Abstract
Evidence is presented to show that the role of a generative grammar of a natural language is not merely to generate the grammatical sentences of that language, but also to relate them to their logical forms. The notion of logical form is to be made sense of in terms a ‘natural logic’, a logical for natural language, whose goals are to express all concepts capable of being expressed in natural language, to characterize all the valid inferences that can be made in natural language, and to mesh with adequate linguistic descriptions of all natural languages. The latter requirement imposes empirical linguistic constraints on natural logic. A number of examples are discussed.
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This work was partially supported by grant GS-2939 from the National Science Foundation to The University of Michigan. This work is the result of lengthy and informative conversations with the following persons: Lee Bowie, Wallace Chafe, Charles Fillmore, Georgia Green, Gilbert Harman, Lawrence Horn, Robin Lakoff, James D. McCawley, Jerry Morgan, Paul Neubauer, Paul Postal, Peter Railton, John R. Ross, John Tinnon and Bas Van Fraassen. In addition, I have relied heavily on observations of C. Leroy Baker and Lauri Karttunen. They are in no way responsible for any mistakes I may have made.
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Lakoff, G. Linguistics and natural logic. Synthese 22, 151–271 (1970). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00413602
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00413602