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From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Semantics (was: Question on Chinese Room Argument)
Message-ID: <3327@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 24 Feb 89 13:51:57 GMT
References: <6451@saturn.ucsc.edu>
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 37

From article <6451@saturn.ucsc.edu>, by biling@ucscd.UCSC.EDU (Doug Rosener):
" 
" I am presently taking a course in Montague Semantics and have had
" courses in syntax and phonology.
" 
" The Montague material is by far the most impressive I have seen 
" (o.k., that might not be saying much).
" 
" If you have mastered this material, could you please explain what you
" think its shortcoming are?

For one thing, Montague grammar is not a semantic theory in the current
sense (grounding symbols), or in any real sense.  Its models incorporate
nothing about our perception of the world.  It's just a theory of
syntactic types.  Yes, I know that it distinguishes syntactic types from
"semantic" ones -- but except for an ad hoc notation for marking off,
e.g., common nouns as different from intransitive verbs (with multiple
slashes), the semantic types and syntactic types are notational
variants.

For another, the rule in natural language is that verbs do not create
opacity.  In MG they do, unless a special meaning postulate ad hoc for
each verb makes them transparent.  So MG gets that wrong.

For a third, the compositionality assumption that is basic to MG is
obviously wrong for natural language, since there are idioms in
natural language.

Finally, and crucially, there is no fundamental discovery about natural
language that is incorporated into MG or that MG has helped us to
discover.

I hope that some of what I've just said is wrong, since I like
MG -- I enjoy symbol pushing.  I await instruction.  Maybe further
discussion ought to be restricted to sci.lang?

		Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu