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Current issues in formal semantics
Journal of Pragmatics 4 (198,0) 477-489 © North~Holland Publishing Company
REVIEW ARTICLE,
CURRENT ISSUES IN FORMAL SEMANTI,CS *
P E T R SGALL
The main ~dm of this raper is to point out that ever~ a very subtle and sophisticated logical analysis of nat~aral language may not he fully adequale if it is based directly on surface phenomena of a single languag,e. "lhe cooperation between ling, fistics and logic has already achieved a point at which an empirically based general linguistic d~scription of deep structure (or of the linguistic structuring of meaning) can, and should, se:,ve as the starting point for the study of the relationship between the structure of natural language which has developed spontaneously without any ~:oncentrated effort, and logical systems which have been constructed as systematically as scientific efforts have allowed.
The book under r:;view illustrates the p resmt situation in algebraic linguistics, where the interest in applying formal methods to lin[;uistic phenomena has been transferred from syntax (primarily) to semantics [ I ] , and where many new insights, contained in apprt~aches to intensicnal semaafic analyses such as formulated by Montague, Lewis, Scott, CresswelI, a~td others are now being applied to the semantic~ of individual natural language:~, T i e author of the presen~L contributior: belongs to those linguists who realiT.e the usefulness of a formal analysis of natura! language, and thus recognizes intensic, nal lo~c as a necessary tool in a theoretical description of semanti¢:s. On the othe~ hand, it seems to me that the pres~mt division o f tasks [2] into a "semantic an~Iysis ot certain locutions" ... "on :' r,~'lativel!f
* A review article of the book by Fran:~ Guethr~er and Christina Rohrer (ed:~.), Studies in formal semantics (Intensionality0 temporality, negation). North Ho!land Linguistics Series 3'~, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 19/8. viii + 265 pp. Dfl. 62.50. Requests for reprints may be sent to ]Pe/~ Sgall, Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Malostransk~ n. 25, I 1800 Prague I, Czechoslovakia. ~] "O1¢ term 'semantics' is used in this article in its usual linguistic sense, vtz including some pragmatical issues; ~e e.g. Sgall (1977). [2] This ~ o n :is ~ t l y characterized by th¢~ two editors of the book m~der review in their concise andpregnantlntroduction, p. 7f, 477
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abstract level", and some future approach relating these analyses (examples of which are provided by the papers included in the book under review) "to the syntactic analysis of the natural language which contains these locutions" quite unnecessarily postpones the real connection of logical and linguistic explorations of the field of meaning to future millennia. 1 would lik~ to exemp!ffy in the sequel that the work that has already been done in the specification of language meaning (as opposed to cognitive content or factual knowledge) should preferably be exploited and encouraged. Doing this, we may be able to avoid unnecessary detours and deadlocks connected with the elaboration of formal means for subsystems which are not designed adequately to "capture as closely as possible the 'logic' of the natural languages they were designed to represent" (as required in the Introduction to the book, p. 7). The present review article does nc: pretend to be a thorough appreciation of the Jogical tools used in the book's contributions. These studies are carried out at a high level, with respect both to the technical innovations they introdu,'e into the domain of intensional logic as applied in natural language semantics, and to the phenomena of cognitive content whose relationships they study in detail. Instead of giving a balanced evaluation of the individual contributions, 1 will concentrate here on aspects of more immediate importance to further research, more in particular such as wit] permit us to avoid the above-mentioned detours. The book is divided into three par,:s, the first of which -"lntensionality" consists of three studies. In the first of these, Mondadori gives what is much more tn,Tn an introductory survey of the bv si~: problem:; of the given domain and o! the main featuzes of the history ~f its research (including a thorough discussion of the reasons ~hy elementary extensional lo#c cannot serve as an adequate mean:~ of descripti,gn of natural language semantic:s). He shows that the necessary distinction [etween a theory, ot truth conditions and a theory of communication or under. slanding reflects a not-to-be-ignored arrtbiguity of the term 'determination'; when ~sserting that ~he intension of expressions i~lus the possible world "determines'" :heir extension, the verb 'deternflne' is not to be understood in its algorithmic (con-. ':t~uctive) sense (cf p. 27f.). Mondadon also contributes to the understanding of ~att~ral kind terries, discussing Putnam's approach, and concluding (p. 3:7) that the ~nter~sion of such ~ term consists in a constant function taking each possible world rote a natural kind (a species), which can be represented by means of a function ",aking each possible ~¢orld into a set of objects (the set of tigers,etc.); thus in the ~erminology of modal semantics, an "essential property" can be treated as a value ~)f such a constant function. HGwever, it is not ,quite clear to this reviewer to what extent Mondadorrs claim that he co~:tributes to the e~;tension of possible world ~emamics to natural language~ actually is justified. It is lrue thac he pays attention lo proper nouns and natur,~l ad terms, contrib,ating to the er.largement of the set ~f iingtdst.~c phenomena that have aheady obtained a plausible treatment within :~g~c. From another point of view, however, mu~:h of the development of logic can be characterized as su~eha progressive nlargement of the studied set of phenomena,
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and it 3eems that Mondadori is not directly interested in an investigation of the relationships of modern logic to the structure of natural language as such. In a similar vein, Guenthner opens his paper on intensional logic and the sematttics of natural language by claiming that "semantic descriptions of natural languages should not simply consist in the reco:Jrse, to already formulated logical systems ... and in the constn:ction of.,. translation algorithms from a natural language to a formal one" and that " t h e use of tbrmal s?,,stems in s'.emantic description must in turn become syntacticaJJy and praf~naticaLg 'revealing' ". Immediately afterwards, however, he also admits that in his paper he will "leave aside this aspect of the explanatory role of formal semantics" (p. 41). He compares various intensional logics and investigates their merits with respec: to the possible representations of intensional locutions in natural languages. He du~y states that no logical system, sv far, has acquired first rights to the status of "tae representing system" in linguisti~ analysis, and he notes that although extension~d predicate logic i:s not rich enough to account for oblique contexts, "the meta-hmfi'aages for intensional systems are just as extensional as those for extensional ol:e~," (p. 47). Among other qualifications of different approaches to inteasional lo[,it:, the author points out that Montague "complicates the representation of normaz predicates i.n an unnecessary way", going too far in his elaboration of quantification over individual concepts (p. 61). He also shows (pp. 6 2 - 6 4 ) how Cresswell's solution of the treatment of noun phrases can be refin~d. Besides throwing ligl~t on various aspects of logical discussion:~ that are relevant for linguistic analysis, Guenthner points out how the sys~Lem of modal logic developed by Aqvist and himself can bz interpreted in Montaguian intensional logic, thus at the same time providing a possible answer to Hintikka's objections against Montague's approach. On the other hand, Guenthner (as is the case with other contributors tc the book under review, as well as with most other logici,ans) only occasionally tot=c,hes upon questions related to a systematic account of the relationship between la~lguage structure and logical systems. A linguistic exploration of his remarks is made difficult, a~ most of them are not self-contained wi~h regard to the use of formal devices; fu~rthermore, Guenthner is not interested ha any kind of linguistic patterning, such as that into parts of speech, sentence parts, or deep cases. Also, the distinction between 'intension' and 'sense', which is necessary if one takes a proposition (o1~ a function from possible worlds into truth values) te be the intension of a sentence (as acknowledged in writings on logic all the way from Carnap's Meaning and Necessity to authors such as Kutschera or Schnelle) comes out so~newh~t unclear in tl~e author's discussion on Frege ( p 45) [3]. Bressan':L paper concerns a model system and its applications. As such, it reFresents an ~,~nlarged summary of his book A Genel'al Modal Interpreted C~lcuht.~,
[!3I For aJ~ analysis of this notion by means of specifying a linguistic counterpart of Catnap's ~ntensionalisomorphism, see Sgallet al. (1977).
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but he also includes an account of hew to translate his modal language into an extensional language; this is, without dtmbt, of great importance for the basic questions of logical semantics. His system is strong enough to handle many intricate distinctions in the content of modal verbs - c f . e~g. his illustrations on p. 107 if., where file case of "Socrates can run whil,~ , o t running", as well as the truth of "It is n e c e ~ r f l y the case that the president of the U.S. is a citizen of the U.S." vs. the falsity of "The president of the U.S. has the property of being necessarily a citizen of the U~q.", are treated in such a way as to offer new solutions to puzzles which have been discussed at length by other philosophers. An investigation of such questions as where to find the boundary between vagueness and ambiguity in modal expressions of natural languages (in other words, What criteria can serve to determine their meanings) is left open for further discussion: Bress~l certainly has provided a new and firmer starting point for such an investigation. The second part of the book is headed by Hoe.pelman's study of activity verb~. Working in a Montaguian framework, the author uses Vendler's classification of action verbs. Here, he pays more attention than many others to the questions of nat~ral language, though he, too, connects his logical analysis immediately with the surface patterning of English, and does not pay explicit attention to general lin~ guistics (as his footnote 6 shows, he realizes, to a certain extent, the risk connected with such simplified handling of the complex phenomena of natural language). The criteria Hoepelman uses for the classification of verb'~ are not p~resented in a sufficiently systematic way, hence, i~! is not fully clear in what sense the terms 'perfectire', 'impeffective', 'momentaneous', or 'stative' are used. ,~Jso, in flds connection one would have expected at least a programmatic attempt to explore the relatively rich and clearly grammatically structured systems of velbal aspect in the Slavonic languages [4]. Even though one finds the assertion that "a:complishments are perfecfive" (p. 155), it still seems that their lexical equivalent.,: are primarily imperfect~ve. at least in languages with full aspec! systems (as an example, e f Engl. to kick ~'~. Czech kopat). As for the author's remark about again (p. 156), it is the division of the sentence rote topic and focus that is respo:asib!e for the different semantic (and intonational!) variants of "Joha paints ~.he wall again". Simil~rly, the author's remarks on the Present Perfect show that he is not familiar with the literature on topic and focus [5]. Thus, he doe,~;no~ realize that, although "JcAu,~ Smith has written a number of short stories ~ (p. 151) leads (the hearer) "to the assumption, that the subject [4] Accoz~mgto Vend~er's characteri:cations, which are briefiy ,,:ummanzedon p. 122, one would expect the class of verbs of 'states' to correspond first of a/,~to those Slavontc verbs that iack the perfectice forms, while the class of activity verbs would correspond to those cases in the Shvor~ Languages, where the perfective (complex) meaning of a ~terb is entailed by a (token ~f the) c:~nrespondingsentence containh~gits impeffective co~mterpart. Thu~, if one was ringing a bell o~ kissing a gi~l, one certaild],, ~ang it or kissed her, re~pec~ively,but ff one was ~ a lette~ yesterday, tile letter may still not have been written to-~ight. |51 See, e,g. SgaUetal, (1973); more rt;cently Sgail and Haji~ov~i(1977).
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of the sentence exists", this is not so if the subject does not belong to the ~opic o f the sentence (of McCawley's well known examples and their variants, such ae. "EINSTEIN has visited Princeton", which is :lwore or less equivalerA with "Princeton has been visited by Einstein", where the capitals denote a marked position of the intonation centre before the end of the senl:ence) [6]. Also, Hoepelman's statements concerning lJ~e possibility of specifying the result of an activity verb, which then "behaw,'s like an accompiistLment" [7], and those on the "hammer-flat construction" (p. 148L) remain rather unclear. The non-existence of such sentences as "John closed the door clean" does not, in my opil~on, entitle one to claim that a combination of a verb slJLchas to close with this constrnction is excluded by the grammar of English. (It is aot possible, as far as the 'actual world' is concerned, to clean a door just by closin~ it; but e.g. "He closed the door flat" might be accepted at least by some spea~.,~rs of English, and other, similar cases might be t~und.) Though his linguistic premises thus may call for further discussion, Hoepelman's logical analysis of the given set of verbal meanings undoubtedly deserves attention within the inw~stigation of the semantics of natural language. A linguist who is not too experienced in studying formal syst~;ms of intensional logic may find the author's approach useful (p. 155f.). However, the uncertainties pointed out above are reflected h.~re, too; e.g. to consider the~ 'imperfectiveness' of a verbal form to be responsible for the lack of an expression ~)f "the acquisition of a result" would imply that not only the Engli,,'& sentence "I just was getting the result then", but also its equivalents in Latin ( c f the qmperfec~Ltm de conatu'), in Czech, etc. would ha-e to be regarded as ungrammatical, axt asstmiption that plainly runs counter to the facts. The refined intensional formalism presented by Hoepelmm~ represents in some respects an improvement on Montague's techniques (for a system of sets of possible denotations, see p. 158f.; for the treatment of proper nouns, p. 159f.; furthermore, c f p. 16If.; 15If.); and a thorough study of his formal description is worthwhile, though troublesome. Verb aspects are also investigated by Aqvist and Guenthner. Within the framework of tense logic they look at the phases of events (as belonging to the layer of cognitive content) rather than at a broadly understood category of verbal aspect. [6] A more adequate treatment of the given property of ,'he Present Perfect can h~ found in Guenthner (1977: esp. 90). [7 ] Why should the whole classification then be regarde0 as a cl~Lssificationof verbs (lexicai units), ff it is perhaps more a matter of asp,~'ct (grammatical category)? The main poit~t of the classification obviously lies in the fact that some verbs (in some or all of their tenses) are combined primarily with this aspect or that; buL it does not seem effective to start with such a classification cf verbs, before one has a thorough analysis of aspects for the language investigated. Such an approach does not seem more reasonable than, e4:. to speak about classes of nouns illustrated by (a) table, rabbit, (b) mYk, flour, (c) scissors, etc. without having an idea of the distinction between the singular and the ~,lural on the (surface) morphemic level and on the level of meanings (or deep structures).
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Though they bmag many ~tluable new insights within tense logic, it i~ ~aot fuUy clear that their enterpri~ is directly relevant to the study of verbal asFec~!as a lin. guistic category (as they claim on p. i 69). Rather, I would say that (a~; the differ. ence between Hoepelman's approach and llheirs ~tlteady points up) their empirical motivation as ye~ has not been sufficiently integrated to yield a reliab,~e basis for constructing complex formal systems, without possibly including dn~Lwbacks that wot:Id be difficult to get rid of afterwards. Certainly, the motivationL is ultimv.tely Wen by natural language. However, when the authors (as iz u:~u~damong logicians nowadays) take the cognitive content as the starting point fol the formu• .! 9!1 lation of a system, and then only look for "natural languag-~ rendennl;.~s of their operators and other symbols (p. 174), it may be suspected that their st;~rting point ha~ not been a sciemific :malysis of the object language, but rather, thirst they have chosen their issues in a partly impressionistic way. The authors seem to be convinced that the relationships they analyze are structured by grammatical patterns of natural lan~'~age (or should we say of English? or of a certain group of languages?), h~tt they do ant I;re~nt g-noort far their pcmwi~tlrm in c:r~In'a r~¢ th~ !.'up 'tO n a~. rather diverse) linguistic accounts of aspect. In sec~io~ 5 : t} 8 of their contribution, Aqvist and Guenthner attempt an investigation of various constructions in ordinary English. It is rather asto~ishi~ag that they do not seem to realize that many of the constructions they treat are considered to be ambiguous in linguistics (or at least that it should be discus:~ed ~hether ambiguity or vagueness of meaning is at stake in the gis,en case). Thus, :r~otordy do w, often use the present tense for future or past actions but also, the i?resent Perfec~ has ar~ot:a~zr relationship to the po/n.t of speech in "I have lived in Vancouver f~Jr ~en yeats and I am happy here" than it has in "I have already b~;en 'io Vanc,.,aver a couple of times". An ~mportant advantage of Aqvist and Guenthner's contr:ibution coasist'.~ in the an',dysis of th,r relevant part of the layer of cognitive conten~ as such (in Part 11, pp. lgSffj. A theory of events is outlined, using ~ system of propositional tense logic ~bai enriches ~:heapproach started by Prior with new operators, which may ~c,:ount for events takiir~g place uninterruptedly throughout intervals of time as we]~las for those conaect,::d with fixed moments, and also for a 'state-of-affairs' being n:tore (or less) true at or:re moment "than at another. Though their form~tlism (in Part I of their paper) ba~es i~self or, a motiv.~tion not always fully substan'tiated linguistic~tily, in Part 11 the cla:~ses of events a~e studied rather independently of the (surface;) proper~ies of Engli~a. He~e, their study provides a serious contribution towarcis ,;stablishing a sc,unc: basis for a sy~e~natic izvestigation of the relationship between logica~ s~ruclu~.res of cognition an~, !araguage structure. To a certxin extent, this relationship is handled :in the concluc~ing part of the paper, too; wt'dle the logical analysis and the classification of even,:s are again connected with cer:tain English lc,cutions, the ling e~g. betwee~ ,~y its being ;the case and "beginning and fm~;shing" seems not to be motivated in a Fersua~ive enough way. Instead of pic~ang cut individual con, structions of ;~ natur;d language, C,e authors, in their study of the rel~tionship
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between cognitive structures and nat)lral language, would have been be~ter off letting the latter be represented by an adequate account of lingui.~tic meaning, deep structure, or teetogrammatic,% whatever term one might choose. In the next contribution Aqvist, Guenthner, and Rohrer investigate the semantics of some temporal conjunctions in English, using the logical apparatus established in the preceding paper, with definitions added to characterize the conjunctions studied. Here, too, the.re are immediate connections of English surface forms with logical structures, accompanied by a rather unsubstantiated hope that general linguistics might help to vaotivate even those definitions that do. not fully reflect the properties of English (see esp. p. 203 bottom, and also p. 208). However, the logical analysis contained m the paper is based on a systematic empirical investigation of *.he given phenomena as presented by Hein/im~iki, and the authors are well aware not only of the ambiguity of linguistic expressions (cf the caveats p. 2020, but also of the complex!,ty el' the patterns of various aspects of meaning. They point oui the need for fi~rther empirical investigations of these patterns before an ,,ue,~u,,t~ :,,,,:,at system for ,~t :t: u¢.,~:zxpuun can be constructed. Even so, a mole thorough linguistic basi.s (as well as a more critical attitude to Reichenbach's approach, and an explicit rendering of the distinction between "absolute" and "relative" tense [8], would have permitted a more complete account. This should then also have included e.g. the ambiguity of the Pluperfect (used either to express a result of a previous action in the past, e,r (in indirect discourse) an event anterior to another past event), so that not only pairs consisting of a mare clause and ils direct modif[zation would have been taken into account. Fur~ermore, the treaument of the counterfactual before (p. 220f.) seems to leave some questions open for further discussion. Taking the semantic relevance of the topic/focus articulation into account, one rr,light find that, e.g., "Before he saw his g~andchildren, Max died" is not a well-formed sentence on the preferred re~ding (wiff, normal intonation), which means lhat the temporal c~use cannot be included in the topic here. The possibility of inferring that "Max saw his grandchildren" might perhaps depend on such a condition; the two uses of before could then perhzvs be reduced to certain features given by the ~exieal environment and the topieFocus articulation. Most valuable for filrther research in linguistic semantics-, are the authors' analyses of the relatior,.~ip of when to as iong as and to while (p. 2 i2),, although it is not quite .obvious whether the distinction between, the different counterparts of when in the, loglc:d structures (p. 211) is of truly linguistic relevance. Also, the account of countability of "true in to" (p. 216) represents an important enrichment of the semantic th,;ories of tetnporal constructions. Mondadoli's p~.~per on the Perfect Furore, which closes the second part of the book under review, also restricts itself (ar.,d qaite reasonably so) to some of the meanings of English constructions with migh ~ have (p. 224 f.). As for the lin-
[8] See Haji6ov~ e~ aL (19'70).
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guisl~c aspects of the given question, ~he present reviewer is not awar,~ that it may be "generally claimed and believed and expected" that might have is a "past (perfect) tense" of might. But it does not come as a smpr/,se that a might have statemertt is indexed to an event to which might itself is indexed (qf. p, 223). Since might has always been characterized in linguistics as a modal verb, serving only secondarily ~Lsa tense auxiliary, it is quite natural to assume thaL e.g., might have come shares the tense characteristics of have come on one reading, wMle the other (the 'future' or 'posterior' one) should be compar~.'d with wouki' have come. Accordit~g t,3 Mondadori's discussion on p. 224t"., mighl~ itself has 1:we temporal indices, i and/, such that in the interval i it is true that it will be po,.;sible for the ,~vent to occur at the (later) interval/. Wh~e it co~ld not be expected that the difficult question of the. relationship ,~etween the impact of tense and that of modality in the meaning ot! this construction was going to be dealt with completely (cf p. 233 on the remaining uncertaint.y), yet many insightfu~ solutions are presented (see, first of -all, pp. 235-240, where ~ m e of the crucial examples are analyzed). Since Mondadori does not systematically distinguish between diflerent units of language meaning, stated on the basi~ of og~rational criteria ensuring the presence of disdnctions ~elewmt for th~ pa~terrts of the given language [9], it may be doubted whether" his treatrnem accounts for every semantic distinction rdevant for English, and whether every distinction it accounts for really is relevant in English. l'a other words, it remains ~,o be investiga~.ed whether, first of all, Mondadori's di.,;tinction betw~.n a 'persisting' ,.~s. a 'non-persist~g' possibility (p. 245) should be understood as ;m instartce of an ~;~big~ity of an English construction, Gr of a vaguelaess of its sense (cf, footnote 3, abo~e). In the ~me way that we understand the sense of the Engli~ we to be ,~'~gue in that the set of persons ~t refers to is specified only with respect to the speak.e~ mid someone else to be included in it [10], so o~.aeof the meanings Ovnses) of m~g~t includes perhaps just the combination of the future aVLtithe possible, if there ~re no syntactic restrictions to make us distinguish whether in the #yen case the verb ~eans that is is po:~sibleat i that x will happen at/, or it will be possible at / taut x happens (where / is posterior t~ the point of speech). Ag!!:~,~,we s ~ how the snalysi:~ of natural lan~ttage phenomena brings inspiration and ne.w insights to logic, a~, It always has done, while an analysis of the indMdual phenomena in itself does not re~:~reseutan investigation of the structur~ ~f natural langmtge, £e. of the rela~ionshil~ between the structuring of the expression to that of the conten',. Part 'Ill of the book under review is devoted *o th,~, phenom,,'na of negation. It consisted; of a m~gte contribution by D.M. Gabbey and LM. Mora,i',:sik, who treat the [9] &s for the meanings of tense, a starting point for such an emi~Ldc~d analysis may be fouad g~',the p.~pcr quoted in footnote 8;.for an investfgation of the linj~uistic se1~,~antics of verbM , ~ l ~ l i t y , ~e Benegov~ (1972). [ I Of No CO~L~idetation o f statistical character :~hould ent¢~ a descript:ion of En~llish as for the q a e ~ , " ~ wheth¢~ th/s "someone else' inclu,~s the hearer, or |he speake1'~J wife, etc.
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issue; both in connection with set theoretical semaatics and with Chomskyan interprelive semantics. They correct!y point ,~ut that differences in stress are relevant for the interpretation of negative sentences, but do not infer from this that a full representation of a sentence should contain an identification of at least the position of t h e 'main stress' or intonation centre, so that e.g. "John didn't kill MARY" and "John didn't KILL Mary" woutd be treated as two different senten.~es. While distingt,,ishing between constituent and ,.;entente n~gation, they connect this distinction, too straiight-forwardly perhaps, with tl~e one between "it is not so that ..." and other types of negation; they duly remark: however, that in the former case, the negated elements need not make up a continuous syntactic unit (p. 253). To cap1:are the role of constituent negation, the authors state that "associated with each element that can be negated, there is a range of incompati~;les" (p. 256). Their formal treatment of constituent negation is based on two rules (p. 260), the first of which states that rite negated elements are "chosen by some such clues as intonation, stress etc."; the second rule then sp.~.cifies that "if nc. special emphasis or clue is given", in the ca~ of a two~!ement pl~rase having been chosen as belonging to the scope of ne~tion, it is the dependent element of a phr.~tse that is negqted. Since the authors do not use the terminology of dependency syntax, they have to enumera:e the diffe :ent cases (AdjP inside NF + AdjP, AdvP inside IVP + AdvP, etc.). Neg y (where y is an element of a basi~ category, v~. N, Adj, Adv, TV, IV, excluding quantifiers and connectives) i,.; then regarded as a variable ranging over the set of incompatibles of y; the semantics; of constituent negation is thus reduced to logically well analyzed domains (includiag the well-known interplay of negation with quantifiers and logical cc,nnectives). 'Fhe authors admit that their treatment, involving 'surface interpretatiola', is incomplete (p. 258) and they' regard the context dependency of the choice of 'incompatibles' as a limitation on formalizability (p. 256f.). However, taking not ordy Jackendoff's approach but a.lso other systematic empirical treatments of negation in connection with the phenomena of intonation, eontextuai boundness, free word order, constructions such a:~ cleft or passive, etc., into accomlt would certainly make it possible to use the set theoretical approach in a more effective way. This, in turn, would have led to a more integrated treatment ef negation, in which also that part of the impact ,3f context that belongs to the langual~e system would haw:~ found a place. As has been shown by Haji~ov~i(1973; cf. also Sgall et al. 1973; Sgall and Haji~ov~ 1977), three differe~at types of negation should be distinguished accerding to their different topic and focus positions. On the basi,~ of such an empirical starting point, many of the insights stated by Gabbay a~ad Moravcsik could be formulated more economically and in a more integrated ,~,ay. Thus, for instance, it n~ay be stated in a mtiform manner that the verb "in tnt~,normal case" is contexually bound (and belongs to the topic) in such sentences as 'q-le did not perform as well as he should" (c.t: p. 257 of the book under review), or '"He doesn't run quickly" (p, 255). Here, the verb is not include5 in the scope of the ne,~ation (wktct~ should be regarded as a more basic notion than that of presupposition),
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Sgall / Otrr¢nt ismeg ~nformal semantics: a review
although (contrary to what the authors r~y on p. 25,4) many negative sentences include adverbials outside the scope of neg~ition (stress being neutral), el. '~Here he d~ tn't LISTEN", "Last wee|: it did not R/tiN". Hov,~ver, cages such as "It did not ~¢,AIN "last week", when compared witch "It d~d not rain last WEEK", ~ o w that the notion of 'normal stress' itself is not too clear and that it has to be replaced by some more sophisticated device (sucl~ as, e.g. the no~ion of the intonation ce:ntre, following Chomsky). Other frameworks, such as Haji~ov~'s, allow us to account for cases Like ' H e did not come since hi~, wife was tLl", where a verb in the topic should be interpreted - on the prefi;n'ed reading --as the ;;ingle unit belonging to the ~¢ope of negation; in the logicv1 interpretatio~:t of this, sentence the predJicate itself is negated, in the san~e way as in so-called lexical negation (know, ignore, etc.) (~e Haji~ovd I975: 73f.). If the !ogicivns were to ;;tart thei~ ana'l.ysis at the point where empirical linguistic analysis ends, i.e. beginning with the semantic representations rather titan w i l t the 'raw' surface shape of sentences, Whose very choice and nature quite naturally lead to fo~nu|ation~ in the logicians' account that swarm with adverbs such as often, normally, pcr~i~ly, insufficiently, and ,..;o on a gr~;at deal of the misurtderstandings or..~ both s~des would disappear. I ~m thinking here of reproaches such as: not really speaking about semantics, or not understanOing the (necessity of) formalism used as the ]anguage of linguistic descriptiorts from th.~: one side, and: not really speaking about natural language as such, or working with a i~ypertrophic formal apparatus from ~he other. We thus come back again to one of Sgail et al. 's (I977) conclas:ions: the "outer" appearance of linguL~tic phenomena should not be immediately submitted to logical examination, since this external form first mu.~.t be :~tudied empirically i.n order to fred o~z~ where simple ~'~riation (on different levels) ends and where the types can be found, whose tokens are encountered in the 'raw material' [ 11 ]. Aa empirical linguistic ~ y s i ~ should discorer the Froperties of the 'deep' or ' s e m i t i c ' structure of naturat lanffcage, on a "disambiguated"" level. To attain this level is the goal ~,f IL~ti~tic analysis, though frown the logician.,;" viewpoint i* is no more than a basis i~r theix sc~nantic interpretations. The properties of this level should be discovered by weans of operationally testable criteria. A well-motivated descripti.oa of such a level is a prerequisite for any kincl of logic~d analysis of the semantics of natural l,nguage, whether it uses def'miti, ms (as it~ the case of Aqvist.. G~enthner and [ I 1] it is quit~, natural thai: even the surface shape of sentences is not always readered with the n~essary degree of precision in a logically oriented an~dysis (the phem~m~,naof stress ~md word /taler, ~ pa~'-~.ic~l~,~re often neglected). 13~.eneces£ty of such ~ linl;ui;;tic ~-~alysis preced~g logi-c~l e×plorafior~ would be more appa~:ent if there were more linguists effectively ¢rien~ed towards explicit descriptions md ff there had been more cooperation between l/nguists ~ d logic~ compa~.~g languat;~s of di1"fe~en~types (see the writingsof Kuno, Keenan, or Li). If genera~ linguistics were distin~aish~:d flora Eny)i~ studies in recent linguistics, just as it has been in the classical schoals, it wouht be e a ~ ! to persuad~ l~gicians that an ~tccount of this or ~" t clau ~f phenomena in English is '~ot their woper task.
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Rohrer, in the book under review), or some other kind of transl~tions of natural language locutions into the formal language o f logic. Any other treatment of the; individual phenomena:of natural language can be understood only as a preliminary account, which, as the authors of the Introduction remark on p. 7f., ultimately must be connected "in an empirically motivated and motivating way to the syn.. tactic analysis o f the: (given) natural language". If the level of linguis'tic meaning (of the tectogrammatics, to use Prague terminology) is taken as the basis of this connection, it will not be necessary to postpone this "important goal of lingnistic research" to some uncertain future era, and repetitive "restrictions" of the form "we understand the expression x, which we want to analyze, only in a meaning similar to y ..." (which do not seem to represent rciiable starting points for an analysis of meaning anyway) can be avoided. Meaning, taken a~ the linguistic counterpart of inten:~ional structure or sense (ra~ter than of intension, in Carnap's terms) will t h e n ' h a w to be distinguish,~d from the cognitive content (or from other langnage4nde~_ndent patte_rn_ings of fae.ta~al knowledge); similarly, ambiguity (the case of more than one meaning for a single expression) will have to be d.~stinguished from vaguene,,~ (where a unit of linguistic meaning is not fully specified as to hs content) [ 12]. As we have remarked, the book under revi,~w is a typical illustration o~fthe situation in contemporary linguistics. It contains many points that wi~flbe ve~T useful in empirical linguistic research, not to speak about its substantial contribution to the re~arch in intensional semantics. Linguists will certainly profit fro~l the guidel:ines giving them orientation in the domain of set-th~eoretical, modal, and intensional semantics, as well as from the analyses c,f the classes of linguistic p]henomena (be it tenses and aspects, conjunctions, or negation) that are treated here. However, the book also characterizes the drawbacks of the present trends and illustrates why the hopes for an important cooperation between logicians and linguists in semantic analyfis of natural language have n o t yet been fulfdled: there still is a lack of mutuai understanding among the two domains of ,,~c~ence, and the scholar who is proficient both in logic and linguistics is still rare. In the logicians' writings, much att*.ntion is paid to questions of formalism; however, the form~disms are often [12] Authors such as Hoepelman (this volume, p. 157) speak about th~ simple 1?ast of (English) perfective expressions as being ambiguous, in that e.g. "~ohn painted the wall b!ue" does not determine whether the wall is still blue or not at the time point of speech (which, with Trajan instead of John, could be a ~ouple of thousand ~'ears la~er than the point of e~e~L~).Here, one should ask whether there really axe two meanings at stake (as linguistic unit:, subs~:mtiated by the structure of English). If such a lh~guistiedistinction cannot be found, then :h,~ past t~nse cannot be considmed ambiguous, as in the case of the.' English plurals cats or rni~ ', ~rhieh do not have different: meanings according to the numl~r of the objec~:sreferred to l, ~epelr~an'~s rule for 'dimmbiguating' the Eng.lJsh past tense then would not'bc~ong to a de,trip ion of Englib.. His distinction betw~n the corresponding two syntactic tulles, Sr and Ss, appf~u'~J~to have no m e n t i o n ~ the stnl:tu~ of English; neither is his treatment of FI and Fj in *h~sol'ules too cleat to' me.
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presented in such a fragmentary way that the lingui:~t is un~::ble to understand them without weeks of studying not ,~nly the paper itse~i', but also other t e x t s n e c e s s ~ to decode its notation. One of the cau:;es of thv pr,.'sent lack of continuity in ~ e development of theo~etical linguistics is the fact that the formally oriented studies are so difficult to read. Since n~any students are not used to reading ~that much anyway, as a regdt they do not even know the clas,~cat works, which certainly canbe read without those e.xcessive efforts. This connects ~ith another drawback - most logicians do not pay attentic,n to more than one or two of the most d / a mode trends in con:emporary linguistics; ofte.n, their investigations are based on assumptions that a~n~ady have been ~efuted in other, not so well known linguistic writings. Thus, much c,f the effot~ cc,nnectedt with form.',lization may soon appear to have been in vain. On the o*~er hand, mo:;~ linguistic writings on semantics include no explicit descriptions, znd questions of methodology are c,ften neglected. Basic matters, such as oa w1"~atbasis mearting phenomena should be .:lescribed are left undiscussed; finguists should become aware that no other basis 'than that of Tarskian truth conditions has ew;r been proposed. The relevance of wlhat Bressa~a (p. 103ff.) calls "philo~ophical puzzles" to lingu:~sticdescriFtions is, un~i:~)rtunately, only rarely realized by linguists. And v~ews such :as the one that (if any) at most lexlcal semantics pertains to the domain ~f linguistic study (a view which a~::tuaUywould have been overcome at the late.~t d u ~ g the fc~-ties, if the developmen~i of linguistics as a field could have been regular a~d continuous), l~:avenot been fully abandoned even to-day. Tee book u,ader review contributes substantially to one of the mai," requirements lo~ the further" development of 'the science of language and communication; that of better mutual understanding. This domain par tiicularly sl~ould not he allowed to suffer from c,a~munic~tion ga~s such as the abo~:e, both between its own subfields, l~s vazioas trertds and r~eighboring disciplines, as well as across its generations of student~. Th,~r¢~fore, if one wants to contribute :to those iz~terdisciplinary investigations w~.~ichar~; so im~:,~rtant for *.he study of h~.tman language, the thing to do is: read the others, and ~ k e yourself readable for them~
References B v n ~ i , Eva. 19"~2 'On ~m~u~ticdescription of vezb~Jmodality'. In. Prague studies in mathematicaJ l i z ~ t i c s 4:191-214; tepr~mtedin: F~netional generative gramm~x in Prague (ed. by 'N. K~einand h~. ,t. Stechow). Kronbe ~g/Ts.: Scriptor, 1974. pp. 258-305. Craenthner, Fras~z. 1977. 'Remltks on the present perfect fit English'. In: C. Rohtcr, eq~LOn the logical analy~ c,f tense ~ d aspect. Ttibingen: Gunter Narr. pp. 83-93. 1 4 ~ v [ , Eva. 1973. ?~ation ~nd topic vs. comment. Phflologica~Pragensia 16: 81-93. Ha#~ov~i. Eva. 1975. ?tegaee a prempozice ve vyznamov~ stevb~ v~ty. [negation and pzesupp o s i ~ in the se:r~ntic structure of the sentence]. Ptaha: Academia. Ha.~i~.~val, Eva, Jarmi~ Panevo~ and Pe~ SgalL 1970. Reeu~sive properties of ten~ in Czech en~ E~,~lish. Prag~*, Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 13: 9-42. A slightly modified vet-
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sion can be found in: W. Klein and A. v. Stechow, eds. Functional generative grammar in l~ague. Kronberg/Ts: Scfiptor, 1974. pp. 187-235. Sgall, Pe~t, 1977. Sign meaning, cognitive cc~ntent, and pragrnatics. Journal of Pragmatics 1: 269-282. Sgall, Pett and Eva Haji~ov~i.1977. Focus on ~cus. Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 28: 5-54. Part II, Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 29:23-42 [1978]. Sgall, Pett, Eva Haji~ovfiand Eva Bene~'ow[. 1 ~,73. Topic, focus and generative semantics. Kronberg/Ts.: Scriptor. Sgall, Pert, Eva Haji~ov~ and Oldfich Proc~zka. 1977. On the role of linguistic semantics. Theoretical Linguistics 4: 31-59.
Petr Sgall (b. 1926) PhDr., DrSc., Charles University, Prague. Since 1950 teaching at Charles University, first in the Faculty of Philosophy. later in the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. From 1968 to 1972 Head of the Laboratory of Algebraic Linguistics, Charles University. 1972 to present: Research Worker, Centre of Numerical Mathematics, Charles University. Author of numerous books and articles in the domains of historical Indo-European linguistics, language theory, theoretical linguistics, generative description1, computational linguiLstics, and semantics. Main curr¢:nt research interest: ,~emantics.
REVIEW ARTICLE,
CURRENT ISSUES IN FORMAL SEMANTI,CS *
P E T R SGALL
The main ~dm of this raper is to point out that ever~ a very subtle and sophisticated logical analysis of nat~aral language may not he fully adequale if it is based directly on surface phenomena of a single languag,e. "lhe cooperation between ling, fistics and logic has already achieved a point at which an empirically based general linguistic d~scription of deep structure (or of the linguistic structuring of meaning) can, and should, se:,ve as the starting point for the study of the relationship between the structure of natural language which has developed spontaneously without any ~:oncentrated effort, and logical systems which have been constructed as systematically as scientific efforts have allowed.
The book under r:;view illustrates the p resmt situation in algebraic linguistics, where the interest in applying formal methods to lin[;uistic phenomena has been transferred from syntax (primarily) to semantics [ I ] , and where many new insights, contained in apprt~aches to intensicnal semaafic analyses such as formulated by Montague, Lewis, Scott, CresswelI, a~td others are now being applied to the semantic~ of individual natural language:~, T i e author of the presen~L contributior: belongs to those linguists who realiT.e the usefulness of a formal analysis of natura! language, and thus recognizes intensic, nal lo~c as a necessary tool in a theoretical description of semanti¢:s. On the othe~ hand, it seems to me that the pres~mt division o f tasks [2] into a "semantic an~Iysis ot certain locutions" ... "on :' r,~'lativel!f
* A review article of the book by Fran:~ Guethr~er and Christina Rohrer (ed:~.), Studies in formal semantics (Intensionality0 temporality, negation). North Ho!land Linguistics Series 3'~, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 19/8. viii + 265 pp. Dfl. 62.50. Requests for reprints may be sent to ]Pe/~ Sgall, Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Malostransk~ n. 25, I 1800 Prague I, Czechoslovakia. ~] "O1¢ term 'semantics' is used in this article in its usual linguistic sense, vtz including some pragmatical issues; ~e e.g. Sgall (1977). [2] This ~ o n :is ~ t l y characterized by th¢~ two editors of the book m~der review in their concise andpregnantlntroduction, p. 7f, 477
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abstract level", and some future approach relating these analyses (examples of which are provided by the papers included in the book under review) "to the syntactic analysis of the natural language which contains these locutions" quite unnecessarily postpones the real connection of logical and linguistic explorations of the field of meaning to future millennia. 1 would lik~ to exemp!ffy in the sequel that the work that has already been done in the specification of language meaning (as opposed to cognitive content or factual knowledge) should preferably be exploited and encouraged. Doing this, we may be able to avoid unnecessary detours and deadlocks connected with the elaboration of formal means for subsystems which are not designed adequately to "capture as closely as possible the 'logic' of the natural languages they were designed to represent" (as required in the Introduction to the book, p. 7). The present review article does nc: pretend to be a thorough appreciation of the Jogical tools used in the book's contributions. These studies are carried out at a high level, with respect both to the technical innovations they introdu,'e into the domain of intensional logic as applied in natural language semantics, and to the phenomena of cognitive content whose relationships they study in detail. Instead of giving a balanced evaluation of the individual contributions, 1 will concentrate here on aspects of more immediate importance to further research, more in particular such as wit] permit us to avoid the above-mentioned detours. The book is divided into three par,:s, the first of which -"lntensionality" consists of three studies. In the first of these, Mondadori gives what is much more tn,Tn an introductory survey of the bv si~: problem:; of the given domain and o! the main featuzes of the history ~f its research (including a thorough discussion of the reasons ~hy elementary extensional lo#c cannot serve as an adequate mean:~ of descripti,gn of natural language semantic:s). He shows that the necessary distinction [etween a theory, ot truth conditions and a theory of communication or under. slanding reflects a not-to-be-ignored arrtbiguity of the term 'determination'; when ~sserting that ~he intension of expressions i~lus the possible world "determines'" :heir extension, the verb 'deternflne' is not to be understood in its algorithmic (con-. ':t~uctive) sense (cf p. 27f.). Mondadon also contributes to the understanding of ~att~ral kind terries, discussing Putnam's approach, and concluding (p. 3:7) that the ~nter~sion of such ~ term consists in a constant function taking each possible world rote a natural kind (a species), which can be represented by means of a function ",aking each possible ~¢orld into a set of objects (the set of tigers,etc.); thus in the ~erminology of modal semantics, an "essential property" can be treated as a value ~)f such a constant function. HGwever, it is not ,quite clear to this reviewer to what extent Mondadorrs claim that he co~:tributes to the e~;tension of possible world ~emamics to natural language~ actually is justified. It is lrue thac he pays attention lo proper nouns and natur,~l ad terms, contrib,ating to the er.largement of the set ~f iingtdst.~c phenomena that have aheady obtained a plausible treatment within :~g~c. From another point of view, however, mu~:h of the development of logic can be characterized as su~eha progressive nlargement of the studied set of phenomena,
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and it 3eems that Mondadori is not directly interested in an investigation of the relationships of modern logic to the structure of natural language as such. In a similar vein, Guenthner opens his paper on intensional logic and the sematttics of natural language by claiming that "semantic descriptions of natural languages should not simply consist in the reco:Jrse, to already formulated logical systems ... and in the constn:ction of.,. translation algorithms from a natural language to a formal one" and that " t h e use of tbrmal s?,,stems in s'.emantic description must in turn become syntacticaJJy and praf~naticaLg 'revealing' ". Immediately afterwards, however, he also admits that in his paper he will "leave aside this aspect of the explanatory role of formal semantics" (p. 41). He compares various intensional logics and investigates their merits with respec: to the possible representations of intensional locutions in natural languages. He du~y states that no logical system, sv far, has acquired first rights to the status of "tae representing system" in linguisti~ analysis, and he notes that although extension~d predicate logic i:s not rich enough to account for oblique contexts, "the meta-hmfi'aages for intensional systems are just as extensional as those for extensional ol:e~," (p. 47). Among other qualifications of different approaches to inteasional lo[,it:, the author points out that Montague "complicates the representation of normaz predicates i.n an unnecessary way", going too far in his elaboration of quantification over individual concepts (p. 61). He also shows (pp. 6 2 - 6 4 ) how Cresswell's solution of the treatment of noun phrases can be refin~d. Besides throwing ligl~t on various aspects of logical discussion:~ that are relevant for linguistic analysis, Guenthner points out how the sys~Lem of modal logic developed by Aqvist and himself can bz interpreted in Montaguian intensional logic, thus at the same time providing a possible answer to Hintikka's objections against Montague's approach. On the other hand, Guenthner (as is the case with other contributors tc the book under review, as well as with most other logici,ans) only occasionally tot=c,hes upon questions related to a systematic account of the relationship between la~lguage structure and logical systems. A linguistic exploration of his remarks is made difficult, a~ most of them are not self-contained wi~h regard to the use of formal devices; fu~rthermore, Guenthner is not interested ha any kind of linguistic patterning, such as that into parts of speech, sentence parts, or deep cases. Also, the distinction between 'intension' and 'sense', which is necessary if one takes a proposition (o1~ a function from possible worlds into truth values) te be the intension of a sentence (as acknowledged in writings on logic all the way from Carnap's Meaning and Necessity to authors such as Kutschera or Schnelle) comes out so~newh~t unclear in tl~e author's discussion on Frege ( p 45) [3]. Bressan':L paper concerns a model system and its applications. As such, it reFresents an ~,~nlarged summary of his book A Genel'al Modal Interpreted C~lcuht.~,
[!3I For aJ~ analysis of this notion by means of specifying a linguistic counterpart of Catnap's ~ntensionalisomorphism, see Sgallet al. (1977).
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but he also includes an account of hew to translate his modal language into an extensional language; this is, without dtmbt, of great importance for the basic questions of logical semantics. His system is strong enough to handle many intricate distinctions in the content of modal verbs - c f . e~g. his illustrations on p. 107 if., where file case of "Socrates can run whil,~ , o t running", as well as the truth of "It is n e c e ~ r f l y the case that the president of the U.S. is a citizen of the U.S." vs. the falsity of "The president of the U.S. has the property of being necessarily a citizen of the U~q.", are treated in such a way as to offer new solutions to puzzles which have been discussed at length by other philosophers. An investigation of such questions as where to find the boundary between vagueness and ambiguity in modal expressions of natural languages (in other words, What criteria can serve to determine their meanings) is left open for further discussion: Bress~l certainly has provided a new and firmer starting point for such an investigation. The second part of the book is headed by Hoe.pelman's study of activity verb~. Working in a Montaguian framework, the author uses Vendler's classification of action verbs. Here, he pays more attention than many others to the questions of nat~ral language, though he, too, connects his logical analysis immediately with the surface patterning of English, and does not pay explicit attention to general lin~ guistics (as his footnote 6 shows, he realizes, to a certain extent, the risk connected with such simplified handling of the complex phenomena of natural language). The criteria Hoepelman uses for the classification of verb'~ are not p~resented in a sufficiently systematic way, hence, i~! is not fully clear in what sense the terms 'perfectire', 'impeffective', 'momentaneous', or 'stative' are used. ,~Jso, in flds connection one would have expected at least a programmatic attempt to explore the relatively rich and clearly grammatically structured systems of velbal aspect in the Slavonic languages [4]. Even though one finds the assertion that "a:complishments are perfecfive" (p. 155), it still seems that their lexical equivalent.,: are primarily imperfect~ve. at least in languages with full aspec! systems (as an example, e f Engl. to kick ~'~. Czech kopat). As for the author's remark about again (p. 156), it is the division of the sentence rote topic and focus that is respo:asib!e for the different semantic (and intonational!) variants of "Joha paints ~.he wall again". Simil~rly, the author's remarks on the Present Perfect show that he is not familiar with the literature on topic and focus [5]. Thus, he doe,~;no~ realize that, although "JcAu,~ Smith has written a number of short stories ~ (p. 151) leads (the hearer) "to the assumption, that the subject [4] Accoz~mgto Vend~er's characteri:cations, which are briefiy ,,:ummanzedon p. 122, one would expect the class of verbs of 'states' to correspond first of a/,~to those Slavontc verbs that iack the perfectice forms, while the class of activity verbs would correspond to those cases in the Shvor~ Languages, where the perfective (complex) meaning of a ~terb is entailed by a (token ~f the) c:~nrespondingsentence containh~gits impeffective co~mterpart. Thu~, if one was ringing a bell o~ kissing a gi~l, one certaild],, ~ang it or kissed her, re~pec~ively,but ff one was ~ a lette~ yesterday, tile letter may still not have been written to-~ight. |51 See, e,g. SgaUetal, (1973); more rt;cently Sgail and Haji~ov~i(1977).
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of the sentence exists", this is not so if the subject does not belong to the ~opic o f the sentence (of McCawley's well known examples and their variants, such ae. "EINSTEIN has visited Princeton", which is :lwore or less equivalerA with "Princeton has been visited by Einstein", where the capitals denote a marked position of the intonation centre before the end of the senl:ence) [6]. Also, Hoepelman's statements concerning lJ~e possibility of specifying the result of an activity verb, which then "behaw,'s like an accompiistLment" [7], and those on the "hammer-flat construction" (p. 148L) remain rather unclear. The non-existence of such sentences as "John closed the door clean" does not, in my opil~on, entitle one to claim that a combination of a verb slJLchas to close with this constrnction is excluded by the grammar of English. (It is aot possible, as far as the 'actual world' is concerned, to clean a door just by closin~ it; but e.g. "He closed the door flat" might be accepted at least by some spea~.,~rs of English, and other, similar cases might be t~und.) Though his linguistic premises thus may call for further discussion, Hoepelman's logical analysis of the given set of verbal meanings undoubtedly deserves attention within the inw~stigation of the semantics of natural language. A linguist who is not too experienced in studying formal syst~;ms of intensional logic may find the author's approach useful (p. 155f.). However, the uncertainties pointed out above are reflected h.~re, too; e.g. to consider the~ 'imperfectiveness' of a verbal form to be responsible for the lack of an expression ~)f "the acquisition of a result" would imply that not only the Engli,,'& sentence "I just was getting the result then", but also its equivalents in Latin ( c f the qmperfec~Ltm de conatu'), in Czech, etc. would ha-e to be regarded as ungrammatical, axt asstmiption that plainly runs counter to the facts. The refined intensional formalism presented by Hoepelmm~ represents in some respects an improvement on Montague's techniques (for a system of sets of possible denotations, see p. 158f.; for the treatment of proper nouns, p. 159f.; furthermore, c f p. 16If.; 15If.); and a thorough study of his formal description is worthwhile, though troublesome. Verb aspects are also investigated by Aqvist and Guenthner. Within the framework of tense logic they look at the phases of events (as belonging to the layer of cognitive content) rather than at a broadly understood category of verbal aspect. [6] A more adequate treatment of the given property of ,'he Present Perfect can h~ found in Guenthner (1977: esp. 90). [7 ] Why should the whole classification then be regarde0 as a cl~Lssificationof verbs (lexicai units), ff it is perhaps more a matter of asp,~'ct (grammatical category)? The main poit~t of the classification obviously lies in the fact that some verbs (in some or all of their tenses) are combined primarily with this aspect or that; buL it does not seem effective to start with such a classification cf verbs, before one has a thorough analysis of aspects for the language investigated. Such an approach does not seem more reasonable than, e4:. to speak about classes of nouns illustrated by (a) table, rabbit, (b) mYk, flour, (c) scissors, etc. without having an idea of the distinction between the singular and the ~,lural on the (surface) morphemic level and on the level of meanings (or deep structures).
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Though they bmag many ~tluable new insights within tense logic, it i~ ~aot fuUy clear that their enterpri~ is directly relevant to the study of verbal asFec~!as a lin. guistic category (as they claim on p. i 69). Rather, I would say that (a~; the differ. ence between Hoepelman's approach and llheirs ~tlteady points up) their empirical motivation as ye~ has not been sufficiently integrated to yield a reliab,~e basis for constructing complex formal systems, without possibly including dn~Lwbacks that wot:Id be difficult to get rid of afterwards. Certainly, the motivationL is ultimv.tely Wen by natural language. However, when the authors (as iz u:~u~damong logicians nowadays) take the cognitive content as the starting point fol the formu• .! 9!1 lation of a system, and then only look for "natural languag-~ rendennl;.~s of their operators and other symbols (p. 174), it may be suspected that their st;~rting point ha~ not been a sciemific :malysis of the object language, but rather, thirst they have chosen their issues in a partly impressionistic way. The authors seem to be convinced that the relationships they analyze are structured by grammatical patterns of natural lan~'~age (or should we say of English? or of a certain group of languages?), h~tt they do ant I;re~nt g-noort far their pcmwi~tlrm in c:r~In'a r~¢ th~ !.'up 'tO n a~. rather diverse) linguistic accounts of aspect. In sec~io~ 5 : t} 8 of their contribution, Aqvist and Guenthner attempt an investigation of various constructions in ordinary English. It is rather asto~ishi~ag that they do not seem to realize that many of the constructions they treat are considered to be ambiguous in linguistics (or at least that it should be discus:~ed ~hether ambiguity or vagueness of meaning is at stake in the gis,en case). Thus, :r~otordy do w, often use the present tense for future or past actions but also, the i?resent Perfec~ has ar~ot:a~zr relationship to the po/n.t of speech in "I have lived in Vancouver f~Jr ~en yeats and I am happy here" than it has in "I have already b~;en 'io Vanc,.,aver a couple of times". An ~mportant advantage of Aqvist and Guenthner's contr:ibution coasist'.~ in the an',dysis of th,r relevant part of the layer of cognitive conten~ as such (in Part 11, pp. lgSffj. A theory of events is outlined, using ~ system of propositional tense logic ~bai enriches ~:heapproach started by Prior with new operators, which may ~c,:ount for events takiir~g place uninterruptedly throughout intervals of time as we]~las for those conaect,::d with fixed moments, and also for a 'state-of-affairs' being n:tore (or less) true at or:re moment "than at another. Though their form~tlism (in Part I of their paper) ba~es i~self or, a motiv.~tion not always fully substan'tiated linguistic~tily, in Part 11 the cla:~ses of events a~e studied rather independently of the (surface;) proper~ies of Engli~a. He~e, their study provides a serious contribution towarcis ,;stablishing a sc,unc: basis for a sy~e~natic izvestigation of the relationship between logica~ s~ruclu~.res of cognition an~, !araguage structure. To a certxin extent, this relationship is handled :in the concluc~ing part of the paper, too; wt'dle the logical analysis and the classification of even,:s are again connected with cer:tain English lc,cutions, the ling e~g. betwee~ ,~y its being ;the case and "beginning and fm~;shing" seems not to be motivated in a Fersua~ive enough way. Instead of pic~ang cut individual con, structions of ;~ natur;d language, C,e authors, in their study of the rel~tionship
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between cognitive structures and nat)lral language, would have been be~ter off letting the latter be represented by an adequate account of lingui.~tic meaning, deep structure, or teetogrammatic,% whatever term one might choose. In the next contribution Aqvist, Guenthner, and Rohrer investigate the semantics of some temporal conjunctions in English, using the logical apparatus established in the preceding paper, with definitions added to characterize the conjunctions studied. Here, too, the.re are immediate connections of English surface forms with logical structures, accompanied by a rather unsubstantiated hope that general linguistics might help to vaotivate even those definitions that do. not fully reflect the properties of English (see esp. p. 203 bottom, and also p. 208). However, the logical analysis contained m the paper is based on a systematic empirical investigation of *.he given phenomena as presented by Hein/im~iki, and the authors are well aware not only of the ambiguity of linguistic expressions (cf the caveats p. 2020, but also of the complex!,ty el' the patterns of various aspects of meaning. They point oui the need for fi~rther empirical investigations of these patterns before an ,,ue,~u,,t~ :,,,,:,at system for ,~t :t: u¢.,~:zxpuun can be constructed. Even so, a mole thorough linguistic basi.s (as well as a more critical attitude to Reichenbach's approach, and an explicit rendering of the distinction between "absolute" and "relative" tense [8], would have permitted a more complete account. This should then also have included e.g. the ambiguity of the Pluperfect (used either to express a result of a previous action in the past, e,r (in indirect discourse) an event anterior to another past event), so that not only pairs consisting of a mare clause and ils direct modif[zation would have been taken into account. Fur~ermore, the treaument of the counterfactual before (p. 220f.) seems to leave some questions open for further discussion. Taking the semantic relevance of the topic/focus articulation into account, one rr,light find that, e.g., "Before he saw his g~andchildren, Max died" is not a well-formed sentence on the preferred re~ding (wiff, normal intonation), which means lhat the temporal c~use cannot be included in the topic here. The possibility of inferring that "Max saw his grandchildren" might perhaps depend on such a condition; the two uses of before could then perhzvs be reduced to certain features given by the ~exieal environment and the topieFocus articulation. Most valuable for filrther research in linguistic semantics-, are the authors' analyses of the relatior,.~ip of when to as iong as and to while (p. 2 i2),, although it is not quite .obvious whether the distinction between, the different counterparts of when in the, loglc:d structures (p. 211) is of truly linguistic relevance. Also, the account of countability of "true in to" (p. 216) represents an important enrichment of the semantic th,;ories of tetnporal constructions. Mondadoli's p~.~per on the Perfect Furore, which closes the second part of the book under review, also restricts itself (ar.,d qaite reasonably so) to some of the meanings of English constructions with migh ~ have (p. 224 f.). As for the lin-
[8] See Haji6ov~ e~ aL (19'70).
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guisl~c aspects of the given question, ~he present reviewer is not awar,~ that it may be "generally claimed and believed and expected" that might have is a "past (perfect) tense" of might. But it does not come as a smpr/,se that a might have statemertt is indexed to an event to which might itself is indexed (qf. p, 223). Since might has always been characterized in linguistics as a modal verb, serving only secondarily ~Lsa tense auxiliary, it is quite natural to assume thaL e.g., might have come shares the tense characteristics of have come on one reading, wMle the other (the 'future' or 'posterior' one) should be compar~.'d with wouki' have come. Accordit~g t,3 Mondadori's discussion on p. 224t"., mighl~ itself has 1:we temporal indices, i and/, such that in the interval i it is true that it will be po,.;sible for the ,~vent to occur at the (later) interval/. Wh~e it co~ld not be expected that the difficult question of the. relationship ,~etween the impact of tense and that of modality in the meaning ot! this construction was going to be dealt with completely (cf p. 233 on the remaining uncertaint.y), yet many insightfu~ solutions are presented (see, first of -all, pp. 235-240, where ~ m e of the crucial examples are analyzed). Since Mondadori does not systematically distinguish between diflerent units of language meaning, stated on the basi~ of og~rational criteria ensuring the presence of disdnctions ~elewmt for th~ pa~terrts of the given language [9], it may be doubted whether" his treatrnem accounts for every semantic distinction rdevant for English, and whether every distinction it accounts for really is relevant in English. l'a other words, it remains ~,o be investiga~.ed whether, first of all, Mondadori's di.,;tinction betw~.n a 'persisting' ,.~s. a 'non-persist~g' possibility (p. 245) should be understood as ;m instartce of an ~;~big~ity of an English construction, Gr of a vaguelaess of its sense (cf, footnote 3, abo~e). In the ~me way that we understand the sense of the Engli~ we to be ,~'~gue in that the set of persons ~t refers to is specified only with respect to the speak.e~ mid someone else to be included in it [10], so o~.aeof the meanings Ovnses) of m~g~t includes perhaps just the combination of the future aVLtithe possible, if there ~re no syntactic restrictions to make us distinguish whether in the #yen case the verb ~eans that is is po:~sibleat i that x will happen at/, or it will be possible at / taut x happens (where / is posterior t~ the point of speech). Ag!!:~,~,we s ~ how the snalysi:~ of natural lan~ttage phenomena brings inspiration and ne.w insights to logic, a~, It always has done, while an analysis of the indMdual phenomena in itself does not re~:~reseutan investigation of the structur~ ~f natural langmtge, £e. of the rela~ionshil~ between the structuring of the expression to that of the conten',. Part 'Ill of the book under review is devoted *o th,~, phenom,,'na of negation. It consisted; of a m~gte contribution by D.M. Gabbey and LM. Mora,i',:sik, who treat the [9] &s for the meanings of tense, a starting point for such an emi~Ldc~d analysis may be fouad g~',the p.~pcr quoted in footnote 8;.for an investfgation of the linj~uistic se1~,~antics of verbM , ~ l ~ l i t y , ~e Benegov~ (1972). [ I Of No CO~L~idetation o f statistical character :~hould ent¢~ a descript:ion of En~llish as for the q a e ~ , " ~ wheth¢~ th/s "someone else' inclu,~s the hearer, or |he speake1'~J wife, etc.
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issue; both in connection with set theoretical semaatics and with Chomskyan interprelive semantics. They correct!y point ,~ut that differences in stress are relevant for the interpretation of negative sentences, but do not infer from this that a full representation of a sentence should contain an identification of at least the position of t h e 'main stress' or intonation centre, so that e.g. "John didn't kill MARY" and "John didn't KILL Mary" woutd be treated as two different senten.~es. While distingt,,ishing between constituent and ,.;entente n~gation, they connect this distinction, too straiight-forwardly perhaps, with tl~e one between "it is not so that ..." and other types of negation; they duly remark: however, that in the former case, the negated elements need not make up a continuous syntactic unit (p. 253). To cap1:are the role of constituent negation, the authors state that "associated with each element that can be negated, there is a range of incompati~;les" (p. 256). Their formal treatment of constituent negation is based on two rules (p. 260), the first of which states that rite negated elements are "chosen by some such clues as intonation, stress etc."; the second rule then sp.~.cifies that "if nc. special emphasis or clue is given", in the ca~ of a two~!ement pl~rase having been chosen as belonging to the scope of ne~tion, it is the dependent element of a phr.~tse that is negqted. Since the authors do not use the terminology of dependency syntax, they have to enumera:e the diffe :ent cases (AdjP inside NF + AdjP, AdvP inside IVP + AdvP, etc.). Neg y (where y is an element of a basi~ category, v~. N, Adj, Adv, TV, IV, excluding quantifiers and connectives) i,.; then regarded as a variable ranging over the set of incompatibles of y; the semantics; of constituent negation is thus reduced to logically well analyzed domains (includiag the well-known interplay of negation with quantifiers and logical cc,nnectives). 'Fhe authors admit that their treatment, involving 'surface interpretatiola', is incomplete (p. 258) and they' regard the context dependency of the choice of 'incompatibles' as a limitation on formalizability (p. 256f.). However, taking not ordy Jackendoff's approach but a.lso other systematic empirical treatments of negation in connection with the phenomena of intonation, eontextuai boundness, free word order, constructions such a:~ cleft or passive, etc., into accomlt would certainly make it possible to use the set theoretical approach in a more effective way. This, in turn, would have led to a more integrated treatment ef negation, in which also that part of the impact ,3f context that belongs to the langual~e system would haw:~ found a place. As has been shown by Haji~ov~i(1973; cf. also Sgall et al. 1973; Sgall and Haji~ov~ 1977), three differe~at types of negation should be distinguished accerding to their different topic and focus positions. On the basi,~ of such an empirical starting point, many of the insights stated by Gabbay a~ad Moravcsik could be formulated more economically and in a more integrated ,~,ay. Thus, for instance, it n~ay be stated in a mtiform manner that the verb "in tnt~,normal case" is contexually bound (and belongs to the topic) in such sentences as 'q-le did not perform as well as he should" (c.t: p. 257 of the book under review), or '"He doesn't run quickly" (p, 255). Here, the verb is not include5 in the scope of the ne,~ation (wktct~ should be regarded as a more basic notion than that of presupposition),
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although (contrary to what the authors r~y on p. 25,4) many negative sentences include adverbials outside the scope of neg~ition (stress being neutral), el. '~Here he d~ tn't LISTEN", "Last wee|: it did not R/tiN". Hov,~ver, cages such as "It did not ~¢,AIN "last week", when compared witch "It d~d not rain last WEEK", ~ o w that the notion of 'normal stress' itself is not too clear and that it has to be replaced by some more sophisticated device (sucl~ as, e.g. the no~ion of the intonation ce:ntre, following Chomsky). Other frameworks, such as Haji~ov~'s, allow us to account for cases Like ' H e did not come since hi~, wife was tLl", where a verb in the topic should be interpreted - on the prefi;n'ed reading --as the ;;ingle unit belonging to the ~¢ope of negation; in the logicv1 interpretatio~:t of this, sentence the predJicate itself is negated, in the san~e way as in so-called lexical negation (know, ignore, etc.) (~e Haji~ovd I975: 73f.). If the !ogicivns were to ;;tart thei~ ana'l.ysis at the point where empirical linguistic analysis ends, i.e. beginning with the semantic representations rather titan w i l t the 'raw' surface shape of sentences, Whose very choice and nature quite naturally lead to fo~nu|ation~ in the logicians' account that swarm with adverbs such as often, normally, pcr~i~ly, insufficiently, and ,..;o on a gr~;at deal of the misurtderstandings or..~ both s~des would disappear. I ~m thinking here of reproaches such as: not really speaking about semantics, or not understanOing the (necessity of) formalism used as the ]anguage of linguistic descriptiorts from th.~: one side, and: not really speaking about natural language as such, or working with a i~ypertrophic formal apparatus from ~he other. We thus come back again to one of Sgail et al. 's (I977) conclas:ions: the "outer" appearance of linguL~tic phenomena should not be immediately submitted to logical examination, since this external form first mu.~.t be :~tudied empirically i.n order to fred o~z~ where simple ~'~riation (on different levels) ends and where the types can be found, whose tokens are encountered in the 'raw material' [ 11 ]. Aa empirical linguistic ~ y s i ~ should discorer the Froperties of the 'deep' or ' s e m i t i c ' structure of naturat lanffcage, on a "disambiguated"" level. To attain this level is the goal ~,f IL~ti~tic analysis, though frown the logician.,;" viewpoint i* is no more than a basis i~r theix sc~nantic interpretations. The properties of this level should be discovered by weans of operationally testable criteria. A well-motivated descripti.oa of such a level is a prerequisite for any kincl of logic~d analysis of the semantics of natural l,nguage, whether it uses def'miti, ms (as it~ the case of Aqvist.. G~enthner and [ I 1] it is quit~, natural thai: even the surface shape of sentences is not always readered with the n~essary degree of precision in a logically oriented an~dysis (the phem~m~,naof stress ~md word /taler, ~ pa~'-~.ic~l~,~re often neglected). 13~.eneces£ty of such ~ linl;ui;;tic ~-~alysis preced~g logi-c~l e×plorafior~ would be more appa~:ent if there were more linguists effectively ¢rien~ed towards explicit descriptions md ff there had been more cooperation between l/nguists ~ d logic~ compa~.~g languat;~s of di1"fe~en~types (see the writingsof Kuno, Keenan, or Li). If genera~ linguistics were distin~aish~:d flora Eny)i~ studies in recent linguistics, just as it has been in the classical schoals, it wouht be e a ~ ! to persuad~ l~gicians that an ~tccount of this or ~" t clau ~f phenomena in English is '~ot their woper task.
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Rohrer, in the book under review), or some other kind of transl~tions of natural language locutions into the formal language o f logic. Any other treatment of the; individual phenomena:of natural language can be understood only as a preliminary account, which, as the authors of the Introduction remark on p. 7f., ultimately must be connected "in an empirically motivated and motivating way to the syn.. tactic analysis o f the: (given) natural language". If the level of linguis'tic meaning (of the tectogrammatics, to use Prague terminology) is taken as the basis of this connection, it will not be necessary to postpone this "important goal of lingnistic research" to some uncertain future era, and repetitive "restrictions" of the form "we understand the expression x, which we want to analyze, only in a meaning similar to y ..." (which do not seem to represent rciiable starting points for an analysis of meaning anyway) can be avoided. Meaning, taken a~ the linguistic counterpart of inten:~ional structure or sense (ra~ter than of intension, in Carnap's terms) will t h e n ' h a w to be distinguish,~d from the cognitive content (or from other langnage4nde~_ndent patte_rn_ings of fae.ta~al knowledge); similarly, ambiguity (the case of more than one meaning for a single expression) will have to be d.~stinguished from vaguene,,~ (where a unit of linguistic meaning is not fully specified as to hs content) [ 12]. As we have remarked, the book under revi,~w is a typical illustration o~fthe situation in contemporary linguistics. It contains many points that wi~flbe ve~T useful in empirical linguistic research, not to speak about its substantial contribution to the re~arch in intensional semantics. Linguists will certainly profit fro~l the guidel:ines giving them orientation in the domain of set-th~eoretical, modal, and intensional semantics, as well as from the analyses c,f the classes of linguistic p]henomena (be it tenses and aspects, conjunctions, or negation) that are treated here. However, the book also characterizes the drawbacks of the present trends and illustrates why the hopes for an important cooperation between logicians and linguists in semantic analyfis of natural language have n o t yet been fulfdled: there still is a lack of mutuai understanding among the two domains of ,,~c~ence, and the scholar who is proficient both in logic and linguistics is still rare. In the logicians' writings, much att*.ntion is paid to questions of formalism; however, the form~disms are often [12] Authors such as Hoepelman (this volume, p. 157) speak about th~ simple 1?ast of (English) perfective expressions as being ambiguous, in that e.g. "~ohn painted the wall b!ue" does not determine whether the wall is still blue or not at the time point of speech (which, with Trajan instead of John, could be a ~ouple of thousand ~'ears la~er than the point of e~e~L~).Here, one should ask whether there really axe two meanings at stake (as linguistic unit:, subs~:mtiated by the structure of English). If such a lh~guistiedistinction cannot be found, then :h,~ past t~nse cannot be considmed ambiguous, as in the case of the.' English plurals cats or rni~ ', ~rhieh do not have different: meanings according to the numl~r of the objec~:sreferred to l, ~epelr~an'~s rule for 'dimmbiguating' the Eng.lJsh past tense then would not'bc~ong to a de,trip ion of Englib.. His distinction betw~n the corresponding two syntactic tulles, Sr and Ss, appf~u'~J~to have no m e n t i o n ~ the stnl:tu~ of English; neither is his treatment of FI and Fj in *h~sol'ules too cleat to' me.
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presented in such a fragmentary way that the lingui:~t is un~::ble to understand them without weeks of studying not ,~nly the paper itse~i', but also other t e x t s n e c e s s ~ to decode its notation. One of the cau:;es of thv pr,.'sent lack of continuity in ~ e development of theo~etical linguistics is the fact that the formally oriented studies are so difficult to read. Since n~any students are not used to reading ~that much anyway, as a regdt they do not even know the clas,~cat works, which certainly canbe read without those e.xcessive efforts. This connects ~ith another drawback - most logicians do not pay attentic,n to more than one or two of the most d / a mode trends in con:emporary linguistics; ofte.n, their investigations are based on assumptions that a~n~ady have been ~efuted in other, not so well known linguistic writings. Thus, much c,f the effot~ cc,nnectedt with form.',lization may soon appear to have been in vain. On the o*~er hand, mo:;~ linguistic writings on semantics include no explicit descriptions, znd questions of methodology are c,ften neglected. Basic matters, such as oa w1"~atbasis mearting phenomena should be .:lescribed are left undiscussed; finguists should become aware that no other basis 'than that of Tarskian truth conditions has ew;r been proposed. The relevance of wlhat Bressa~a (p. 103ff.) calls "philo~ophical puzzles" to lingu:~sticdescriFtions is, un~i:~)rtunately, only rarely realized by linguists. And v~ews such :as the one that (if any) at most lexlcal semantics pertains to the domain ~f linguistic study (a view which a~::tuaUywould have been overcome at the late.~t d u ~ g the fc~-ties, if the developmen~i of linguistics as a field could have been regular a~d continuous), l~:avenot been fully abandoned even to-day. Tee book u,ader review contributes substantially to one of the mai," requirements lo~ the further" development of 'the science of language and communication; that of better mutual understanding. This domain par tiicularly sl~ould not he allowed to suffer from c,a~munic~tion ga~s such as the abo~:e, both between its own subfields, l~s vazioas trertds and r~eighboring disciplines, as well as across its generations of student~. Th,~r¢~fore, if one wants to contribute :to those iz~terdisciplinary investigations w~.~ichar~; so im~:,~rtant for *.he study of h~.tman language, the thing to do is: read the others, and ~ k e yourself readable for them~
References B v n ~ i , Eva. 19"~2 'On ~m~u~ticdescription of vezb~Jmodality'. In. Prague studies in mathematicaJ l i z ~ t i c s 4:191-214; tepr~mtedin: F~netional generative gramm~x in Prague (ed. by 'N. K~einand h~. ,t. Stechow). Kronbe ~g/Ts.: Scriptor, 1974. pp. 258-305. Craenthner, Fras~z. 1977. 'Remltks on the present perfect fit English'. In: C. Rohtcr, eq~LOn the logical analy~ c,f tense ~ d aspect. Ttibingen: Gunter Narr. pp. 83-93. 1 4 ~ v [ , Eva. 1973. ?~ation ~nd topic vs. comment. Phflologica~Pragensia 16: 81-93. Ha#~ov~i. Eva. 1975. ?tegaee a prempozice ve vyznamov~ stevb~ v~ty. [negation and pzesupp o s i ~ in the se:r~ntic structure of the sentence]. Ptaha: Academia. Ha.~i~.~val, Eva, Jarmi~ Panevo~ and Pe~ SgalL 1970. Reeu~sive properties of ten~ in Czech en~ E~,~lish. Prag~*, Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 13: 9-42. A slightly modified vet-
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sion can be found in: W. Klein and A. v. Stechow, eds. Functional generative grammar in l~ague. Kronberg/Ts: Scfiptor, 1974. pp. 187-235. Sgall, Pe~t, 1977. Sign meaning, cognitive cc~ntent, and pragrnatics. Journal of Pragmatics 1: 269-282. Sgall, Pett and Eva Haji~ov~i.1977. Focus on ~cus. Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 28: 5-54. Part II, Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 29:23-42 [1978]. Sgall, Pett, Eva Haji~ovfiand Eva Bene~'ow[. 1 ~,73. Topic, focus and generative semantics. Kronberg/Ts.: Scriptor. Sgall, Pert, Eva Haji~ov~ and Oldfich Proc~zka. 1977. On the role of linguistic semantics. Theoretical Linguistics 4: 31-59.
Petr Sgall (b. 1926) PhDr., DrSc., Charles University, Prague. Since 1950 teaching at Charles University, first in the Faculty of Philosophy. later in the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. From 1968 to 1972 Head of the Laboratory of Algebraic Linguistics, Charles University. 1972 to present: Research Worker, Centre of Numerical Mathematics, Charles University. Author of numerous books and articles in the domains of historical Indo-European linguistics, language theory, theoretical linguistics, generative description1, computational linguiLstics, and semantics. Main curr¢:nt research interest: ,~emantics.