Recent developments in the semantics of natural language seem to lead to
a genuine synthesis of ideas from linguistics and logic, producing novel
concepts and questions of interest to both parent disciplines. This book
is a collection of essays on such new topics, which have arisen over the
past few years. Taking a broad view, developments in formal semantics
over the past decade can be seen as follows. At the beginning stands
Montague's pioneering work, showing how a rigorous semantics can be
given for complete fragments of natural language by creating a suitable
fit between syntactic categories and semantic types. This very
enterprise already dispelled entrenched prejudices concerning the
separation of linguistics and logic. Having seen the light, however,
there is no reason at all to stick to the letter of Montague's
proposals, which are often debatable. Subsequently, then, many
improvements have been made upon virtually every aspect of the
enterprise. More sophisticated grammars have been inserted (lately,
lexical-functional grammar and generalized phrase structure grammar),
more sensitive model structures have been developed (lately, 'partial'
rather than 'total' in their com- position), and even the mechanism of
interpretation itself may be fine-tuned more delicately, using various
forms of 'representations' mediating between linguistic items and
semantic reality. In addition to all these refinements of the semantic
format, descriptive coverage has extended considerably.