Montague's "Linguistic" Word: Motivations, Trajectory, Attitudes

Abstract

The history of formal semantics is a history of evolving ideas about logical form, linguistic form, and the nature of semantics (and pragmatics). This paper discusses Montague’s work in its historical context, and traces the evolution of his interest in issues of natural language, including the emergence of his interest in quantified noun phrases from a concern with intensional transitive verbs like seeks. Drawing in part on research in the Montague Archives in the UCLA Library, I discuss Montague’s motivation for his work on natural language semantics, his evaluation of its importance, and his evolving ideas about various linguistic topics, including some that he evidently thought about but did not include in his published work.