The (re-)emergence of representationalism in semantics

The major challenge posed to all those seeking to explain semantic properties of natural language is the pervasive dependence on context for the way in which expressions are understood. This chapter surveys the emergence of formal models of semantics against the background of the new emphasis in linguistics during the 1950’s of formal modelling of grammars, and then details the way in which formal semanticists have increasingly turned to tools of proof theory for formal languages as they have grappled with this challenge. As we shall see, the starting point for this modelling of context dependence involved fierce disagreement between the protagonists as to whether or not explanations of natural-language content required some form of semantic representation, a view which those working within formal semantics paradigms initially so effectively ridiculed that this alternative was barely aired at all within semantics for the last decades of the last century. Yet as formal tools have been increasingly refined in order to express this pervasive context-dependence, the disagreement that led early on to the setting-aside of representationalism in semantics as a respectable methodology has, as we shall see, got so transformed that the initially conflicting sets of assumptions are now hard to distinguish.