Formal and Lexical Semantics and the Genitive In Negated Existential Sentences In Russian (original) (raw)

Goals 1.1 Theoretical concerns and general goals The theoretical concern of this paper is the integration of formal and lexical semantics, more specifically the traditions of (post-) Montague Grammar and the Moscow semantic school, respectively. We propose to represent lexical meaning in the form of meaning postulates, and the output of compositional semantic interpretation in a formula of intensional logic in which lexical items are primitives, and to integrate lexical and compositional information via entailments from these (and other) sources. We think of the content of a text as a theory determined by a set of axioms together with their entailments. The axioms come from various sources: lexicon, compositional semantics, context and background knowledge. (Broader and narrower notions of semantic or semantico-pragmatic interpretation correspond to the inclusion or exclusion of various potential sources of axioms.) Such a theory characterizes the class of all models that are consistent with the content of the given text, or of the text together with aspects of its context. Some of the most general axioms, which may be taken to form part of the theory of any text, are those that represent some of the most general constraints on possible models of a given language, axioms which contribute to what the Moscow School calls naivnaja kartina mira 'the naive picture of the world' (Apresjan 1974), and what formal semanticists, following Bach (1986), call Natural Language Metaphysics. We do not pretend to have an articulated view of the nature of all the different sorts of axioms that may play a role in the "theory" of a text, but here we will illustrate some of the possibilities.