A New Look at the Well-Formedness Constraint

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Partee : What I want to talk about today concerns not just semanties so much as the relation between semantics and syntax. Although the work that I have been doing and that I will talk about is mainly within the thoery of Montague grammar, I think that some of these ideas are equally applicable to transformational grammar. Emmon and I both have been talking a lot about Montague grammar while we have been here. I don't want to make it seem as though we think transformational grammar is, in the past, all of no value. It is certainly true that much of the recent work in Montague grammar by linguists has drawn very heavily on past work in transformational grammar and many linguists are now formulating theories which try to use best parts of Montague's work together with best parts of transformational work. So the theory of the enterprise which now I call Montague grammar. The general topic within which this paper is a part is the topic of constraints on grammars. The goal of linguistic theory is to try to characterize what it is that makes human languages distinctive, how human languages are the actual human languages and what we think to be all of the possible human languages differ from other imaginable kinds of languages including the languages of computers or the languages that are invented by logicians. The class of human languages seems to have a lot of very particular properties and to charatcrize these is one of the improtant goals of linguistic theory. In general, the formulation of these properties comes in two parts: one being the very general form of a linguistic theory and the other part being formulation of certain universal constraints within such a theory.
Within the theory of transformational grammar, most of the constraints that have been studied are constraints on form of rules. There has been a lot of work on things like the A-over-A constraint or the Coordinate Structure Constraint studied by Ress. I think Ross's dissertation was one of the first major works on the theory of constraints in grammar. I want to talk about a different kind of constraints which rises quite naturally within the Montague framework but which, I think, can also be applied in many cases to the transformational framework.
I'll talk about the constraint that I call the Well-Formedness Constraint. First, I want to say a little general word about the form of Montague grammar and the way in which it differs from the form of transformational grammar. The first thing on the handout is a scheme for the statement of syntactic rules in Montague grammar.