Montaguesemantikka

Montaguesemantikka, or Montague semantics, is a theoretical framework in linguistics and philosophy of language for modeling the meaning of natural language using formal logic. Initiated by logician Richard Montague in the 1960s and 1970s, it treats sentences as truth-conditional expressions and aims to derive their meanings compositionally from their parts. The approach seeks to show that ordinary language can be analyzed with the same precision and tools used in formal logic.

Key ideas include a strongly typed, higher-order formal language based on the typed lambda calculus and a semantic interpretation that maps syntactic constituents to logical expressions. The architecture is compositional: the meaning of a larger expression is determined by the meanings of its constituents and the rules of combination. Montague semantics often employs intensional logic with possible-worlds semantics to handle modal and propositional-attitude contexts, as well as quantification and intensional verbs. In the standard framework, entities are represented by type e, truth values by type t, and higher-order expressions are built from these.

Historically, Montague semantics helped bridge formal logic and linguistic analysis, demonstrating how natural language phenomena such as quantifiers, negation, modality, and intensional verbs could be analyzed with precise semantic representations. Its influence extends to much of contemporary formal semantics and has informed subsequent approaches, including dynamic and contextual theories, even as researchers critique its empirical coverage and practical complexity.

See also: Montague grammar; formal semantics; possible-worlds semantics; lambda calculus.