Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings (review)

To say that this book is a ‘welcome addition’ to the resources on semantics would be one of the biggest understatements imaginable. The importance of having this particular collection of papers readily available, in affordable form, and put together with an introduction giving the context and the contribution of each individual paper is enormous. This is a book that every working semanticist or semantics student should and undoubtedly will (if they don’t already) have on their shelf. With a bit of work (and some help from the brief introductory comments on pp. 7–10) these papers should be reasonably accessible to students with a year’s worth of formal semantics training. But I would recommend it to more beginning students too (though it might be a struggle to get through many of these papers), for reasons that emerge below.

This is a book that is more than the sum of its parts (and that’s already a pretty huge sum). Not only did each and every paper in this volume make a seminal contribution to the development of semantic theory, but having these put all together side by side illuminates some fundamentally important points about semantics as a whole. First, it gives the reader a real sense of what model-theoretic semantics is. The beginning stages of formal semantics within linguistic theory (the period represented by the contributions here) were highly influenced by the work of philosophers—and thus the work in that period was highly sophisticated about what meaning is (in the model-theoretic sense) as distinct from pure representations. But with the growing interest in the hypothesis that there is a significant level of representation of ‘logical form’ (LF) and with the growing interest in its syntactic properties (if indeed it does exist), I personally feel that more and more linguistics students studying semantics have lost sight of the project of ultimately providing a model-theoretic interpretation for linguistic expressions. (Of course not all theories of semantics agree that the grammar does indeed supply a model-theoretic interpretation, and so my remarks above might be somewhat controversial. But students and practitioners should at least be aware of what the model-theoretic project is, and all of the papers in this book, for example, are firmly rooted in that project.) Thus despite the fact that most of the papers in this volume might be quite difficult reading for a novice semantics student or an advanced syntax student, I would nonetheless recommend that all such students own this book, read various papers from time to time, and thereby get a feel for the basic project. (A student with more background in syntax and less in semantics might want to begin with the papers by Greg Carlson, David Dowty, Barbara Partee, Barbara Partee and Mats Rooth, Lauri Karttunen, and William Ladusaw).

Second, the book illuminates the development of formal pragmatics and its interactions with semantics. (See especially the papers by Robert Stalnaker, David Lewis, Hans Kamp, Irene Heim, and Angelika Kratzer.) By viewing natural language not only as a device for pairing expressions with model-theoretic objects but also as a device for communicating, and by pointing out that we can formalize communication situations, the shared knowledge of the participants, and the way in which meaning serves to update this knowledge, we can begin to understand a number of otherwise puzzling phenomena in compositional semantics (e.g. the projection problem for presuppositions, to name just one). This observation sounds by now almost like a trivial platitude—but the papers in this volume are seminal in showing that we need not rely on vague intuitions about pragmatics but can instead use our formal tools to make precise predictions. Formal pragmatics is perhaps one of the fastest growing areas within ‘linguistic semantics’ (broadly construed), and its roots trace...