Exploiting logical forms

The Delilah parser and generator for Dutch delivers three related levels of logical form: Stored Logical Form, Normal Logical Form and Flat Logical Form. SLF is produced by graph unification of attribute-value matrices as the value of a semantic feature. It is an underspecified level of semantic representation, as it does not spell out the exact scope of semantic operators like quantifiers, negation and modalities. NLF and FLF are postderivationally induced from SLF. Both representations specify all semantic dependencies, but in different ways. SLF is exploited for a purely semantic reduction of lexical ambiguity. FLF holds all information necessary for easy semantic inference. 1 Logical form and grammar Logical form we take to be that mode of linguistic analysis at which lexical concepts, inferential semantics and information structure interact. The required analysis is formal, in the sense that it should account for the intersubjective and— thus—systematic aspects of sentential and lexical meaning. In particular, logical form is a level of grammatical representation at which semantic consequences can be computed—a view already expressed by Higginbotham (1985). Thus, logical form is one of the ultimate targets of linguistic analysis and the representation of what makes natural language a unique module of human cognition. Typically, logical form emanates from deep processing; there are no shallow ways to semantic precision. The claim that logical form is formal by necessity, does not imply that it is bound to comply with first-order predicate logic. Predicate logic does not entertain a privileged relation to semantic interpretation: the set of meanings of a natural language is neither a subset nor a superset of the well-formed and interpretable propositions of predicate logic or their complement. It may be a helpful tool in describing certain aspects of the relations between concepts and operators in natural language; in our view, however, it is neither the target nor the anchor of natural language semantics. Logical form must be casted as a representation for which some adequate notion of semantic consequence (entailment) can be defined. Overviewing modern grammar, it makes sense to state that the relation between logical form and syntactic structure defines the arena. That is not a trivial observation: though linguistics ranks among the elder sciences in the world, it took millennia before the proper balance between form and interpretation was questioned from a grammatical perspective. In recent times, Bertrand Russell (1949) has argued that logical form is not homomorphic to syntactic structure. Generative grammar split on the question with which aspects of meaning grammar could afford to deal (Seuren 1998, ch. 7). In the same period, Montague (1973) defined logical form by compositional interpretation, but correlated it to a pseudo-