Meanings via Syntactic Structures
نویسنده
چکیده
Chomsky (1957) o ered prescient suggestions about how to formulate theories of understanding for the spoken languages that human children can naturally acquire. We can view his proposal as a prolegomenon to a theory of meaning that combines a layered theory of syntax with an account of how humans can naturally use expressions in acts of referring, asserting, querying, and so on; cp. Austin (1961); Davidson (1967); Dummett (1976); Higginbotham (1985). Though crucially, Chomsky’s (1957) conception of reference di ered frommore familiar conceptions of denotation, as in Frege (1892b) or Russell (1905, 1912, 1957); cp. Goodman (1949, 1953), Strawson (1950), Chomsky (1977, 1995b, 2000b, 2017). I think we should develop the kind of semantic theory towards which Chomsky has long been pointing; see Pietroski (2017abc). But in this essay,my aim is simply to articulate a sense inwhich Syntactic Structures outlined a program for semantics, well before Davidson (1967), Montague (1970), and Lewis (1970).
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