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تسجيل

Truth-conditional semantics and the generative enterprise

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  C13-P449

2026-01-29

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Truth-conditional semantics and the generative enterprise

Despite reservations expressed by philosophers of language like Tarski and ‘natural language philosophers’ like Austin, the philosopher and logician Richard Montague (e.g. 1970, 1973) argued that natural language semantics could be modelled in terms of truth conditions. According to this perspective, a crucial aspect of natural language semantics relates to logical properties and relations so that natural language can be ‘translated’ into the metalanguage of predicate calculus, exposing its meaning to rigorous scrutiny and definition. In this section, we present an overview of this tradition.

Montague’s ideas have appealed to formal linguists because of the precision offered by the application of truth-conditional semantics to natural language. In particular, this approach has appealed to scholars who have sought to integrate the field of linguistic semantics with the generative grammar model developed by Chomsky. As we have seen in earlier chapters, language is viewed as a modular system in the tradition pioneered by Chomsky (see Figure 13.1). Within this model, each module represents an encapsulated system of linguistic knowledge that contains principles operating over primitives of a specific kind. For example, while the syntax module operates over grammatical categories like noun, verb, tense and so on, the phonology module operates over speech sounds representing bundles of articulatory features. Many semanticists influenced by the generative enterprise sought to develop an approach to natural language semantics that could provide a semantic representation for the grammatical representation generated by the syntax module: the sentence.