Type-Logical Semantics

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online (2011)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Type-logical semantics studies linguistic meaning with the help of the theory of types. The latter originated with Russell as an answer to the paradoxes, but has the additional virtue that it is very close to ordinary language. In fact, type theory is so much more similar to language than predicate logic is, that adopting it as a vehicle of representation can overcome the mismatches between grammatical form and predicate logical form that were observed by Frege and Russell. The grammatical forms of ordinary language sentences consequently may be taken to be much less misleading than logicians in the first half of the 20th century often thought them to be. This was realized by Richard Montague, who used the theory of types to translate fragments of ordinary language into a logical language. Semantics is commonly divided into lexical semantics, which studies the meaning of words, and compositional semantics, which studies the way in which complex phrases obtain a meaning from their constituents. The strength of type-logical semantics lies with the latter, but type-logical theories can be combined with many competing hypotheses about lexical meaning, provided these hypotheses are expressed using the language of type theory.

Links

PhilArchive

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Towards a type-theoretical account of lexical semantics.Christian Bassac, Bruno Mery & Christian Retoré - 2010 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 19 (2):229-245.
Davidson's Semantics and Computational Understanding of Language.Damjan Bojadžiev - 1989 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 36 (1):133-139.
Davidson on Convention.Dunja Jutronić-Tihomirović - 1989 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 36 (1):121-132.
Type-logical semantics.Bob Carpenter - 1997 - Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Formal semantics in modern type theories with coercive subtyping.Zhaohui Luo - 2012 - Linguistics and Philosophy 35 (6):491-513.
Formal Semantics: Origins, Issues, Early Impact.Barbara H. Partee - 2010 - The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 6 (1).
An Expressive First-Order Logic with Flexible Typing for Natural Language Semantics.Chris Fox & Shalom Lappin - 2004 - Logic Journal of the Interest Group in Pure and Applied Logics 12 (2):135--168.
Syntax and semantics: an overview.Arnim von Stechow - 2012 - In Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning. De Gruyter Mouton.

Analytics

Added to PP
2011-03-03

Downloads
825 (#16,538)

6 months
171 (#14,391)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Reinhard Muskens
University of Amsterdam

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Knowledge and belief.Jaakko Hintikka - 1962 - Ithaca, N.Y.,: Cornell University Press.
On Denoting.Bertrand Russell - 1905 - Mind 14 (56):479-493.
On Denoting.Bertrand Russell - 2005 - Mind 114 (456):873 - 887.
General semantics.David K. Lewis - 1970 - Synthese 22 (1-2):18--67.

View all 26 references / Add more references