Review of Type - Logical Semantics by B . Carpenter Riccardo

One of the many roles of linguistics is to address the semantics of natural languages, that is, the meaning of sentences in natural languages. An important part of the meaning of sentences can be characterized by stating the conditions that need to hold for the sentence to be true. Necessarily, this approach, called truth-conditional semantics, disregards some relevant aspects of meaning, but has been very useful in the analysis of natural languages. Structuralist views of language (the kind held by Saussure, for instance, and later Chomsky) have typically focused on phonology, morphology, and syntax. Little progress, however, has been shown towards the structure of meaning, or content. A common tool for the study of content, and structure in general for that matter, has been logic. During most of the 20th century, an important role of logic has been to study the structure of content of mathematical languages. Many logicians have moved on to apply the techniques developed to the analysis of natural languages—Frege, Russell, Carnap, Reichenbach, and Montague. An early introduction to such classical approaches can be found in [2]. As an illustration of the kind of problems that need to be addressed, consider the following examples. The following two sentences assert the existence of a man that both walks and talks: