Formal semantics (natural language)

Formal semantics is an interdisciplinary field, often viewed as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy, while also incorporating work from computer science, mathematical logic, and cognitive psychology.

Others theories compute scope relations in the semantics itself, using formal tools such as type shifters, monads, and continuations.

However, modal components have been identified in the meanings of countless natural language expressions including counterfactuals, propositional attitudes, evidentials, habituals and generics.

[16][17][18] Formal semantics emerged as a major area of research in the early 1970s, with the pioneering work of the philosopher and logician Richard Montague.

In retrospect, Montague Grammar has been compared to a Rube Goldberg machine, but it was regarded as earth-shattering when first proposed, and many of its fundamental insights survive in the various semantic models which have superseded it.

Before Montague, many linguists had doubted that this was possible, and logicians of that era tended to view logic as a replacement for natural language rather than a tool for analyzing it.

While linguists wanted a restrictive theory that could only model phenomena that occur in human languages, Montague sought a flexible framework that characterized the concept of meaning at its most general.

[21] Formal semantics grew into a major subfield of linguistics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, due to the seminal work of Barbara Partee.

Early research in linguistic formal semantics used Partee's system to achieve a wealth of empirical and conceptual results.

The resulting framework is known as the Heim and Kratzer system, after the authors of the textbook Semantics in Generative Grammar which first codified and popularized it.

The Heim and Kratzer system differs from earlier approaches in that it incorporates a level of syntactic representation called logical form which undergoes semantic interpretation.

[22][21] However, work by others such as Gerald Gazdar proposed models of the syntax-semantics interface which stayed closer to Montague's, providing a system of interpretation in which denotations could be computed on the basis of surface structures.