Logical Structure And Linguistic Structure

In comparative syntax a general approach has been pursued over the past decade predicated on the notion that Universal Grammar allows of open parameters, and that part of the job of linguistic theory is to specify what values these parameters may have, and how they may be set, given primary linguistic data, to determine the grammars of particu lar languages. The papers presented in this volume are also concerned with language variation understood in this way. Their goals, however, do not strictly fall under the rubric of comparative syntax, but form part of what is more properly thought of as a comparative semantics. Semantics, in its broadest sense, is concerned with how linguistic structures are associated with their truth-conditions. A comparative semantics, therefore, is concerned with whether this association can vary from language to language, and if so, what is the cause of this variation. Taking comparative semantics in this way places certain inherent limitations on the search for the sources of variability. This is because the semantic notion of truth is universal, and does not vary from language to language: Sentences either do or do not accurately characterize what they purport to describe. ! The source of semantic variability, therefore, must be somehow located in the way a language is structured.

Noam Chomsky is Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. David W. Lightfoot is Professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA. 'Chomsky's book on syntactic structures is one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is ordinarily understood by experts in those fields. It is not a mere reorganization of the data into a new kind of library catalog, nor another speculative philosophy about the nature of Man and Language, but rather a rigorous explication of our intuitions about our language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data and other intuitions, all based plainly on an overt theory of the internal structure of languages; and it may well provide an opportunity for the application of explicit measures of simplicity to decide preference of one form over another form of grammar. 'Robert B. Lees in : 'Language' 'I had already decided I wanted to be a linguist when I discovered this book. But it is unlikely that I would have stayed in the field without it. It has been the single most inspiring book on linguistics in my whole career.' HenkvanRiemsdijk.

No detailed description available for "Syntactic Structures".

This book is devoted to elementary formal logic and metalogic, and their applications to language.

This study focuses on the relation of syntactic and semantic structure. It investigates the notion that within generative grammar there is a level of linguistic representation Logical Form. Its main assumption is that this is a level of phrase structure representation, derived by transformational operations from S-structure, and over which formal semantic interpretations are defined.The book explores Logical Form by focusing primarily on quantificational phenomena and on how their explicit syntactic representation interacts with various syntactic and semantic properties. Among the topics discussed are the interactions of wh and quantified phrases, bound variable anaphora, branching quantifiers, extraposition and multiple interrogation.Logical Form contains several technical innovations: the notion that LF-movement closely approximates "Move α," a new approach to characterizing quantifier scope, which makes central use of the notion of "government," a novel interpretation of the relation of syntactic nodes and categorical projections, and an application of path theory to the syntactic structure of Logical Form.Robert May is Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Barnard College, Columbia University. Logical Form is Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 12.

Available for the first time in 20 years, here is the Rudolf Carnap's famous "principle of tolerance" by which everyone is free to mix and match the rules of language and logic. In The Logical Syntax of Language, Carnap explains how his entire theory of language structure came to him like a vision when he was ill. He postulates that concepts of the theory of logic are purely syntactical and therefore can be formulated in logical syntax.