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Re: [ontolog-forum] Barbara Partee on Formal Semantics

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Philip Jackson <philipcjacksonjr@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 06:45:20 -0500
Message-id: <SNT147-W76E292D9F190E67FA306FC1620@xxxxxxx>
Research on "natural logic" is an intersection between work on formal semantics and the approach to natural language proposed by my thesis.  Partee's paper mentions a talk in 1970 by Lakoff about a paper he wrote on natural logic.
 
Given the amount of previous research on artificial intelligence and natural language, it was inevitable some relevant research would not be discussed in my Ph.D. thesis.  So, I've started writing a Postscript about additional research topics. The first version focuses on natural logic research, and is included at this link.
 

Phil 
> Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 11:54:19 -0400
> From: sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx
> To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [ontolog-forum] Barbara Partee on Formal Semantics
>
> I came across a 52-page review of the development of formal
> semantics, which Barbara Partee published in 2011. See below
> for the URL and a copy of the concluding paragraph.
>
> Barbara earned a PhD at MIT (Chomsky as thesis adviser) and
> began teaching linguistics at UCLA, where she joined Richard
> Montague and Hans Kamp in pioneering work in combining formal
> semantics with the complexity of NLs. This review is a history
> of the field by one of the leading developers and promoters.
>
> My major criticism is about the size of the "grain of truth"
> by which she minimizes George Lakoff's criticisms. I have
> a high regard for both Barbara and George. Both of them were
> graduate students of Chomsky's around the same time, and they
> both have important points to make (although I prefer Barbara's
> style to George's sometimes excessive hyperbole).
>
> My very short critique is that Barbara and George are equally
> correct about the aspects of language they emphasize, and
> equally wrong about the aspects of the other that they dismiss
> or minimize. There is, of course, much more that could be said.
>
> John
> ______________________________________________________________
>
> http://newprairiepress.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=biyclc
>
> FORMAL SEMANTICS: ORIGINS, ISSUES, EARLY IMPACT
> by Barbara H. Partee
>
> [Concluding paragraph]
>
> I should note a criticism that comes from Lakoff and other “Cognitive
> Linguists”: formal semanticists don’t work on metaphor, because
> formal semantics is inadequate for dealing with metaphor, and deals
> only with ’easy’ parts of natural language. There is probably a grain
> of truth to this, and it is undoubtedly connected with the relative
> narrowness of treatments of lexical meaning within formal semantics.
> (Formal semanticists have a great deal to say about the semantics of
> “logical words”, and about aspects of the semantics of open-class words
> that impinge directly on their contribution to compositional meaning,
> but very little to say about what distinguishes the meanings of open-
> class words whose more ‘formal’ properties are alike.) I don’t believe
> that formal semantics will ever account for ‘all of meaning’. But I
> believe that it does very well at accounting for the truth-conditional
> core of literal meaning, which is not handled in any explicit way
> within Cognitive Linguistics. And we’re getting better at solving
> problems, and there is progress on semantic issues in language
> typology, language history, language acquisition, pragmatics and
> discourse, computational linguistic applications, and more. And as
> the field has made progress, new questions have opened up. I have
> really not said anything about the work of the last thirty years,
> and it is that work by which the fruitfulness of the field can best
> be judged.
>
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