Studies in formal semantics: Intensionality, temporality, negation Edited by Franz Guenthner and Christian Rohrer (review)

REVIEWS455 attacks so substantial a fragment of English. The sample grammar in Appendix D is 26 pages long, and covers a great deal of ground. As a theoretical proposal regarding the psychological mechanisms underlying human syntactic recognition , it is not an obvious success and is also (by its own admission) premised on some highly controversial assumptions (namely the alleged grammatical universals of REST).8 My most negative opinion, however, concerns a nonsubstantive matter, namely that the book is outrageously overpriced considering the poor quality of its format. REFERENCES Kaplan, Ronald M. 1972. Augmented transition networks as psychological models of sentence comprehension. Artificial Intelligence 3.77-100. Miller, George A., and Philip N. Johnson-Laird. 1977. Language and perception. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ross, John R. 1967. Constraints on variables in syntax. MIT dissertation. Wanner, Eric, and Michael Maratsos. 1979. An ATN approach to comprehension. Linguistic theory and psychological reality, ed. by Morris Halle et al., 119-61. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Woods, William. 1970. Transition network grammars for natural language analysis. Comm. Assoc, for Comp. Mach. 13.591-606. [Received 15 July 1981.] 8 One of M's major concerns is to show that some of Chomsky's proposed constraints follow directly from the determinism hypothesis. Assuming that they do follow, and that they are valid, the result would nonetheless be cold comfort to an orthodox Chomskyan, to whom it is an article of faith that the universals in question represent innate predispositions that cannot be explained in terms of such 'functional' or 'performance-related' considerations as limitations on memory. Studies in formal semantics: Intensionality, temporality, negation. Edited by Franz Guenthner and Christian Rohrer. (North-Holland linguistic series, 35.) Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1978. Pp. viii, 265. / 62.50. Reviewed by Leonard M. Faltz, Arizona State University The formal study of natural-language semantics has recently occupied an active and growing group of scholars. G&R's collection represents work in this field carried out in the mid-to-late 70's at Stuttgart and Bonn. Following an introduction (1-10) in which the study of formal semantics is outlined and placed in perspective with regard to the current state of logic and of linguistics, eight papers are presented in three groups: Intensionality (three papers), Temporality (four papers), and Negation (one paper). Readers working in formal semantics will want to know about the sorts of proposals found here. I personally was particularly interested in the articles of the 'Temporality' section, hoping that some insight into the logic of aspect would be obtained by the careful construction of formal systems. As it turned out, after reading the articles, I feel that we have yet to get to the bottom of the matter—that the essential features which control the logic of aspect have still eluded the investigators. There may be inherent limitations to the sort of approach taken here—although deeper investigations may prove this suspicion wrong. 456LANGUAGE, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 2 (1982) Fabrizio Mondadori, 'Interpreting modal semantics' (13-40), is primarily a review of the justifications for representing intensions as functions from possible worlds to extensions, together with a discussion of the applicability of this construction to proper names and natural-kind terms. He emphasizes the fact that modal semantics is a theory of truth conditions, not of language use— and that therefore epistemological considerations should not play a role in justifying the way constructions are set up to represent modal semantics. Franz Guenthner, 'Systems of intensional logic and the semantics of natural languages' (41-74), sketches the four formal semantic systems of Kripke, Âqvist, Bressan, and Montague, and compares the ways that these systems handle variables and constants (e.g., are variables assigned to individuals relative to worlds, or independently of worlds?), quantification, predication (especially intensional predicates), and indexical expressions (such as time-indexed expressions). Aldo Bressan, 'The interpreted modal calculus MC and some of its applications' (75-1 18), tells how the language MC was developed by Bressan to formalize the logic of physical sciences (especially classical particle physics). The article begins with a terse but complete definition of the syntax and model-theoretic semantics of this language. Bressan then shows how a number of modally interesting sentences (e.g. The...