Notes 3.18.2013
LING505R
Chapter 13 – beginning of the chapter up to Lambda-Abstraction
Our formal languages (statement logic and predicate logic) are all isomorphic  for every form
it takes, there are semantic rules of interpretation which guarantee that the meaning of each
individual part of the formal expression will come together to give you the interpretation of the
entire expression.
Note intense debate about whether or not compositionality is something that is feasible or even
desirable.
Price of making a simpler syntax (Jackendoff & ________, year?). This compromises our
compositionality principle; you couldn’t have a predicate or statement logic—expressions would
have no fixed meanings.
Natural language is usually not vague, even though ambiguous. Ambiguous means it has two
interpretations (ex: Everybody liked a teacher). You need a system which allows you to have
more than one meaning.
‘Port Royal Grammarians’  One group in history that attempted to divide and figure out the
purest language (language that is perfectly logical and free of ambiguity and uncertainty).
Another similar sentiment is that language change equals degradation and that older forms (like
Sanskrit) are the purest, most logical. If only we hadn’t allowed language to deteriorate, we
would all be speaking perfectly logically.
Language Use versus Language Meaning  in this text we are not dealing with pragmatics, just
with meaning. As users of natural language, we don’t say exactly what we mean, but we’ve left
that completely out of this discussion. Before we can even get to intentionality and pragmatics,
we need to know what the statements themselves mean first.
Samples:
-Blue
-Sweater
(both can be predicates, and are in English)
-Large
(also a predicate, but harder than blue to compositionally derive because what is the set of all
large things?)
-Fake
-Diamond
(presents a “complete compositional nightmare” – difficult to derive the meaning of fake
diamond)
Note that ‘fake diamond’ can actually be done compositionally (note: what is the definition or
what do you need to have a fake diamond? Something that is like a diamond in many properties,
but is not a diamond), it’s just difficult to determine what the function of ‘fake’ is which takes
‘diamond’ as its argument.
Good, and book can concatenate. What happens when I add an infinitival verb expression (a
relative clause) like “to start a fire with” [“good book to start a fire with”]. ‘Good’ goes with ‘to
start a fire with’, but they are not a syntactic constituent (illustrating notion of constituency).
The first person to point out this problem was ____Wells in 1947 (?) but was dismissed for
decades.
Sample:
All students like a teacher.
All students like a teacher.
We have tons of evidence that “like a teacher” is a constituent; not “all students like”.
What we’re not doing in our compositionality, our grammar of English, is just taking side by side
elements and stringing them together.
Note that there are different theories that frame this a different way, for example to say that there
are no VP’s. There are flat structure theories. Some argue that there is a flat structure because
verbs can come in any order (SVO, VSO, etc)  as an aside note that there are reasons for these
differences in ordering across languages, but we’re not talking about that today.
Note that in this tree, the NP “all students” has scope over “a teacher”. It’s a command relation.
Defined this way: look up tree to the next branching node (if it weren’t branching, it would be
irrelevant), and looking at everything below that node (‘like a teacher’ in this case). Note also
that ‘a teacher’ has scope over ‘like’. There is no interpretation available from THIS tree
structure where all students like a different teacher, because ‘a teacher’ does not have scope over
‘all students’.
Note another alternative (besides Simpler Syntax): Logical Form (who?) which discussed surface
versus underlying forms (and quantifier lowering).
Occam’s razor principle a ‘wack a mole’ because when you simplify your syntax, you make
something else more complicated. the fewer number of rules you use in your system, the more
complicated your derivations will have to be. If you’re not going to encode your semantics
compositionally somewhere in your syntax, you’re going to have to account for it somewhere
else. (note tie to the idea that no one language is more complicated or simple than any other
language! Overall complexity is probably equivalent among world languages)