There is no opposition between Formal and Cognitive Semantics

Formal semantics and pragmatics as they have developed since the late 1960's have been shaped by fruitful inter-disciplinary collaboration among linguists, philosophers, and lo-gicians, among others, and in turn have had noticeable effects on developments in syntax, philosophy of language, computational linguistics, and cognitive science. In this paper I describe the environment in which formal semantics was born and took root, highlighting the differences in ways of thinking about natural language semantics in linguistics and in philosophy and logic. With Montague as a central but not solo player in the story, I reflect on crucial developments in the 1960's and 70's in linguistics and philosophy, and the growth of formal semantics and formal pragmatics from there. I discuss innovations, key players, and leading ideas that shaped the development of formal semantics and its relation to syntax, to prag-matics, and to the philosophy of language in its early years, and some central aspects of its early impact on those fields.

Journal of Indian Philosophy, 2007

This paper does not deal with the topic of 'the generosity of artificial languages from an Asian or a comparative perspective'. Rather, it is concerned with a particular case taken from a development in the Western tradition, when in the wake of the rise of formal logic at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century people in philosophy and later in linguistics started to use formal languages in the study of the semantics of natural languages. This undertaking rests on certain philosophical assumptions and instantiates a particular methodology, that we want to examine critically. However, that in itself is still too broad a topic for a single paper, so we will focus on a particular aspect, viz., the distinction between grammatical form and logical form and the crucial role it plays in how the relationship between natural languages and formal languages is understood in this tradition. We will uncover two basic assumptions that underlie the standard view on the distinction between grammatical form and logical form, and discuss how they have contributed to the shaping of a particular methodology and a particular view on the status of semantics as a discipline. But before we turn to the topic at hand, a few more words on the general nature of the investigation are in order. Its general aim is to find out how semantics constructs its object, i.e., we are interested in what semanticists view as the proper object of study, how they think this object can best be approached, and how they view the relations between their own undertaking and neighbouring disciplines that deal with related, or even the same kind of phenomena, such as cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology. The background assumption is that, much like in other disciplines, semantics, too, does not have its object of investigation cut out for itself by nature, but constructs it in a complex process that involves empirical elements ('facts' being already too dangerous a term), philosophical assumptions, and borrowings *

Computer Standards & Interfaces, 1989

Most language definitions strike compromises be-DK 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark tween these goals, and it may be that no single Charles RATTRAY document can adequately address all audiences. Because informal methods are inadequate, re

Proceedings of the 1987 workshop on Theoretical issues in natural language processing -

There is semantics and, on the other hand, there is seraan~ics. And then there is the theory of meaning or content. I shall speak of pure mathematical semantics and real semantics. I have very little idea what "formal" means in "formal semantics"-unless it simply means semantics done rigorously and systematically. 1 I have even less idea what is meant by "commonsense semantics". I shall not speak much of the theory of meaning. The distinction between these two modes of semantics, the mathematical and the real, is not meant to be a hard and fast distinction-nor, most assuredly, is it intended to be rigorous or systematic. As I see it, the distinction has primarily to do with purposes or goals, derivatively, with constraints on the tools or conceptual resources considered available to realize those goals. In particular, real semantics is simply pure mathematical semantics with certain goals in mind and thus operating under certain additional constraints. Another way to put the point: some work in pure mathematical semantics is in fact a contribution to real semantics; however, it does not have to be such to make a genuine contribution to pure mathematical semantics. 2 Hence, since real semantics can be executed with the same degree of rigor and systematicity as must all of pure mathematical semantics, it should be. Have I made myself clear? Not entirely, perhaps. Let's try a more systematic approach. Pure mathematical semantics is either a part of or an application of mathematical logic. Real semantics, even though an application of mathematical logic, is a part of the theory of meaning or content. Contributions to real semantics had better cast some light on naturally occurring phenomena within the purview of a theory of meaning-on such properties and relations as truth analyticity, necessity, implication. Traditionally (indeed, until Montague, almost undeviatingly) the techniques of pure mathematical semantics were deployed for formal or artificial languages. But this by itself is of no importance. These languages were invented, and are of interest only because, or insofar as, they are plausible and illuminating models, in the intuitive sense, of real phenomena in thought and in informal language. Consequently, the nature of the languages studied need not make an essential difference. 3 What does make a difference is the purpose 1This is mildly disingenuous; talk of "formal semantics" is usually grounded in one or another idea of "logical (or, more generally syntactic) form". But one should beware the overly eager application of such notions to the semantics of natural languages. 20f course, problems pursued for purely technical, mathematical reasons often turn out to be related to important questions and issues in real semantics. 3Indeed, the two examples I shall consider concern the semantics of formal languages.

One of the most important courses in the linguistics curriculum is an introduction to semantics for advanced undergraduate and/or beginning graduate students. The highly technical nature of this material, the intricacy of the theoretical issues involved, and the relevance for the students’ further studies and future academic careers make it extremely desirable to have a good textbook for this course. There are a number of options for an introduction to formal semantics (Cann 1993, Chierchia and McConnel-Ginet 1990, de Swart 1998, Heim and Kratzer 1998) and at least one to mentalist semantics in the Cognitive Grammar framework (Ungerer and Schmidt 1996), and Cruse 1986 is the authoritative source on traditional lexical semantics viewed from a contemporary theoretical perspective. But many linguistics programs offer introductory semantics courses designed to cover major topics in lexical semantics and some amount of compositional semantics for students who may go on to specialize in either formal or mentalist approaches, or in studies of other fields in linguistics in which they have to be able to apply methods of mentalist or formalist semantics.

SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 2006

The basic intention of this article is to show how the cognitive semantics inherits its ancestry from the Cartesian foundation. The emergence of the cognitive semantics is envisaged here as an integral part of the knowledge evolution, in terms of shifts, which ultimately determines the ...

Predicative Forms in …

In this paper, we describe our general approach to computational lexical semantics, very brie y, focusing on the dynamics of semantics, and in particular of events. We i n vestigate what semantic information should be encoded in a lexicon entry so that i t c o n tributes best to the construction of a Text Meaning Representation (TMR) and to the generation of a text from the TMR. Within this approach, lexical items constitute the building blocks of the sentences of a text. We are interested in showing that static knowledge sources can bechanged dynamically, to t the linguistic context, at processing time if we h a ve t h e mechanisms to enable such changes. Moreover, our experience shows that determining the meaning of lexical items is not a trivial task in lexicon acquisition, and as humans still play a crucial role in lexicon acquisition, this problem must beaddressed head on. We show that it is possible to reconcile the subjectivity o f a c q uirers with the recognition of the \core" meaning of a word, if we develop a theory of computational (lexical) semantics which c a n account for some of the combinatory and productive principles of natural languages. 2 EVELYNE VIEGAS, KAVI MAHESH, SERGEI NIRENBURG tude to the static knowledge bases (the lexicon, the ontology, the grammar, the special \microtheory" rules) is almost strictly functional: the knowledge which i s a cquired is, from the outset, intended for use to help extract and represent m e a n i ng given a text or realizing a text given its meaning.