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Logical and Philosophical Ideas in Certain Formal Approaches to Language

Abstract

This paper reminds, puts in order, sketches and also initiates some researches from the field of logic and philosophy of language. It lays emphasis on the logical-linguistic and ontological developmental lines originated with Polish researchers. The author discusses two opposite orientations of the former line in the process of formalization of language, called here nominalistic and Platonistic. The paper mentions the author's result (1989; 1991) concerning theoretical equivalence of two axiomatic approaches to language syntax which take into consideration these two different philosophical orientations, respectively. It also introduces certain formal-logical foundations of language semantics, discusses and develops the problem of the syntactic and semantic categorial agreement, i.e. the agreement of the syntactic category of each language expression with the ontological category assigned to the reference of this expression. The author, in particular, gives a solution to this problem for quantifiers.

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Wybraniec-Skardowska, U. Logical and Philosophical Ideas in Certain Formal Approaches to Language. Synthese 116, 231–277 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005098325137

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Keywords

  • Ontological Category
  • Categorial Grammar
  • Philosophical Idea
  • Main Functor
  • Primitive Notion