logicandlanguage.net

Gillian --

The Fefermans' new biography of Tarksi has some information on Richard Montague's life. Montague and Solomon Feferman were both PhD students of Tarski around the same time (the 1950s), so the Fs' description of his frenetic life is first-hand reporting.

I recommend the Tarski bio also, for anyone interested in the lives of the (logical) saints.

A. Feferman and S. Feferman: "Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic" (CUP, 2004). here.

You may also want to try doing a Grokker search. See the demo at:

www.groxis.com

I just bought a book on formal semantics edited by Partee the other day and it begins with Montague's "The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English", which I haven't looked at yet, but on glancing through looks not too terrible to read. Unfortunately, it was originally not in a journal but in a volume by Hintikka, Moravcsik, and Suppes.

If you really want to be obsessed with Montague though, his personal life and death sound pretty mysterious and exciting. I had heard a hint about it when I first took semantics as an undergrad, and got a bit more in the Tarski biography.

I just bought a book on formal semantics edited by Partee the other day and it begins with Montague's "The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English", which I haven't looked at yet, but on glancing through looks not too terrible to read. Unfortunately, it was originally not in a journal but in a volume by Hintikka, Moravcsik, and Suppes.

If you really want to be obsessed with Montague though, his personal life and death sound pretty mysterious and exciting (maybe "exciting" is the wrong word - "adventuresome" or "risky" might be more accurate). I had heard a hint about it when I first took semantics as an undergrad, and got a bit more in the Tarski biography.

Partree has an article on Montague Grammar in the Handbook of Logic and Language, which your library hopefully has a copy of. There's loads of handy references in that article. And, hey, while you're there, check out Moortgat's racy account of Categorial Type Logics (unfortuantely, not much in the way of motivation for the meatier bits).

I'm busy perusing Glyn Morrill's book "Type Logical Grammar - Categorial Logic of Signs", which is an account of categorial grammar building towards Moortgat-esque generalisations of Lambek Calculi. It starts from Montague Grammar though and has an intro chapter on that. Worth checking out if your library has a copy.

See if you can find a copy of Introduction to Montague Semantics, by Dowty, Wall, and Peters. much of it is an introduction to logic for linguists (not much good to you), but the last couple of chapters include a detailed analysis of a slight variation on the system developed in Montague's ‘The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English’ (which is the paper most people are talking about when they talk about ‘Montague Grammar’).

If you want to see the development of Montague's ideas on the subject, you may wish to have a look at his papers ‘English as a Formal Language’, ‘Universal Grammar’, and, of less direct relevance, ‘On the Nature of Certain Philosophical Entities’, ‘Pragmatics’, and ‘Pragmatics and Intensional Logic’. Your library may have the journals in which some of these were originally published.

Check out bookfinder.com. They have used copies of Formal Philosophy starting at US$65, and Montague Grammar starting at US$34. I picked up a copy of the latter, but left you the cheapest one. I couldn't resist getting the one that says "From the library of Donald Davidson", along with "Some water damage". Maybe he was reading it while surfing?

Thank you, everyone, for all your recommendations and suggestions. I can see that I'll have to get a copy of the Tarski biography. Dave - I picked up both the books, thanks for the tip-off!

Wow, I guess I bought my copy of Formal Philosophy at the right time: I paid $7.95 for a new copy.

Since no one else has mentioned this yet, I guess I will -- Partee's gossipy reminiscences about all sorts of linguistics-related things, including her work on Montague and her encounters with him (as well as the early history of the MIT linguistics program and lots of other stuff), are available at her website under the title "Reflections of a Formal Semanticist as of Feb. 2005." It's apparently a longer version of the introduction to a 2004 volume of her selected papers.

I second that suggestion about the Dowty textbook. It is one of the clearest accounts of Montague grammar, if there is such a thing.

Partee's memoirs are useful but I must say that she's unreasonably and unjustifiably harsh on situation semantics. One wonders why.

BTW, great blog Gillian!

Hello Varol, it's good to hear from you. I still have very fond memories of your wife reading my Turkish coffee grinds after dinner! How are things in Ankara? I think you recently had my very excellent office-mate out to visit - Yujin Nagasawa?

Thanks for the note about the Dowty textbook. I'll take your advice and check it out.

I don't know why Partee is down on situation semantics, but I think of it as an intelligent, but failed, attempt to reform possible world semantics ("semantics" is ambiguous here and I mean the kind for natural languages, not the kind for modal logics!) I was convinced of this by Scott Soames' article "Direct Reference, Propositional Attitudes, and Semantic Content" in the Soames and Salmon edited Propositions and Attitudes.

Goodness, what a topic ... I studied with former colleagues of Montague at UCLA and heard quite a few things. I don't know how much the Tarski bio says about his death, but I can second the earlier poster's claim that it should be "interesting".

Oh, and the Dowty textbook is definitely a better intro. to Montague grammar than his own papers (as is Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet, Meaning and Grammar [MIT Pr., 1994]). Maybe it's just because I'm a non-logician, but I find them very hard to follow.

So, a book coauthored by Solomon Feferman describes Solomon Feferman as "handsome" (p. 211 of the Tarski biography). Apart from -- or perhaps in addition to -- that amusing detail, it is so far a great read.

Yeah, "shy and boyishly handsome" is funny, but have you seen the picture on page 212? The guy is cute!

Sorry for this late rejoinder Gillian. The whole family say hello. My daughter loves to drink tea from that handsome Princeton mug.


I think STASS ideas are useful and contemporary. One of my favorite authors is Keith Devlin. He has some very good papers in his homepage. They are about STASS one way or another.


BTW, I recommend this nice review about Tarski (I mean the Fefermans book you mentioned). It has two nice pix too.

silly me, this is the link about fefermans book:

http://www.siam.org/siamnews/03-05/Tarski.htm

I've been trying to get up to speed on some of Montague-related stuff recently (wish I'd seen this post and comments before!).

In addition to those already mentioned (Thomason intro, Partee article in Lappin's Handbook, Lewis' "general semantics"), the most useful things I found were Cresswell's book "Logics and Languages", the first chapter of Dowty's book "Word Meaning and Montague Grammar" (tho' sounds like I should have read the text book mentioned above first), and chapter 13 in McCawley "Everything that linguists always wanted to know about logic".

Be interested if anyone has any comments on these... I was following my nose rather than expert advice. The Cresswell book is particularly clear, for someone like me from a logicy background, rather than linguistics.

oh, one more thing...

The Davis/Gillon OUP book _Semantics: A Reader_ has all sorts of nice logic/language borderline articles in it: Lewis, Kamp, Kaplan and so on. (It includes "Demonstratives" but not "Afterthoughts" by Kaplan... we need a compaign to get those two published together as a self-standing book a la _Naming and Necessity_.) It's reasonably cheap given the sheer volume of good stuff you get in it!