Formal Semantics

Paul Portner is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Acting Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science at Georgetown University. He is the author of numerous articles on topics such as mood and modality, tense and aspect, and the syntax/semantics interface. Barbara H. Partee is Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is the author of several landmark essays in formal semantics. She has written and edited numerous books, including Mathematical Methods in Linguistics (with Alice ter Meulen and Robert Wall, 1990), Montague Grammar (edited, 1976), and Quantification in Natural Languages (edited, with Emmon Bach, Eloise Jelinek, and Angelika Kratzer, 1995).

"This volume contains a well-balanced selection of great papers covering fifteen vibrant years of semantic research. My own definition of a classic paper is a paper that is endlessly borrowed by students, but rarely returned. The papers in this volume all share the property that somewhere in the world somebody owns my copy of them. It's great to find them all collected here." Fred Landman, Tel Aviv University "Truth-conditional semantics has its roots in the work of Frege and analytic philosophy, which was designed to overcome the vagueness, ambiguities, and dubious ontological commitments of natural language. Curiously, this intellectual tradition provided the very foundation for the serious study of meaning in natural language. This collection of seminal articles bears witness to this astonishing development; it should be essential reading for linguists and philosophers who are seriously interested in linguistic meaning." Manfred Krifka, Humboldt University

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1Paul Portner and Barbara Partee1 The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English 17Richard Montague2 A Unified Analysis of the English Bare Plural 35Greg Carlson3 Generalized Quantifiers and Natural Language 75Jon Barwise and Robin Cooper4 The Logical Analysis of Plurals and Mass Terms 127Godehard Link5 Assertion 147Robert C Stalnaker6 Scorekeeping in a Language Game 162David Lewis7 Adverbs of Quantification 178David Lewis8 A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation 189Hans Kamp9 File Change Semantics and the Familiarity Theory of Definiteness 223Irene Heim10 On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions 249Irene Heim11 Toward a Semantic Analysis of Verb Aspect and the English 'Imperfective' Progressive 261David R Dowty12 The National Category of Modality 289Angelika Kratzer13 The Algebra of Events 324Emmon Bach14 Generalized Conjunction and Type Ambiguity 334Barbara Partee and Mats Rooth15 Noun Phrase Interpretation and Type Shifting Principles 357Barbara H Partee16 Syntax and Semantics of Questions 382Lauri Karttunen17 Type-Shifting Rules and the Semantics of Interrogatives 421Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof18 On the Notion Affective in the Analysis of Negative-Polarity Items 457William A LadusawIndex 471