Description
Book SynopsisCompositionality in Formal Semantics is a collection of Barbara Partee's papers that have been influential in the field but are not readily available and includes a new introductory essay in which Partee reflects on how her thinking and the field of semantics have developed over the past 35 years.
Trade Review"Barbara H. Partee is the founding mother of linguistic semantics as it is practiced today, and this collection of many of her classic papers shows why she has been so influential. The combination of theoretical insight with her legendary ability to find just the right example to make a point is evident throughout. And, as a bonus, the collection begins with a wonderful memoir of the turbulent time when semantics was getting its start."
Robert Stalnaker, MIT
"Two different audiences will be delighted with this book: those who read the classic papers gathered here when they first appeared and those who did not but are heirs to the rich semantics tradition in formal linguistics that Barbara H. Partee established with those papers and with her irresistible enthusiasm for systematic investigation of linguistic meaning. Partee's keen semantic insights, her flair for telling examples, her intellectual generosity, her clear-headedness, and her pedagogical talents are evident throughout, not just in the vintage pieces but also in the introductory essay she's written and in the couple of articles published more recently. This volume belongs on every semanticist's shelf." Sally McConnell-Ginet, Cornell University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
1 Reflections of a Formal Semanticist 1
2 Opacity, Coreference, and Pronouns 26
3 Some Structural Analogies Between Tenses and Pronouns in English 50
4 Toward the Logic of Tense and Aspect in English with Michael Bennett 59
5 Bound Variables and Other Anaphors 110
6 Anaphora and Semantic Structure with Emmon Bach 122
7 Compositionality 153
8 Appendix B Genitives – A case study 182
9 Ambiguous Pseudoclefts with Unambiguous Be 190
10 Noun Phrase Interpretation and Type-Shifting Principles 203
11 The Airport Squib: Any, Almost, and superlatives 231
12 Many Quantifiers 241
13 Binding Implicit Variables in Quantified Contexts 259
14 Weak NPs in HAVE Sentences 282
15 Some Puzzles of Predicate Possessives with Vladimir Borschev 292
Index 316
