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WORD MEANING and MONTAGUE GRAMMAR Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy WORD MEANING AND MONTAGUE GRAMMAR Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy Volume 7 Managing Editors: GENNARO CHIERCHIA, Cornell University PAULINE JACOBSON, Brown University FRANCIS J. PELLETIER, University o/Rochester Editorial Board: JOHAN VAN BENTHEM, University ofAmsterdam GREGORY N. CARLSON, University of Rochester DAVID DOWTY, Ohio State University, Columbus GERALD GAZDAR, University 0/ Sussex, Brighton IRENE HElM, M.LT., Cambridge EWAN KLEIN, University 0/Edinburgh BILL LADUSAW, University 0/ California at Santa Cruz TERRENCE PARSONS, University o/California, Irvine The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume. DA VID R. DOWTY WORD MEANING AND MONTAGUE GRAMMAR The Semantics of Verbs and Times in Generative Semantics and in Montague's PTQ Kluwer Academic Publishers Dordrecht / Boston / London Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Dowty, David R Word meaning and Montague grammar. (Synthese language library; v. 7) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Semantics. 2. Montague grammar. 3. Generative grammar. 4. English language-Grammar, Generative. I. Title. II. Series. P325.5.G45D6 415 79-19332 ISBN-I 3: CJ78-'X"r2T7-lroJ-3 e-ISBN-I3: CJ78-94-IDJ-9473-7 001: 1O.1007B78-94-IDJ-9473-7 Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Kluwer Academic Publishers incorporates the publishing programmes of D. Reidel, Martinus Nijhoff, Dr W. Junk and MTP Press. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands. First published 1979 Reprinted with new preface 1991 Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved Copyright © 1979 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland © 199:1 Kluwer Academic Publishers No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. FOREWORD The most general goal of this book is to propose and illustrate a program of research in word semantics that combines some of the methodology and results in linguistic semantics, primarily that of the generative semantics school, with the rigorously formalized syntactic and semantic framework for the analysis of natural languages developed by Richard Montague and his associates, a framework in which truth and denotation with respect to a model are taken as the fundamental semantic notions. I hope to show, both from the linguist's and the philosopher's point of view, not only why this synthesis can be undertaken but also why it will be useful to pursue it. On the one hand, the linguists' decompositions of word meanings into more primitive parts are by themselves inherently incomplete, in that they deal only in distinctions in meaning without providing an account of what mean­ ings really are. Not only can these analyses be made complete by a model­ theoretic semantics, but also such an account of these analyses renders them more exact and more readily testable than they could ever be otherwise. On the other hand, I have tried to dispel the misconception widely held by philosophers that all the interesting and important problems of natural language semantics have to do with so-called logical words and with compo­ sitional semantics rather than with word-semantics, as well as with the more basic misconception that it is possible even to separate these two kinds of problems. Cases are explored where the compositional semantics of tenses and time adverbials is so completely intertwined with the semantics of verbs as to preclude an analysis of the former without treating the latter as well. The best way in which to advocate a program of research is to provide a concrete illustration of how it can be carried out. Thus a more specific but equally important goal of this book is to present analyses, carried out within this framework, of a set of iflterrelated problems centering around the semantics of the so-called "Aristotelian" verb classification (in Zeno Vendler's terminology, the distinctions among states, activities, accomplish­ ments and achievements) and the grammatical constructions which provide the diagnostic tests that have been used to delimit these classes in English. A third goal of this book is to shed further light on the traditional contro­ versy in transformational grammar over the question of how the semantic vi FOREWORD interpretation of a sentence is best correlated with its syntactic structure, in particular, the way the analysis of word meaning relates to this problem. Here I think a number of issues that remained cloudy in the inconclusive debate on this topic in the late 1960's and early 1970's can be brought clearly into focus by the very powerful yet explicit framework presented in Montague's 'Universal Grammar' (Montague, 1970b), of which the ITQ grammar (Le., 'The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English', Montague, 1973) is the best known example. Chapter 1 introduces the "Universal Grammar" theory and shows how several linguistic theories which differ from one another in the "division of labor" between syntax and semantics can all be seen as special instances of that theoretical framework. This allows the issues connected with the three goals mentioned above to be stated more clearly and concretely, and it prepares the way for their investigation in what follows. In Chapter 2 the "Aristotelian" verb classification (which I will refer to as an aspectual classification of verbs) is approached from two standpoints simultaneously: first, from the linguist's methodology of seeking out minimal semantic distinctions which manifest themselves repeatedly, if in subtle ways, in the syntactic and lexical patterns of the language itself, and second, from the logician's methodology of constructing for a formalized language defi­ nitions of truth and entailment with respect to a model that match our intuitions about the corresponding English sentences. Because generative semantics offers the most highly structured version of decomposition analysis, I adopt it here, but it will become apparent that the results of this chapter are equally compatible with other ways of relating word meaning to surface structure besides the generative semantics theory. My concern with this verb classification problem over the years has con­ vinced me that no account of these distinctions in verbs can ever be deemed satisfactory unless it also leads to an explanation of just why the syntactic and semantic diagnostic tests which isolate these classes behave as they do. I believe that all previous treatments of this problem (including my own) are fatally defective in this way. The remaining chapters, therefore, examine the syntax and semantics of English constructions in which the consequences of distinctions in verb class can be observed, providing at the same time an illustration of how research in word semantics and syntax must interact extensively in a compositonal theory such as Montague's. Chapter 3 concerns the progressive tense, which is crucially involved in distinguishing among several types of verbs. The English progressive, like the similar phenomenon of imperfective aspect in other languages, provides FOREWORD vii the greatest challenge to Anthony Kenny's thesis (which I adopt) that accomplishments are partly defined by the changes of state with which they terminate. Moreover, the analysis of the progressive leads to the major inno­ vation of taking truth relative to an interval of time (rather than a moment of time) as the basic semantic definition, and this in turn leads to a new view of the verb classification. Chapter 4 shows how the semantic analyses of Chapters two and three can be correlated explicitly in the PTQ theory with the variety of surface syntactic patterns of English that manifest each verb class, e.g. single verbs, verbs whose obligatory complements are prepositional phrases, adjectives or nouns, and the important problem of how an optional modifier of a verb can convert a verb phrase from one aspectual class to another. Chapter 5 is concerned with linguistic evidence pertaining to the generative semantics claim that decomposed lexical structures are best regarded as underlying syntactic structures of English (rather than simply as aspects of semantic interpretation). Interactions of word meaning with the scope of adverbials and quantifiers (which, incidentally, provide a strong semantic motivation for decomposition) are used to argue that the method of relating syntax to meaning offered by PTQ is superior to both generative semantics and Katz' interpretive semantics in certain ways. As one of the prime manifestations of distinctions in aspectual class in English is in processes of word formation (e.g. the intransitive achievement awaken is leXically derived from the stative adjective awake, and the transitive accomplishment verb awaken is further derived from intransitive awaken), I have included as Chapter 6 a theory of lexical rules for Montague Grammar. As the proper relationship between lexical and syntactic rules has been a difficult and controversial problem in linguistic theory, I believe this chapter is essential if important data such as the relation between awake, transitive awaken and intransitive awaken is to be seen in proper perspective. Chapter 7 introduces syntactic and semantic rules for English tenses, auxiliary verbs (modals, perfective have and progressive be), time adverbials (yesterday, since Thursday, etc.) and "aspectual adverbials" such as for an hour and in an hour. As no fully formalized treatment of many of these problems has appeared, this chapter may be of interest quite independently of the matter of lexical semantics. These analyses are presented in an English fragment that includes lexical rules and a lexicon (words treated in this book and their translations) as well as the usual syntactic and semantic rules.
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