Meaning and Partiality

This book radically simplifies Montague Semantics and gernalizes the theory by basing it on a partial higher order logic. The resulting theory is a synthesis of Montague Semantics and Situation Semantics. In the late sixties, Richard Montague developed the revolutionary idea that we can understand the concept of meaning in ordinary langiguages much in the same way as we understand the semantics of logical languages. Unfortunately, however, he formalized his idea in an unnecessarily complex way — two outstanding researchers in the field even compared his work to a ‘Rube Goldberg machine’. Muskens' work does away with such unnecessary complexities, obtains a streamlined version of the theory, shows how partialising the theory automatically provides us with the most central concepts of Situation Semantics, and offers a simple logical treatment of propositional attitude verbs, perception verbs and proper names.

Reinhard Muskens is an Associate Professor of Logic and Semantics in the Department of Linguistics at Tilburg University.

Contents

7/1/95