Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Despite their diversity, natural languages have many fundamental features in common. From the perspective of Universal Grammar (see, e.g., Chomsky 1986), such languages as English, Navajo, Japanese, Swahili, and Turkish are far more similar to one another than they are to the formal languages of logic. Most obviously, natural language expressions fall into lexical categories (parts of speech) that do not correspond to the categories of logical notation, and some of them have affixes, including prefixes, suffixes, and markings for tense, aspect, number, gender, and case. Moreover, logical formalisms have features that languages lack, such as the overt presence of variables and the use of parentheses to set off constituents. The conditions on well-formed formulas in logic (WFFs) are far simpler than those on well-formed (grammatical) sentences of natural languages, and the rules for interpreting WFFs are far simpler than those for interpreting grammatical sentences. Compare any book on syntax and any book on formal logic and you will find many further differences between natural languages and formal languages. There are too many approaches to the syntax of natural languages to document these differences in detail. Fortunately, we will be able to discuss particular examples and some general issues without assuming any particular syntactic framework.We will focus mainly on logically ... log in or subscribe to read full text