Logic and linguistics in the twentieth century

The interaction between logic and linguistics on the nature of universal grammar can be roughly divided into three phases, which will be analysed in details in the next sections. The first phase (beginning of the century up to the 1960s) was characterized by an extremely intense work in the field of logical grammar (§. 2), with the arising of categorial grammar within the Polish School in the first decades of the century and its extensive application to ordinary language by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel in the early 1950s. Besides, the work on truth-conditional semantics by Tarsky, Quine and Davidson (§. 3) provided the necessary background to the model-theoretic analyses of natural language and to Montague Grammar in the 1970s. On the linguistics side, in 1957 the transformational generative paradigm made its first steps out of the banks of American post-Bloomfieldian structuralism and behaviourism (§. 4). Chomsky's critique of the inadequacies of phrase structure grammars had a strong impact on the tradition of logical grammar, by revealing the limits and problems of categorial models. Moreover, in these years the generative architecture of the universal grammar received its first shaping, accompanied by the initial steps of the debate on the role and nature of semantic theory. The second phase (late 1960s, throughout the 1970s) began with the crisis of the semantic models developed in the early period of generative grammar and the rise and fall of the Generative Semantics enterprise (§. 5). One of the major events of this period was the explosion of Montague Grammar and the subsequent breakthrough made in the linguistic community by the development of model-theoretic semantics (§. 6). More generally, these years were characterized by a great debate on the proper position of semantics with the theory of grammar, and by the first attempts of carrying out extensive comparisons and integrations between generative linguistics and logical grammar. The third phase (starting from the beginning of the 1980s) is best illustrated by referring to the central role acquired in the Government and Binding version of Chomsky's theory by the notion of Logical Form (LF) (§. 7), resulting in an intense work in linguistics on topics like quantification, coreference, etc., with the consequent constant readjustment of the border between logic and formal linguistics.