a piece of a meaning of an already composed subpart. generative semantics.

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Joint work by linguists and philosophers, cont’d. Joint work by linguists and philosophers, cont’d.

! Recall the consequences of the analysis in (13b) for a sentence like (14a). ! Thanks to Paul Postal (p.c.) for reminding me that Jim McCawley was one The presumed deep structure (14b) would clearly give the wrong meaning. of the first linguists to appreciate the importance of doing recursion on (14) a. Everyone was eager to win. open sentences, at least as early as (McCawley 1968). b. [ everyone was eager for [ everyone Tns win]] S S ! The syntax and semantics of logical languages had been done that way ! MG-TG resolution suggested in (Partee 1973, 1975): what we want as since Frege – that’s crucial to the semantics of quantified sentences and “underlying” subject in the embedded sentence is a bindable variable; I all of variable-. followed Montague’s line and bound it by lambda abstraction to make a ! Trying to do recursion on closed sentences was what made VP type. (Others kept an S type for the infinitive, with the variable bound transformational rules cast in terms of “identical NPs” break down when by the higher quantifier.) quantifiers were discovered. Expulsion from the Garden … (15) a. [[ to win ]] = "!x [ win (x)] ! In Chomskyan syntax, a corresponding change was eventually made, b. alternatively: everyone’( !x[ x was eager for [x to win]]) replacing the “identical NP” by the special null element PRO, interpreted ! That solution is one illustration of the importance of the Fregean principle as a bound variable. Other syntactic theories, like GPSG, HPSG, and that wherever quantifiers may be involved, recursion must be allowed to LFG, and modern versions of , were developed after work on open sentences. the quantifier issues had become well known, so they were designed from the start not to run into those problems.

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The influence of formal semantics Reactions to formal semantics among syntacticians.

! A methodological principle implicit in TG, explicit in some (not all) versions ! Chomsky’s skepticism that included the Katz-Postal hypothesis, and carried to extremes in ! It turned out that Chomsky was deeply skeptical of formal semantics and of the Generative Semantics, was the principle that sameness of meaning idea of compositionality in any form. should be reflected in sameness of deep structure. ! I have never been able to satisfactorily explain his skepticism; it has seemed to me ! But with a “real semantics”, we don’t need sameness at any syntactic that it was partly a reaction to a perceived attack on the autonomy of syntax, even level, including “LF”, to capture sameness of meaning (cf. Thomason though syntax is descriptively autonomous in Montague grammar. 1976). [This point remains controversial.] ! But syntax is not “explanatorily autonomous” in Montague grammar, or in any formal semantics, and I do not see any rational basis for believing that it should be. ! Oversimplifying hugely, but certainly true for many of us: this ended the linguistic wars. Eventually formal semantics became mainstream ! Maybe also because of puzzles about the nature of our knowledge of semantics semantics in linguistics. (raised in my 1979 “Semantics: mathematics or psychology?”). ! In any case, formal semantics spread and became “mainstream semantics” in the ! A later divergence within formal semantics with respect to syntax- US and Europe in spite of Chomsky’s skepticism, and MIT hired its first formal semantics architecture: semanticist, , in 1989, and its second, Kai von Fintel, in 1994, and ! (i) Non-transformational grammars, generally aiming for something close quickly became one of the leading programs in formal semantics as well as syntax. to direct (surface) compositionality.

! (ii) LF as a level of syntax in later Chomskyan approaches; the mapping to LF resembles upside-down Generative Semantics.

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Formal semantics as an autonomous subdiscipline of Formal semantics as an autonomous subdiscipline of linguistics, and other later developments. linguistics, and other later developments, cont’d.

! The height of initial interaction on semantics between linguists and philosophers had passed by 1980, followed by the rise of cognitive ! By the beginning of the 1990’s, formal semantics was a fully science, including semantics as an interdisciplinary concern, and then by a established field within linguistics, and students were not greater specialization of semantics inside of linguistics proper, though conscious that the core fields hadn’t always been ‘phonology, always with many individual scholars maintaining links of various kinds syntax, semantics’. within and across the disciplines.

! Many (not all, of course) important developments in the 80’s were by ! In the 1980’s, there was less interaction between linguists and linguists – too many to list here – also beginnings of semantic typology, philosophers in the U.S., in part because interest in the formal pragmatics, … philosophy of language had declined as interest in philosophy ! By the middle of the 1980’s the increasing recognition of formal semantics of mind increased. as part of the core curriculum in linguistics was seen in the publication of textbooks and the growing number of departments with more than one ! But since the 1990’s, it’s on the rise again; one center has semanticist, and a few, like ours, with more than two by the end of the been MIT, where linguists and philosophers take courses with decade; by now quite a few have several. Stalnaker, Heim, and von Fintel. ! Many linguists now are syntax-and-semantics specialists.

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Later developments and current outlook Selected

! Divergence between Europe and the US in the 1990’s: The ILLC was founded in Fuller references can be found in several papers, versions of which are Amsterdam in late 1980’s, with journal JOLLI and the ESSLLI summer schools: downloadable from my site, http://people.umass.edu/partee/ . equal weight on language, logic, and computation.

! In the US, the journal Natural Language Semantics was launched in 1992 by Heim ! Partee, Barbara H. 1996. The development of formal semantics in and Kratzer, to integrate formal semantics more closely into linguistic theory, and linguistic theory. In The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, ed. to connect semantics with syntactic theory, unlike the older Linguistics and Shalom Lappin, 11-38. Oxford: Blackwell. Philosophy. And Heim and Kratzer 1998 is a fully post-Montague textbook in ! Partee, Barbara H. with Herman L.W. Hendriks. 1997. Montague formal semantics (with not enough model theory). grammar. In Handbook of Logic and Language, eds. Johan van Benthem ! But there’s less separation now than ten or fifteen years ago. and , 5-91. Amsterdam/Cambridge, MA: Elsevier/MIT ! Lakoff and other “Cognitive Linguists”: formal semanticists don’t work on metaphor, Press. therefore formal semantics is inadequate for dealing with metaphor, and deals only with ‘easy’ parts of natural language. ! Partee, Barbara H. 2005. Reflections of a formal semanticist as of Feb 2005. http://people.umass.edu/partee/docs/BHP_Essay_Feb05.pdf ! I don’t believe that formal semantics will ever account for ‘all of meaning’. But we’re getting better at solving problems, and there is progress on semantic issues ! See also related presentations: 2009 Oslo video here; 2009 slides from in language typology, language history, , pragmatics and RichFest (RT’s 70th birthday festival). , computational linguistic applications, … . There’s lots of exciting work going on, and lots more still to do!

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