Comments on Professor Partee’s Paper

Abstract

Partee has effectively shown in her paper that formal analysis of semantical notions and problems can be of great interest to linguists. The contributions of logicians in the field of semantics, as Hintikka pointed out, have not yet been fully noted and utilized by linguists in their studies of semantics of natural languages. Though we are not quite clear about what exact factors prompt linguists of recent times to devote more attention to the studies of semantics, we can with confidence say that this new development of linguistic studies would be impossible without a positive realization of the relevance of semantic analysis for synthetical and grammatical theorizing. Perhaps it is increasingly recognized by both linguists and logicians that syntax and semantics of a language can be only relatively separated and distinguished, but not absolutely bifurcated and abstracted from each other. For it seems clear that every semantic distinction can be given a synthetic marking in a language system and every synthetic form can be given a semantic interpretation, be it direct or indirect.