Examples

Abstract

When the semantics of predicate logic is based on concepts rather than relations, there no longer is a compositional context free grammar for it unless we restrict ourselves to a finite variable fragment. This shows that there is a semantic reason for the much discussed syntactic bottlenecks (or phases). It is furthermore argued that LF as used in Generative Grammar cannot rely on free variables in the way it does. Once this is acknowledged, however, it becomes possible to actually argue that sentences must have a particular syntactic structure since they do not allow for a compositional analysis of meaning. In particular, Dutch is not strongly context free if the semantics is spelled out in terms of concepts rather than relations. Further constructions being looked at include the English X-or-no-X-construction and respectively-constructions.

In this chapter we shall look at some examples. The first example will be standard predicate logic. It will be shown that if semantics is based on concepts and not on relations then there must be a limit on the number of free variables. The second example will be a fragment (Montague size) of English. Finally, we shall indicate how the present approach allows to get insights into sentence structure.