Publications

Abstract

This paper follows the changing fortunes of Chomsky’s search for a pedigree in the history of Western thought during the late 1960s. Having achieved a unique position of supremacy in the theory of syntax and having exploited that position far beyond the narrow circles of professional syntacticians, he felt the need to shore up his theory with the authority of history. It is shown that this attempt, resulting mainly in his Cartesian Linguistics of 1966, was widely, and rightly, judged to be a radical failure, even though it led to a sudden revival of interest in the history of linguistics. Ironically, the very upswing in historical studies caused by Cartesian Linguistics ended up showing that the real pedigree belongs to Generative Semantics, developed by the same ‘angry young men’ Chomsky was so bent on destroying.

Abstract

After an exposé of the programme involved, it is shown that the Gricean maxims fail to do their job in so far as they are meant to account for the well-known problem of natural intuitions of logical entailment that deviate from standard modern logic. It is argued that there is no reason why natural logical and ontological intuitions should conform to standard logic, because standard logic is based on mathematics while natural logical and ontological intuitions derive from a cognitive system in people's minds (supported by their brain structures). A proposal is then put forward to try a totally different strategy, via (a) a grammatical reduction of surface sentences to their logico-semantic form and (b) via logic itself, in particular the notion of natural logic, based on a natural ontology and a natural set theory. Since any logical system is fully defined by (a) its ontology and its overarching notions and axioms regarding truth, (b) the meanings of its operators, and (c) the ranges of its variables, logical systems can be devised that deviate from modern logic in any or all of the above respects, as long as they remain consistent. This allows one, as an empirical enterprise, to devise a natural logic, which is as sound as standard logic but corresponds better with natural intuitions. It is hypothesised that at least two varieties of natural logic must be assumed in order to account for natural logical and ontological intuitions, since culture and scholastic education have elevated modern societies to a higher level of functionality and refinement. These two systems correspond, with corrections and additions, to Hamilton's 19th-century logic and to the classic Square of Opposition, respectively. Finally, an evaluation is presented, comparing the empirical success rates of the systems envisaged.

Abstract

The main thesis of the article is that language change is only partially subject to criteria of functionality and that, as a rule, opposing forces are also at work which often correlate directly with psychological and sociopsychological parameters reflecting themselves in all areas of linguistic competence. We sketch a complex interplay of horizontal versus vertical, deliberate versus nondeliberate, functional versus antifunctional linguistic changes, which, through a variety of processes have an effect upon the languages concerned, whether in the lexicon, the grammar, the phonology or the phonetics. Despite the overall unclarity regarding the notion of functionality in language, there are clear cases of both functionality and antifunctionality. Antifunctionality is deliberately striven for by groups of speakers who wish to distinguish themselves from other groups, for whatever reason. Antifunctionality, however, also occurs as a, probably unwanted, result of syntactic change in the acquisition process by young or adult language learners. The example is discussed of V-clustering through Predicate Raising in German and Dutch, a process that started during the early Middle Ages and was highly functional as long as it occurred on a limited scale but became antifunctional as it pervaded the entire complementation system of these languages.

Abstract

Aristotle's importance in the professional study of language consists first of all in the fact that he demythologized language and made it an object of rational investigation. In the context of his theory of truth as correspondence, he also provided the first semantic analysis of propositions in that he distinguished two main constituents, the predicate, which expresses a property, and the remainder of the proposition, referring to a substance to which the property is assigned. That assignment is either true or false. Later, the ‘remainder’ was called subject term, and the Aristotelian predicate was identified with the verb in the sentence. The Aristotelian predicate, however, is more like what is now called the ‘comment,’ whereas his remainder corresponds to the topic. Aristotle, furthermore, defined nouns and verbs as word classes. In addition, he introduced the term ‘case’ for paradigmatic morphological variation.

Abstract

The Logic of Language opens a new perspective on logic. Pieter Seuren argues that the logic of language derives from the lexical meanings of the logical operators. These meanings, however, prove not to be consistent. Seuren solves this problem through an indepth analysis of the functional adequacy of natural predicate logic and standard modern logic for natural linguistic interaction. He then develops a general theory of discourse-bound interpretation, covering discourse incrementation, anaphora, presupposition and topic-comment structure, all of which, the author claims, form the 'cement' of discourse structure. This is the second of a two-volume foundational study of language, published under the title Language from Within . Pieter Seuren discusses such apparently diverse issues as the ontology underlying the semantics of language, speech act theory, intensionality phenomena, the machinery and ecology of language, sentential and lexical meaning, the natural logic of language and cognition, and the intrinsically context-sensitive nature of language - and shows them to be intimately linked. Throughout his ambitious enterprise, he maintains a constant dialogue with established views, reflecting their development from Ancient Greece to the present. The resulting synthesis concerns central aspects of research and theory in linguistics, philosophy and cognitive science.

Abstract

Translation of the first four chapters of Western linguistics: An historical introduction (1998)

Abstract

The prime purpose of this paper is, first, to restore to discourse-bound occasion sentences their rightful central place in semantics and secondly, taking these as the basic propositional elements in the logical analysis of language, to contribute to the development of an adequate logic of occasion sentences and a mathematical (Boolean) foundation for such a logic, thus preparing the ground for more adequate semantic, logical and mathematical foundations of the study of natural language. Some of the insights elaborated in this paper have appeared in the literature over the past thirty years, and a number of new developments have resulted from them. The present paper aims atproviding an integrated conceptual basis for this new development in semantics. In Section 1 it is argued that the reduction by translation of occasion sentences to eternal sentences, as proposed by Russell and Quine, is semantically and thus logically inadequate. Natural language is a system of occasion sentences, eternal sentences being merely boundary cases. The logic hasfewer tasks than is standardly assumed, as it excludes semantic calculi, which depend crucially on information supplied by cognition and context and thus belong to cognitive psychology rather than to logic. For sentences to express a proposition and thus be interpretable and informative, they must first be properly anchored in context. A proposition has a truth value when it is, moreover, properly keyed in the world, i.e. is about a situation in the world. Section 2 deals with the logical properties of natural language. It argues that presuppositional phenomena require trivalence and presents the trivalent logic PPC3, with two kinds of falsity and two negations. It introduces the notion of Σ-space for a sentence A (or A/A, the set of situations in which A is true) as the basis of logical model theory, and the notion of PA/ (the Σ-space of the presuppositions of A), functioning as a `private' subuniverse for A/A. The trivalent Kleene calculus is reinterpreted as a logical account of vagueness, rather than of presupposition. PPC3 and the Kleene calculus are refinements of standard bivalent logic and can be combined into one logical system. In Section 3 the adequacy of PPC3 as a truth-functional model of presupposition is considered more closely and given a Boolean foundation. In a noncompositional extended Boolean algebra, three operators are defined: 1a for the conjoined presuppositions of a, ã for the complement of a within 1a, and â for the complement of 1a within Boolean 1. The logical properties of this extended Boolean algebra are axiomatically defined and proved for all possible models. Proofs are provided of the consistency and the completeness of the system. Section 4 is a provisional exploration of the possibility of using the results obtained for a new discourse-dependent account of the logic of modalities in natural language. The overall result is a modified and refined logical and model-theoretic machinery, which takes into account both the discourse-dependency of natural language sentences and the necessity of selecting a key in the world before a truth value can be assigned