Formalsemantik

Formalsemantik, or formal semantics, is a field of linguistics and philosophy that studies the meaning of natural language using formal tools from logic, set theory, type theory, and model theory. It seeks to provide precise representations of semantic content and to explain how sentence meaning is derived from the meanings of its parts and their syntactic combination.

Historically, formal semantics builds on Frege’s work on sense and reference and on later developments in model theory and truth conditions. A major milestone was Montague grammar, which treats natural language as a fragment of formal logic with a compositional semantics, allowing linguistic expressions to be mapped to higher-order logic.

A central idea is compositionality: the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituents and the rules used to combine them. Core frameworks include possible-worlds semantics for modality and attitude contexts, and lambda calculus or type-theoretic representations for functional composition. These approaches enable formal analyses of quantifiers, negation, tense and aspect, intensional verbs, anaphora, presupposition, and event structure.

Key topics studied in formal semantics include determiner semantics (every, some, the), scope phenomena, truth conditions of verbs and adjectives, and the interaction between syntax and semantics. Applications span theoretical linguistics, philosophy of language, and computational linguistics, informing natural language processing and formal analyses of meaning. The field continues to address challenges related to context, pragmatics, and the limits of formal representations in capturing real-world linguistic use.