Formal semantics of natural language

Lingua 45 (1978) 355-391 © North-Holland Publishing Company

I EV[EWS Edward L. Keenan (ed.), Formal semantic~ of natural language. Papers from a colloquium sponsored by the King's College Research Centre, Cambridge, England. Cambridge University Press, London, 1975. xiii, 475 pp. £12.50. Reviewed by: Jerold A. Edmondson, Technical University Berlin, 1 Berlin 10, Ernst-Reuter-Platz, B.R.D. This book contains twen~ty-five papers grouped into six loosely defined topics: (a) quantification in natural language; (b) reference and cross-reference; (c) intensional logic and syntactic theory; (d) questioning model theoretic semantics; (e) .~l~.iil~lilifl/,ll, ilt,,;5 d l l U

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product of the heralded Cambridge Colloquium on Formal Semantics of Natural Language held in April 1973 with contributors from both philosophical and linguistic circles and from both sides of the Atlantic. One should not be misled by the title of this book into thinking that Montague's Formal Philosophy has served as a model. The research here does not represent a homogeneous body of analyses in the frame of a particular paradigm. Indeed, much of the material is not really concerned with semantics at all but with syntax. The amorphousness of this work is, at its worst, sadly symptomatic of the lack of agreement among linguists, philosophers and computer scientists on how to employ the word' semantics'; but, at its best, it documents the budding of the flower of the fruits of cooperation between empirical research and formal methods that may one day equal that found between physics and ma~;hematics. This appears, however, still rather far off with respect to the questions of details of formalism and how important the fine points of natural language should be considered in the theory construction. It could not be expected that all contributions of such a book would be qualitatively equal. Once again, there are pronounced differences in the breadth and depth of the various articles. It is, in fact, often difficult to make comparisons between proposals becat~se of the fact that idiosyncratic details of the analyses vary extremely. The impression that the book leaves as a whole is one of competing viewpoints at various points in their development, some quite sophisticated, some at the beginnings. The furor of the bandwagon effect following the breakthrough of Montague's PTQ is quite evident in many of the papers, though curiously no one really employs Montague Grammar as such. The first topic consists of four papers, two that seem more oriented toward expanding the apparatus of classical logic and two that strive for a more encompassing linguistic treatment of the phenomena. To the first group belong the logicians Lewis and Altham & Tennant and to the second Partee and Hull. I begin with Partee's 'Deletion and variable binding'. Partee regards this paper, I think quite correctly, as a variation and expansion on

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a theme from her much cited paper 'Opacity, coreference and pronouns' (1973). While at that time she onJy harbored the suspicion that a uniform treatment of pronouns would be very difficult, she takes in this paper t. dichotomy of pronoun sources as a principle. Ordinary pronouns of natural language can arise either as bound variables or as pronouns of laziness. With these distinct underlying forms can be associated two distinct derivations. Little is said about how bound variables become pronouns but prenouns of laziness would surface through deletion of underlying full forms or some equivalent mechanism if one is an interpretivist. The major point of the paper is to lay bare the environments in which each of the pronouns can appear. The ploy that P. uses to discuss the effect of the syntactic surrounding on the two pronoun types is the ambiguity arising in sentences containing only. Thus, the sentence (la) below can ensue from (lb), variable binding, or from (lc), deletion. (lb) and (lc) themselves are predictably distinct. (la) Only John expected that he would win. (1 b) (only John (x expected that x would win)). (lc) (only John expected that John would win.) P. argues that refiexivization and Equi-NP deletion must be rules that apply obligatorialy whenever there is identity of variables since there is no ambiguity in the sentences (2). (2a) Only John expected to win. (2b) Only John voted for himself. In other words, there are no reflexives of laziness or implicit complement subjec:s of laziness. A duality of pronoun sources also finds support from the fact that quantifier phrases can control bound variables but no del~.tion of the second occurrence of the full NP is permitted. (3a) Everyone ate his food in silence. (3b) Everyone (x ate x's food in silence). (3c) Everyone ate everyone's food in silence. (3a) can come only from the structure (3b) and not from (3c). The best fit for the data P. unearths is summarized in (4): (4) Pronoun controlled by proper names definite descriptions quantifier phrases

variable binding

deletion

yes yes yes

yes yes no

yes

no

yes yes

no no

Reflexive controlled by proper names definite description

quantifier phrases

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Complement subject controlled by proper names definite descriptions quantifier phrases

yes yes yes

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Super Equi-NP adds a further complication that, after some tortuous argumentation, ultimately supports P.'s position. Datives that follow good or important can control a complement subject in different ways, depen.4.ing on whether the complement subject is explicit or implicit. For this reason: (5) and (6) below are not synonymous. (5) It is important for John for him to solve the problem alone. (6) It is important for John to solve the problem alone. P. sees a solution to capturing the meaning difference between these sentences by means of open sentences containing distinct variables in one case and identical variables in the other. (7) It is important for x for y to solve the problem atone. (8) It is important for x for x to solve the problem alone. It remains unclear, however, how one (on the surface at least) occurrence of John can bind two different variables in the case of (7). In table (4) above definite NP's were grouped together with proper names. P. argues that this is not quite accurate because of the fact that definite descriptions can take either referential or attributive interpretations. In such cases a pronoun of laziness, deletion reading, can be controlled by a referential definite NP only. (9) Only the owner of those convertible bonds thinks that he will lose money. This sentence should have four readings, two referential and two attributive. In fact, most speakers seem to get only three, at the outside. Bound variable readings are: (a) confusion on the bond market for one issue and (b) an owner, cal' him J.D., is worried about his investment. Though intuitions about laziness readings must be weak, it might be possible to accept (9) to mean: J.D. was the only one who thought that the owner of those convertible bonds would lose money. P. also notes that the putative source of laziness readings: (I0) Only the owner of those convertible bonds thinks that the owner of those convertible bonds will lose money. seems to have only attributive readings. If however, the embedded N P in (10) is reinforced with the intensifier, then referential readings just might be possible, cL Edmondson and Plank (1978). (11 a) The owner of those convertible bonds thinks that he himself will lose money.

(1 lb) The owner of those convertible bonds t vertible bonds himself will lose money. expect OUl nly the referential reading a s (1 well. Clearly more work on this area is in order. ‘s earlier work this paper is carefully a of pronoun sources cannot be consi has shown how it might be applie lusion that appears as tic category for proper names an n them to have quite different cant ature was one of real innovations of ontague grammar. A semantics for erficial and embedded questions ring a semantics of interrogatives of the form ~~~~~2 x on questions in interr he foundation of any 1 n-answer relationshi ions among questions can be studied witho estion-answer relationship” (Aqvist I975 resting paper belong to the first tradition, whe (1975) espouse the second, at ~~~~~ person k tion with an answer will lead to a true iff the person mentioned, t of persons who in fact case in which Smedley fails to be a per the response is not in the , or is not in the extension set of the common question above wou onsist of a corn t it be the case that ow of him that he killed e interesting res presents are the notions of info se corresponds to cases of contradiction an the response to a query is either a mere paraphrase it, no information is i

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By limiting the discussion to this very small subset of all question types H. is able to avoid many of the nagging difficulties that cause interrogatives to remain controversial: (a) How can an analysis of this subtype be generalized to include other wh-questions or Yes-no-questions ? (b) Why do some of the latter type have answers that are not yes or no or don't know but of the type H. treats, e.g. Can you tell me what time it is ? or Is the next President going to be from California or Georgia ? There is also something disturbing about having the syntactic unit of analysis be discontinuous between questioner and answerer. Lewis, in 'Adverbs of quantification', is out to establish what kind of entities must be assumed for the various uses of English adverbs like: sometimes, never, usually, often, etc. These forms presumably involve quantification, but quantification over what kind of variables? Variables over time points would not constitute sufficiently rich individuals for all cases because other adverbs can reshape the structure of the time continuum. (14) During full moon Boris often goes for a walk. A further objection not mentioned by L. is that the intuitive interpretation of some sentences with never seems to suggest that an action event or process occurred or might have occurred more than once and thus ~ 3t(P) is not quite equivalent to Vt ~ (P), cf.: (15a) I never voted for Ford. (15b) I didn't vote for Ford. Since Ford was a candidate only once, (15a) does not make the correct statement about the facts in this case. That is why never is intuitively stronger and more emphatic than not. Taking the primitive for temporal quantification to be stretches of time, is also not entirely satisfactory. L. offers sentences in which events are not evenly distributed over any kind of time interval. The sentence: (16) Sid's Bar is often crowded~ can be intuitively true even if only between 8pm and midnight when most of the customers show up. In other words, a kind of temporal bunching can occur. But, switching the unit of quantification to events, as the last sentence might suggest, runs up against the use of temporal adverbs in stative sentences: (17) A man who owns a Mercedes always insures it. and, most difficult of all, against such adverbs in timeless statements about, for example, mathematical truths: (18) A natural number always has two square roots.

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L. sees a way out of this dilemma by taking the unit of analysis to be cases. Quantifiers, temporal and otherwise, would therefore need to be capable of binding, whatever variable might appear in their scope. Or~ as L. puts it, a case is"' the 'tuple of its participants; and these participants are values of the variables that occur free in the open sentence modified by the adverb". One of the advantages of L.'s suggestion is that lifting restrictions on variable types allows us to account for the equivalence of sentences that look outwardly quite different, e.g. (18) and (19). (19) Every natural number has two square roots. Since unrestricted quantification of the type L. is proposing is a very powerful device, certain constraints must apply to guarantee observational adequacy. One .~uantifier cannot be permitted to bind every variable of whatever sort in its scope; ::~e natural language versions of sentences with two (or more) ordered quantifiers would, for example, all have only one reading. Therefore, L. surmises, it is not unexpected that natural languages develop restricting devices, one of which is the ifclause. For the course of one or possibly a few anaphorically linked sentences the partltqn~nte " - ' ~ ; " : " ~ ' " appear. Thus (17) could come from: . . . . . . •-..... can o,-,w-,,*,*J (20) Always, if x is a man, if y is a Mercedes and if x owns y, then x insures y. These three if-clauses establish three participants that are different, a man, a Mercedes and a time coordinate. L. suggests that the adverb always may quite often be omitted to "reconstruct the so-called ' generality interpretation' of free variables ..." and that if-clauses are often replaced in natural language by restricted terms as in the surface structure of (17). Framed in somewhat more familiar terms, L. is ~uggesting that the Geach donkey sentences should be handled as cases of conditional assertion. The problem is, of course, the same as in other suggested analyses; a rather severe rending of natural language syntax and word order is necessary to achieve the proper semantics. Altham and Tennant are intent on solving a similar problem as Lewis in their 'Sortal quantification'. They observe that there are many natural language quantifiers beyond the usual logical inventory, many with the capacity to bind variables running over more than one kind of thing at once. (21) In this university there are as many chairs for philosophy as professors. From the point of logic there is also the added inconvenience of plurality. This excess of natural language A./T. would handle as in Altham (1971), that is several and other plural quantifiers will wind up being that discourse dependent number of things, a set with a threshold cardinality at leas~ greater than 2. One of the curiosities of natural language is that the threshold cardinality of different kinds of sets can react with one another in some kinds of sentences. The two sentences of (22): (22a) Most marathon runners are non-smokers. (22b) Most non-smokers are marathon runners.

ever

stole a book fro

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The first paper on the topic of reference and crossreference is John L y o n s " Deixis as the source of reference', a study of how the grammatical structure of the definite article and the personal pronouns can be derived from underlying demonstrative pronouns and adverbs.. L. sees this derivation as a generalization of the child's strategy of identification by ostension. It also reflects the historical source of these parts of speech in many languages. L. takes as the starting point of discussion a set of phrase structure rules that are said to generate a kind of quasi-English. Of particular interest in this grammar fragment i~ the cleaving or" the sentence expansion into equative and predicative types, i.e. S --> {NP NP} and S --> {NP VP}. These types are syntactically distinct in many languages and certainly semantically different. In this very early base component there is only one deictic particle there, which L. sees as the most elemental indication of a feature or entity in question. There is good agreement in this assumption with that in Mayerthaler (1978), who argues that much of morpho-syntactic encoding is determined by perception and that our above-ground sight leads us to regard away from ego as less marked than at ego. As soon as the child can distinguish places and individuals, then deictic pronouns and deictic adverbs will replace the one expansion ,~f the category symbol D. ".. then goes on to consider the possible constructional types of sources for the s: ,~ple demonstrative NP that dog. After rejecting internal structures for that-dog oi the form predicative adjective complement-head and pronominal head-predicative nominative complement, L. opts for a construction principle based on apposition wi1"l either predicative or equative parts. This assumption leads to a four-fold structural ambiguity for that dog,: (a) that entity - a dog (deictic with noun in predicative apposition); (b) that e n t i t y - the dog (deictic with noun in equative apposition); (c) that e n t i t y - a dog which is there (deictic with noun in predicative apposition with adjectivalized deictic adverbial); and (d) that entity - the dog whic;: is there (deictic and noun in equative apposition with adjectivalized deictic adverbial). L. then adds ingenuov~ly that of these four different forms (b) is the most normal and common. Admittedly, a parent might say to a child on a visit to the zoo that axolotl with two different senses, locative/descriptive and locative/identificatory. More ambiguities require strong motivation, however, it seems to me, even if there is the only deictic particle at one acquisitior~al stage. One other problem for L.'s suggestion has to be the fact that many languages can dispense with the definite article and yet have no problem developing definite singular referring expressions. These languages, and presumably all languages, have deictic particles but it is the locative part (article) that is sacrificed while the descriptive part (common noun) is retained in adult grammar. That must mean that the derivation of that d~;g, i.e. [that[that= dog[dog there]]] =~ [that [dog there]] ~ [that [there[dog ]]] =~ [tl~at-there[dog ]] ~ [that [dog ]], would b~ interrupted or incomplete at some stage. $~uren's 'Referential constraints on lexical items' is concerned with the fact that the ~xpr~ssion undergoing object incorporation is never a referring expression. The framework employed makes use of lexical decomposition in the manner of generative ~mantics. This paper will no doubt be useful for those working in a particular model. For outsiders, the constraints S. develops fail to transcend the edifices of this particular theory.

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Dahl's well-argued paper 'On generics' takes the difference between accidental generalizations and nomic or lawlike generalizations to be the distinction expressed by generic NP's and some uses of the verb tenses. One of the major points is that this division basically allows us to avoid drawing the unwanted conclusion that a single counterexample makes the statement false, for example: (25) Dogs have four legs. can still hold if there are three-legged dogs. D. introduces a further division that may have grammatical significance. Some nomic statements are descriptive and some are normative. The fit'st case refers to someone's innate and acquired capacities and abilities, while the second cc,ncerns principles of behavior. People may not speak a language by virtue of ignorance or choice. There is a difference in German that occurs to me in which such a distinction is explicit. The sentence John is not a doctor can be encoded in two ways"

(26b) Hans ist kein Arzt. The first version means that John simply is not a physician, whereas the second could involve a judgment of this person's abilities; his behavior is deviant or he is incompetent. Taking generics as statements about what situations would be like ia alternative worlds also gives us a start on analyzing verbs of disposition like smoking or drinking. It will not do, as D. points out, to simply claim that at some time in all alternative worlds that person, of whom it is said he smokes, is smoking. Rather, one will want to express the fact that this individual is a regular user of tobacco, i.e. courses of events in alternative worlds must be compared. The use of modal logic in the analysis of generics is indeed strongly suggestive of how some of the semantic problems can be resolved. Nevertheless, the real dilemma has to be the choice of tense, the articles and plurality to encode such semantic categories. On that we find little help here. Colin Biggs' paper 'Quantifiers, definite descriptions, and reference', though contained in the section on reference, covers some: of the same ground as Partee. The question under discussion here is whether quantified NP's refer and what kind of reference is involved. Most of the examples treat instances in wlhich a repeated occurrence of an N P yields sentences that are not synonyr~ous with sentences containing a pronoun in place of the second NP, i.e." (27a) Everyone hates everyone. (27b) Everyone hates himself. (28a) All optimists e~pect all optimists to be President. (28b) All optimists expect to be President. (29a) The shortest linguist in the world expects the shortest linguist to be discriminated against. (29b) The shortest linguist in the world expects (himself) to be discriminated against.

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The claim that B. is out to establish is that no structure containing two corefere~tial tokens of a quantified NP is a plausible underlying form for (28). Apparently I~. understands 'coreferential' to mean token identity of the quantified NP's. When B o remarks that pronouns of laziness (deletion) cannot apply to these cases as "Mos~ people seem to have abandoned, at least for such cases (as above), the notion that pronouns go proxy", then he means ten years ago, when quantifiers overturned the Lees and Klima (1963) and Chomsky (1965) theories. The underlying form for (28a) in B.'s view demands a representation of the form: (30) (Vx) (x is an optimist -~ x expects that ((Vy) (y is an optimist -~ y be President)) Apparently, there is some speech act contribution to the meaning, since (30) is to represent a "commitment by the speaker". Little is said about its influence, however. In fact, little is said about how (30) is to be interpreted. If expects is not being taken as an intensioaal verb, then much of what B. says cannot be correct, but no instructions as to interpretation are offered. Of (30) it is simply claimed: First, any suggestion that there are two tokens (two quantified NPs) which are coreferential has been removed in (8) [our 30 - JAE]. Secondly, it is not a consequence of our representation that if x is an optimist x expects to be President; nor, more generally, is it the case l hat All optimists expect (themselves) to be President is a consequence of (in the sense of being logically entailed by) that representation. These are two curious statements. The expression (30) is written in the syntax of predicate logic and the notion coreferential, identical tokens or the like has no meaning tha~ I can imagine. And more seriously, if intensionality plays no role here, then the second claim, under usual assumptions, will be falsified for that case when x=y. The problem with this paper lies in the fact that the undefined term coreference is so intertwined in developing the aims of the paper that it looks as if the author is out to prove soraething that no one would really dispute, i.e. that no string containing two full quantified NP's can be the source of sentences like (27b), (28b) and (29b). It is also strange that this paper reveals no apparent influence from the work of Montague or his followers, who have spent a great deal of time discussing such sentences. Kamp's eclectic article ' T w o theories about adjectives', which opens the section on intensions and syntax, has to be one of the best contributions in the volume. K. begins by restating and refining Montague's claim that adjectives have to be functors on common nouns, i.e. underlyingly attributive, and semantically functions from properties tc~ properties. The arguments for this analysis are famous by now, because of the semantic character of the adjectives in small elephant, expectant mother and alleged murderer. K. defines four classes that depend on the kind of set theoretical operation performed on the common noun: (a) predicative in - a class whose members act like independent predicates intersected with the common noun; (b) privative in - the intersection of such properties and the common noun property must be the empty set, e.g. mock in mock turtle; (c) affirmative- reduces the common noun

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property to a subset of itself, e.g. heavy in heavy book and heavy in heavy dinosaur; (d) extensional- operates only on the extension of the common noun. Montague in thb~ assumption radically departs from the usual linguistic treatment of attributive adjectives as moved predicative adjectives; some languages, like Bahasa Indonesia, seem to have only predicative adjectives. He is induced to this step by the existence of non-extensional adjectives such as skillful. It must not follow that, given that all and only cobblers are dart players, then all skillful cobblers are skillful dart players. K. then goes on to consider a second theory of adjectives more in line with the traditional linguistic and logical analyses. He considers it imperative that an adequate theory be able to derive the meaning of comparatives and superlatives from the positive degree of the adjective. This second theory attempts to vindicate the assumption that adjectives, nouns and intransitive verbs are all of a single kind: one-place predicates. But, if adjectives were ordinary predicates, the theory would break down, as Montague has shown. K. attempts to have his cake and eat it too by developing " a semantical framework in which the idea of a predicate being true of an entity to a certain degree can be made coherent and precise". In his view a resolution in favor of adjectives as predicates is possible in terms of a theory of vagueness and contextual disambiguation in natural language. K. then proceeds on a tour de force through many-valued model theory, vagueness and partial interpretation, probability and context sensitive model theory in search of an adequate framework with such virtuosity and lucidity that the reader is left at the end with a feeling of near vertigo at the heights he has scaled. K. ends by trying to account for the fact that adjectives, unlike nouns, can easily form comparatives, even though both ef them seem to be in some sense vague. He speculates that a rough explanation lies in the fact that the degrees to which an object satisfies an a~ective are easily discriminated, whereas the distinguishing properties of a noun tend to cluster together and comparing such complexes of features simultaneously is not, in general, easily done. Besides that, nouns tend to be sharper predicates than adjectives; the extension gap is~ in actual fact, relatively small and it is when two objects are not clearly in or outside of the predicate's extension that a comparative is useful. All the problems are not, however, solved. Though the noun must determine the criteria or standards for the adjective that modifies it, the vagueness of four-legged vs. heavy contrasts so greatly that one might feel that clear differences are being ignored. A further problem is that adjectives like alleged cannot, under any circumstance according to H., be viewed as predicates and thus it is necessary to assume two separate derivational strategies with all the attendant consequences. The importance of this article for linguists is that it demonstrates how semantic vagueness can provide additional arguments in favol~ of a particular analysis when the syntactic solution is anything but clear; the model theory evolves into something more than an arbitrary set theoretical construct of the appropriat~ sort. The prime question for Kutschera in 'Partial interpretation' concerns whether a three-valued logic or a two.valued logic is more suited for analyzing syntactically well.formed but semantically meaningless expressions, e.g. violations of selectional restrictions, nonexisting objects and presuppos[tional failure. To test the competing t h e o r i e s - K, also discusses two otl~er proposals p e r i p h e r a l l y - a Montague-like grammar fragment is developed.

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Up to this point in the article K. has expressed the aim and methodology in clear and nondense prose. When he begins to formalize, however, let the tyro beware. For concentration of formulas, definitions and rules, and sparseness of text K. is probably without a rival in this book. In less than four pages he constructs a categorial syntax, extensiional and intensional interpretations and pragmatics. Part 3 is dedicated to extending the fragment to partial interpretations for both extensions and intensions. This means, in the first case, that the valuation M(a) is not defined for all constants a of the categories sentence and proper name. Unlike free logics, however, K. adjusts the universal quantifier so that universal instantiation holds and so that a universal stater,~ent All A's are B is true only for the A's that are defined. Intensions and pragmatics are made to work together to account for presuppositions. Presupposition is so defined that a sentence has an intension in a world i even if it has no extension in i due to a presuppositional failure. Part 4 deals with recasting the just developed two-valued logic with partial interpretation into the mould of three-valued logic. Extensionally, every category is expanded to take on the value 'meaningless'. The surprising claim in this part is that " t h e rIse of partial functions is unavoidable, as for instance in the treatment of presuppositions of indirect sentences". Clearly, this assertion touches the much discussed prqjection problem for presupposition. Since other investigators have made suggestion,.; for treating this problem without partial functions, K. really needs to support thJis assertion more extensively to remain credible. This is all the more the case as K. will close by seeing partial interpretations as equivalent to but more basic than three-valued interpretations. Despite these split hairs, the article as a whole is a serious attempt to deal with an important and diffict~lt problem. Bartsch's 'Subcategorization of adnomimal and adverbial modifiers' presents a novel way to account for the different sentence positions, restrictions on verb choice and negation as well as the consequences for the semantics that an adverb can assume, cf.: (31a) Strangely, John opened the door. (31b) Jc,hn strangely opened the door. (3!c) John opened the door strangely. With this example B. makes the important observation that the categorial distinction is not sufficient to catch all the subcategorial differences that have to be taken into account to guarantee syntactic wellformedness. Subcategorization of the functions in which strange can appear are assumed to be beyond the lexical content of this word. In the remainder of the paper B. presents the various levels of a model Natural Generative Grammar and illustrates how it might work for modifiers. The following two papers by Heidrich and Stechow, respectively, are unrelated in topic but share the common feature that they approach near unreadability at some points due; to the idiosyncratic nature of the formalism and the peculiar selection of problem. The first deals with mapping generative semantics onto intensional logic and the second with the development of a semantic theory relating' partial meanings'. In two very similar articles Jardin and Ports rail against the use of model theory as

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an appropriate metaconstruct for a theo~' of truth and a theory of consequence for natural language. They assert in chorus t~at whatever success model theory has had in this respect it is merely a corroboratic a. ~f "the uncontroversial claim that natural language can capture fragments of maAG iormal languages". In their view any attempt to "break out of the confines of language and show how the latter'hooks onto the w o r l d ' " is futile, since model theory is an assembly of nonperceivable structures. In mathematics, model theory is used as ~ kind of translation into a known metalanguage; more is not needed. Both also point out important diff'erences between formal languages and natural languages. Unfortunately, neither presents any suitably detailed alternative solution to model theory and this rather tends to make it easier for us to ignore their valid criticism. The fifth topic opens with Lakoff's 'Pragmatics in natural logic'. This article aims at integrating a treatment of indexicals and conversational implicature into the formal semantics of what L. calls 'natural logic'. That wbdch is normally seen as part of pragmatics would be incorporated into the semantics of natural logic. The basic ingredients for this suggestion are: (a) the performative analysis, (b) eliminating coordinates for indexicals, i.e. speaker, hearer, etc., and employing points of reference only to assignment coordinates for variables and atomic predicates; (c) subsuming variables of social interaction, politeness, cooperation, etc. under the formal characterization of natural logic; and (d) global, transderivational fuzzy correspondence grammars. L. begins by noting that his independent proposal parallels that found in David Lewis' 'General semantics' - questions, imperatives and promises should be seen as containing implicit performatb,e verbs. L. faults Lewis, however, for not "going all the way with the performative analysis; in particular, he [Lewis] refuses to embrace a similar analysis for declaratives". L. claims that Lewis is misguided because he says that the sentence: (32) I state that the earth is flat.

does not commit the speaker to the earth's being flat but only to his saying so. L. correctly observes that speakers are legally responsible for the content of their statements. But Lewis is concerned about truth conditions and not about the commitment of the speaker and this is the confusion that pervades much of this paper. After several readings of the text, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that L. is out to systematically blur the distinction between metalanguage and object language. Consider, for example, the claim L. often repeats, that "the surface adjective true has come to be used as a technical term by many logicians". True enough, but it is clear from the examples that 'technical term' does not mean for L. that the truth predicate is defined in the metalanguage. Instead, conditions of appropriate use for the predicates true and false must be established. This assumption forces L. to claim that: (33a) It is false that all Cretans are liars. (33b) It is true that all Cretans are liars.

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are appropriate for anyone except those coming from C r e t e - strange appropriateness conditions indeed. L. also uses 'satisfaction' in a way that is at the least unorthodox, There I use the neutral '1' to indicate satisfaction, both in the cases of performatives and nonperfotmatives. When I speak of felicity values, I do not mean to suggest, incidentally, that there is a new kind of value called a felicity value, but rather that there is only one kind of value, a satisfaction value, and that the surface adjectives felicitous and true are to be taken as indicating satisfaction in the case of performatives and nonperformat~ves respectively. But surely, satisfaction must entail something like a felicity value just as this term entails a truth value when it is normally used. In any case, something so crucial to L.'s theory as this would require a great deal more justification than is found here. There is much in L.'s discussion of entailment and conversational implicature that is worthwhile reading. These parts are certainly the strongest sections in this long paper. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt about the failure of the program taken in its entirety because of the misguided notion of truth. Isard's 'Changing the context' advocates incorporating the r,~ference point used to evaluate one sentence into the context for evaluating the next. In other words, it will not do to simply let the proposition map a reference point onto a truth value without instructions on how this point is to be absorbed into the context, cf. Smaby (1976). The major contribution in I.'s paper, it seems to me, consists in providing some telling examples pointing out that pronouns demand updating the point of reference in mid-utterance. Failure to appreciate this important observation has led to the claim that and can have two, three or even an infinite number of interpretations, cf. Cresswell (1973) and Posner (1978). (34a) Mary got married and (then) had a baby. (Temporal sequence) (34b) The King was in the counting house and was (there) counting out his money. (Local sequence) (34c) You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. (If-then sequence) If the reference point of time, place and world (circumstance) is absorbed into the context before evaluating the second proposition of each of the above sentences, then only one meaning for and need be postulated. But - and this is also the problem with I. - how do we know we have to update before proceeding in (34) and not in (35) (on one reading at least).

(35) John sang and danced. Lack of space prevents me from really doing justice to the next two papers by 5gall and Vennemann, respectively. The first presents (a) some suggestioas for classifying presuppositions, assertions and points of reference, (b) the concepts of juncture and hierarchy of communicative dynamisms, (c) a semantically based generative description with neither global constraints nor transformations. The formalism is from dependency theort.

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Vennemann is out to describe a very similar field of data in terms of Natural Generative Grammar. Presuppositions are not associated with the individual sentence but with a pool in the discourse. These have the status of axioms that delimit the range of the theorems, i.e. possible extensions of the discourse. The topic is the unit ae individual focused on for the discourse. Each sentence itself contains a theme (refi "ring back to the topic) and theme predicating something of it. F,~ the nonspecialist no area of linguistic study appears more confused and confus,~,g than this one. Judging from the near constant revisions of terminology, even e x e r t s must still be a bit at sea in these areas. Thus, these papers may aid in collecting the facts and handling parts of the problem. Nevertheless, I suspect that the definitive treatment of these phenomena is still to be written. l'he last contribution in this section is Yorick Wilks' 'Preference semantics', a treatment in terms of the artificial intelligence framework. Preference semantics is a set of formal procedures representing meaning with the emphasis on understanding instead of deriving meanings by sorting the well-formed sentences from the nonwell-formed. This model contains no independent syntax base to steer the interpretation, only a series of levels: (a) a set of semantic primitives structured into lexical decomposition trees, (b) structured items called templates, which organize the wordtrees into phrases and clauses, and (c) structures at higher levels, constructed from paraplates. The term 'preference' has been chosen to emphasize that an inductive inference strategy is to be followed in interpretation so that, should a preferred path fail due to a mis-analysis, then alternatives must be attempted. In the 'derivational' paradigm there is no provision for failure. W. argues that an inferential strategy is what we need, for humans do not reject sentences, they try to understand them. With this sort of approach, claims W., we might be able to account for the fact that (36a) is a possible metaphorical use while (36b) is not: (36a) My car drinks gasoline. (36b) The crook drank a glass of water. (Where crook means a shepard's staff) Animal actors are 'preferred' as the subject of drink; but in the case of (36b) no such possibility exists. While metaphors are probably not the best basis on which to build a case for a 'non-failsafe' semantic strategy that can operate from the outside in, there are appealing aspects to W.'s suggestion. Pronouns might constitute a more convincing case. But to eliminate syntax not just from its central position in the theory, but to do away with it entirely, is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Much of language typology and questions of crosslinguistic encoding would become irrelevant to describing language behavior. On the other hand, there exist some models for doing semantics with syntax that might be compatible with making choices that could lead to a failure, e.g. Hintikka's (1974) game semantics. W.'s own proposal for handling some English sentences will probably not find too many supporters among linguists. With the exception of categories like subject, object, source and goal much of the terminology and concepts, e.g. bare templates, an extreme version of lexical decomposition, heads and semantic density, possess no clear intuitive counterparts and W. scoffs at arguing for any of these categories linguistically:

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I describe the system in a rough and ready way, with nothing like an adequate justification, or motivation as the fashionable word is, of its primitive :lements and assumptions. Linguists who dislike notistandard systems, and are prone to consider them' unmotivated' per se should skip immediately to the discussion section so as not to miss the substantive point of this paper. That many linguists are not above nonstandard systems, has been aptly demonstrated by the proliferation of frameworks of late. Nevertheless, same are perhaps not quite ready to embrace phlogistonism. The final topic in the book is entitled' Semantic, s and surface syntax'. It begins with Joe Edmonds' contribution 'Assigning tense meanings after syntactic transformations' a work presented and argued in the classical Aspects tradition. The problem under discussion centers on co-occurrence restrictions in English between two classes of adverbs and the simple past tense vs. the present perfi~cL cf.: (37a) (37b) (38a) (38b)

He arrived last Tuesday. *He has :~rrived last Tuesday. As o~ thh: moment he hasn't arrived. *As of this moment he didn't arrive.

However, if the perfect form surfaces in nonfinite clauses, then this verb form is compatible with either adverb type. (39a) He appears to have arrived last Tuesday. (39b) He appears not to have arrived as of this moment. E. argues that the best solution to capture the restriction in finite clauses and the lack of a restriction in transformed clauses should be stated by inserting lexical information into the tree "'after the rules producing nonfinite clauses including TENSEdeletion apply". In a footnote at the end of the article, however, E. takes it all back. He says he would now prefer an analysis that generates the symbol PAST at two places in the base, one under the AUX node and one in the VP. Nonfinite clauses ensue by deleting the TENSE symbol. This latter proposal is, in my opinion, certainly a much more appealing approach than the first version. Intuitively, the have -en forms in nonfinite clauses in English are simply markers of past and not of perfect aspect. There is no reason to expect a clash with punctual adverbs of the type last Tuesday. The formal solution also rends the structure of the theory less than E.'s first suggestion. In 'Towards a formal treatment of aspect' Fuchs and Rouault propose to show how "the linguistic phenomena of aspect can be treated within the framework of an FRG (French Recognition Grammar)". The central place in F./R.'s theory is ~ u p i e d by a structure called a lexis. It resembles a kind of relational network with ordering among the parts.

obvious ~Qun~ere~~~

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(mostly from the area of complementation) arrived at on the basis of distributional and transformational behavior were compared for this kernel segment of the French verbal lexicon. Some of G.'s conclusions are: (a) the property [_+ human] is of little importance; not many verbs are sensitive to it; (b) there exist structural pairs that are clearly not transformationally related and yet these verbs share some common distributional and semantic properties; (c) when some purely syntactic properties are linked together as the determining criteria, a single semantic class can be singled out, e.g. the verbs of/ethical judgment/, o r / m o v e m e n t / a n d of/causative of movement/. Interestingly, G. also found that "[... ] in French there are no two verbs that have exactly the same syntactic properties" and "[...] there are no two syntactic properties that have the same distribution over the lexicon". This result has to be considered unexpected corroboration for tb~. oft uttered observation that exact synonymy must perish and furthermore, that part of this law is the cause or the effect of syntactic diversity. Should the lock-step of syntactic and semantic properties prove true of still other languages, then the study of purely formal syntactic properties may give us a new tool for determining suitable semantic categories. Keenan's 'Logical exvressive_ .Dower and syntactic'__.... -,..wr;~*;'~".,....,..in ,,,,,u,"~" ....,,,I language' is also one of the stronger contributions in this volume. It takes as the starting point the enlightening position that there is linguistic interest beyond purely logical notions like entailment, presupposition and true answer for formulating the formal semantics of natural language. The logical structure can often aid in explaining syntactic variation crosslinguistically. K. illustrates this claim with three examples: (a) the variable ability of languages to relativize on NP's out of difficult positions; (b) the variable ability of languages to mark coreference of NP positions and (c) many languages encode indirect questions embedded under a factive verb and restrictive relative clauses identically. The point of the first principle K. develops is that languages that retain pronouns i~ relative structures can, in general, relativize on more NP positions than those that do qot. Persian is, for example, such a pronoun retaining language: (41) Mardi: ke John u ra va zan-ag ra mi-zanad dar Chicago zindegi i aan that John him obj and wife his obj hit in Chicago lives mi:konad. 'The man that John hit (him) and his wife lives in Chicago'. K.'s explanation: if restrictives are taken to be modi~er sentences tha~ are true of a smaller class of individuals than a~re true of the heao NP, then pronoun-retaining languages preserve more of this sentence on the surfac~e than non-pronoun.retaining languages. Consequently, more difficult positions become accessible to relativizafion. This explanation seems to me less than totally convincing because relative con,~mJe~ions in such pronoun-retaining languages tend to look more like complement structures than relatives. The introductory particle is typicaUy invariant as to case etc. and the same as the complement particle that, which is, by the way, also true of English. In fact, as soon as the complement such that replaces who(m) etc., nearly all difficult structures become accessible in English.

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(42a) The man such that he and the woman live in Chicago (42b) The man such that John believes the rumor that Mary kissed him (42c) The man such that I saw the woman who kissed him Thus, K. is probably making the right claim but possibly comparing apples and oranges. Relatives and complements are often difficult to distinguish, but one criterion might just be that the latter are sentences while the former are syntactically non-sentences, cf. Edmondson (to appear). K.'s second case compares the marking of pronouns, reflexive and non-reflexive, in different positions. Some languages possess special reflexive forms while others can mark reflexives only with the nonreflexive form or with zero; some can mark reflexives only in the object position of the same clause and others in positions in the embedded clause. K. has no explanation for this phenomenon. Some reasons for this are found in Edmondson (1978). The third and strongest of K.'s cases is a demonstration that (43a) John knows the route the plane took. (43b) John knows which route the plane took. are identically encoded in many languages, even though direct questions and relatives may be distinct. This can occur, K. argues, because these two structures are semantically equivalent. Haj Ross' 'Clausematiness' is a classical syntactic study of the gradient nature of the sentence boundary and the influence of such a squish on rule application or inhibition. The rules discussed are: (a) Equi; (b) Gapping; (c) suspension of presupposition; (d) Subjunctive Sinking; (e) if... any; (f) sequences of tenses; (g) raising ; (h) Not.hopping; and (i) Clitic-Climbing (for Roma-,ce). Each of these is investigated with respect to the ability of a certain verb class to undergo it. The verb classes are lypified by: surprise; learn; know; want; try; auxiliaries and predicate raising verbs. As one expects from R., the style is breezy and the text heavily laden with many stimulating unsolved problems dropped between the lines. There can remain little doubt at the end that the gradient nature of natural languages is a fact for syntactic study to reckon with. How central this fact is to the theory construction (cf. a similar discussion in phonology found in Bailey 1973), must await a more concrete proposal on how to describe and explain R.'s data. As far as I can see, semantic factors have played no role in the thinking that has gone into this problem to date. The articles by Keenan, Kam~ and Gross in this volume, however, are strongly suggestive that there may be more than syntax at work here. In closing, I suppose a general statement about the value of this book as a whole is in order. This is a difficult question because of the extreme heterogeneity in subject matter, formalism and quality. I rather suspect that a current collection of papers on this topic would be less diverse than this one. In the not too distant past there are some obvious parallels to be found in coUections of pre- and p0st-1965 syntax. Keenan's Formal semantics of natural language has the unique distinction- and thus it differs from Steinberg and Jakobovits (1971) and Davidson and Harman (1972)of being the first collection to app,~,ar after the turning point established by Montague. For this reason alone, it is probably worth looking at.

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References Altham, J.E.J., 1971. The logic of plurality. London: Methuen. Aqvist, L., 1975. A new approach to the logical theory of interrogatives. T0bingen: Gunter Narr. Bailey, C-J.N., 1973. Variation and linguistic theory. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics. Belnap, N.D., 1963. An analysis of questions: Preliminary report. Santa Monica: Systems Development Corp. Chomsky, N., 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Cresswell, M.J., 1973. Logics and languages. London: Methuen. Davidson, D.L., and G. Harman, 1972. Semantics of natural language. Dordrecht: Reidel. Edmondson, J.A., 1978. Ergative languages, reflexive pronouns and questions of formal grammar. In: Groenendijk and Stokhof (eds.), Amsterdam papers in formal grammar 11. Edmondson, J.A., to appear. Crosslinguistic encoding of relative clauses. MS. Edmondson: J.A., and F. Plank, 1978. Great expectations: Preliminaries to an intensive self-an:,:ysis. Linguistics and Philosophy. Hamblin.. C L ., .1976. . . . . . grammar, in: B. Partee (ed.), Montague . Questions . . in hA,,.,, ,-,-,,,~Su~ gramnt~tr. New York: Academic Press. Hintikka, L, 1974. Quantifiers vs. quantification theory. Linguistic Inquiry 5, 153-178. Karttuner~ L., 1975. Syntax and semantics of questions. Paper read at the 1975 Winter Meeti,~g of the LSA in San Francisco. Lees, R.B., and E.S. Klima, lo63. Rules for English pronominalization. In: Reibel and Shane (eds.), Medern studies in English. Englewood Cliffs, N.J." Prentice-Hall. Mayerthaler, W., 1978 (to appear). Morphologische Nattirlichkeit. Frankfurt a/M: Athenaion. Partee, B., 1973. Opacity, coreference and pronouns. In: D.L. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of natural language. Dordrecht: Reidel. Posner, R., ?~78. Meaning and use of sentence connectives in natural language. In: F. Kiefer and Searle (eds.), Speech act theory and pragmatics. Amsterdam: NorthH~llancl. Smaby, R., 1976 (to appear). Ambiguous coreference with quantifiers. In: G0nthner and Schmid~ (eds.), Proceedings of the Bad Homburg conference on formal semantics. Steinberg, D.D., and L.A. Jakobovits, 1971. Semantics. An interdisciplinary reader in philosophy, linguistics and psychology. London: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Jan Dorul'a, Slovhci v dejinhch j a z y k o ~ c h vzt'ahov ('The Slovaks in the history of linguistic relations'). Vydavatel'stvo Slovenskej Akad6mie Vied, Bratislava, i977. 135 pp., resum6s in Russian and German. Reviewed 0y Herbert Galton, Dept. of Slavic Languages, Univ. of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66045, U.S.A. The purpose of this book must be seen in the light of the post-war linguistic situation in Czechoslovakiao Czech is, of course, the Slavic language with the oldest independent and unbroken literary tradition, since the 13th century, but Slovak has been successfully codified since the middle of the last century only. That codification,