The essays in this collection are the outgrowth of a workshop, held in June 1976, on formal approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. They document in an astoundingly uniform way the develop ments in the formal analysis of natural languages since the late sixties. The avowed aim of the' workshop was in fact to assess the progress made in the application of formal methods to semantics, to confront different approaches to essentially the same problems on the one hand, and, on the other, to show the way in relating semantic and pragmatic explanations of linguistic...

The second Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter was held in Jerusalem on April 25-28, 1976. The symposium was originally planned to celebrate the 60th birthday of Y ehoshua Bar-Hillel, philosopher and friend. But his sudden death intervened, and turned celebration into commemoration. The topic of the symposiumwas Meaning and Use. For Bar-Hillel, the question 'meaning or use?' was of great importance, one which he took as a question of priorities. Which approach to natural language is prior: the formal, semantical approach, which accords a central position to the truth- functional concept of...

The essays in this collection are the outgrowth of a workshop, held in June 1976, on formal approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. They document in an astoundingly uniform way the develop ments in the formal analysis of natural languages since the late sixties. The avowed aim of the' workshop was in fact to assess the progress made in the application of formal methods to semantics, to confront different approaches to essentially the same problems on the one hand, and, on the other, to show the way in relating semantic and pragmatic explanations of linguistic...

I. MASS TERMS, COUNT TERMS, AND SORTAL TERMS Central examples of mass terms are easy to come by. 'Water', 'smoke', 'gold', etc., differ in their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties from count terms such as 'man', 'star', 'wastebasket', etc. Syntactically, it seems, mass terms do, but singular count terms do not, admit the quantifier phrases 'much', 'an amount of', 'a little', etc. The typical indefinite article for them is 'some' (unstressed) , and this article cannot be used with singular count terms. Count terms, but not mass terms, use the quantifiers 'each', 'every', 'some',...

The most general goal of this book is to propose and illustrate a program of research in word semantics that combines some of the methodology and results in linguistic semantics, primarily that of the generative semantics school, with the rigorously formalized syntactic and semantic framework for the analysis of natural languages developed by Richard Montague and his associates, a framework in which truth and denotation with respect to a model are taken as the fundamental semantic notions. I hope to show, both from the linguist's and the philosopher's point of view, not only why this...

Complementation has received a great deal of attention in the past fifteen to twenty years; various approcahes have been used to study it and different groups of complement-taking verbs have been examined. The approach taken here employs analytic techniques which have not been systematically applied before to this group of temporal aspectual verbs. In other works which have concentrated on these same verbs (perlmutter, 1968, 1970 and Newmeyer, 1969a, 1969b) few insights about the semantic properties of the verbs are formalized. In the present study, the various verbs and their complement...

Much is said in Marxist literature about Marxist methodology which is supposed to be entirely original - differing a great deal from all other trends in the modern philosophy of science. On the other hand, however, it is unfallacious to state that there are no people outside Marxism who would like to deny this statement. This has to put those who really believe that Marxism has something important to say in philosophy of science on guard: if someone says something important others usually are inclined to protest. But who is inclined to protest when it is stated that Marx em- ployed both...

This piece of work began life as a doctoral thesis written at the University of Texas between 1976 and 1978. Now after a year in Dublin it is to become a book. Of the many people in the Department of Linguistics at Texas who shaped my interests and who helped me through the writing of the thesis, I must single out Lee Baker, Lauri Karttunen, Bill Ladusaw, Sue Schmerling and Stanley Peters for special gratitude. All of them have provided specific suggestions which have improved this work, but perhaps more .importantly they provided a uniquely stimulating and harmonious environment in which to...

When the Soviet people will enjoy the [God) wQl com11Ul1ld a ble',ing on u, In ble,"ngr of Communism, new hundred, all our way" '0 that we ,hall,ee much more of Hi, wisdom, power, goodnell8, of mOlion, of people on earth will BIly: and truth than we have formerly known. 'We are for CommuniBml' It i, not We ,haH find that the God of I8TIlei is through war with other countries, but by , among U', and ten of us shall be able to the example of a more perfect organiza- tion of society, by rapid progress in rellist a thouBIlnd of our enemie,. The Lord will make our name a prai,e and developing the...

In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics." The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of...