History: Montagovian

Source of version: 1 (current)

= pertaining to the work of Richard Montague. I don't know that he's been that influential on Lojban, has he? --((And)) Inasmuch as he's the guy who introduced lambda calculus to the analysis of human language semantics... -- nitcion From what little I know about either, I'd say he's had more influence on ((Gua\spi)). But I might be totally wrong. --((And)) I believe that ((pc)) is a Montagovian, in the sense of someone who actually studied with Montague. --((John Cowan)) I did indeed, and during the time that he was developing Montague Grammar, which is probably the main reason to be interested in him. Montague grammar is a cancellation grammar; that is, grammatical categories are named for what others they combine to produce what. For example, terms (sumti) are category t, predicates are category t/S, where S is the category of sentences. so, when a term and a predicate come together t t/S the t's cancel out and the result is S, a sentence. Montague added a transformational component, so that to work the two pieces did not have to occur next to each other in the surface structure of the text. The cancellation grammar lends itself nicely to Frege's sort of semantics -- things with holes in them are of a class with labelled holes. For more, see ''Formal Philosophy'' and the Unicorn Papers. pc >|8}