Richard Montague

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Richard Montague (born September 20, 1930 in Stockton , California , † March 7, 1971 in Los Angeles , California) was an American mathematician , logician, philosopher and linguist and classic of the formal semantics of natural languages.

Life

In 1957 he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley under Alfred Tarski. PhD. The title of his dissertation is Contributions to the Axiomatic Foundations of Set Theory . He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles throughout his subsequent career . The life and work of the thinker served as a model for the book The Semantics of Murder (2008) by Aifric Campbell . The book title alludes to the violent death of Montague, which has never been clarified.

plant

For Montague - according to his thesis - there is no fundamental difference in the semantics of artificial and natural languages. Montague has used recent developments in intensional logic to reveal the logical structure of natural languages. The syntax is oriented towards the linguistic surface, there are no transformations as in the Chomsky syntax. Expressions of natural language are converted into the language of intensional logic by means of translation rules, the interpretation of which is carried out according to model theory. Every meaningful expression is assigned an intention which, depending on possible worlds or situations, delivers a reference object as an extension . Thus, in the sense of Frege, truth conditions for natural language sentences can be specified and valid conclusions can be formulated.

Montague's universal semantic grammar is a critical counterpart to Noam Chomsky's grammar theory , in which semantics was viewed as a component independent of syntax. Montague's claim, however, was that the meaning of a sentence is directly linked to its sentence structure.

In 1972 he coined the term “possible-world semantics” or “ possible-worlds semantics ”.

The theory, however, should be seen more as an approach to explaining a clearly defined sub-area of ​​the semantics of natural language. Montague developed a very strong separation between truth-dependent semantics and language pragmatics . Many phenomena of natural language ( tinting particles , cross-sentence anaphors , coherence, etc.) could and should therefore not be dealt with in the context of this theory. Although the position is rarely taken at the beginning of the 21st century, it offers a formal basis for the correct treatment of intensionality. Ie a statement like "John is looking for a unicorn" does not contain an existential statement "There is a unicorn", but means "John is looking for something that has the properties of a unicorn".

Works

  • with Donald Kalish : Logic: Techniques of Formal Reasoning . Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich 1964.
  • Formal philosophy: selected papers of Richard Montague / ed. And with an introd. by Richmond H. Thomason. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. 1974 (1979 print: ISBN 0-300-01527-5 )

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Richard Montague: Universal Grammar. (Writings on linguistics), Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg / New York 2012, ISBN 3-5280-3704-0
  2. ↑ Jeffrey C. King and Jason Stanley: Semantics, Pragmatics, and The Role of Semantic Content , in: Zoltan Szabo (ed.): Semantics versus Pragmatics , Oxford University 2005: p. 5.
personal data
SURNAME Montague, Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician, philosopher, and linguist
DATE OF BIRTH September 20, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Stockton
DATE OF DEATH March 7, 1971
Place of death los Angeles