From the analysis of existential sentences to the logic of natural languages

Maleczki Márta

The starting point of the work to be presented here is the semantic analysis of "there is/are..." sentences in a categorial grammatical framework enriched with special semantic operations, called combinators in combinatory logic. One merit of this approach is that the definiteness effect is not to be stipulated but simply follows from the offered analysis and from a universal property of determiners formulated in the theory of generalized quantifiers (conservativity). Another, more fundamental result is that a special set of basic combinators for natural languages can be given partly on the basis of the analysis offered here, and partly on the basis of some important conclusions of earlier linguistic investigations with combinators.  A far-reaching theoretical consequence of my proposal is that the set of basic combinators I argue for defines a special logical system (proved independently of linguistic considerations by Bunder). Since my argumentation is based on purely linguistic analyses, this logic is certainly a good candidate for being the logic (or at least one of the logics) underlying the structure of natural languages.