Blackwell Reference Online

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Formal semantics has roots in several disciplines, most importantly logic, philosophy, and linguistics. The most important figure in its history was Richard Montague, a logician and philosopher whose seminal works in this area date from the late 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s; its subsequent development has been a story of fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration among linguists, philosophers, logicians, and others, and by now formal semantics can be pursued entirely within linguistics as well as in various interdisciplinary settings. At the time of Montague's work, semantics had been a lively and controversial field of research for centuries, and radically different approaches to it could be found across various disciplines. One source of deep differences was (and still is) the selection of the object of study: the central questions of semantics may come out quite differently if one focusses on language and thought, or on language and communication, on language and truth, or on language “structure” per se. A more accidental but no less profound source of differences is the research methodology prevalent in the field within which one approaches questions of semantics. Thus early generative linguists concentrated first on “semantic features”, using methodology influenced by phonology to study questions of lexical meaning borrowed in part from psychology (which emphasized concept ... log in or subscribe to read full text