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Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings (Linguistics: The Essential Readings)

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Here's what's in it:

1. The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English:
Richard Montague.
2. A unified analysis of the English bare plural: Greg Carlson.
3. Generalized quantifiers and natural language: Jon Barwise and Robin Cooper.
4. The Logical Analysis of Plurals and Mass Terms: Godehard Link.
5. Assertion: Robert C. Stalnaker.
6. Scorekeeping in a Language Game: David Lewis.
7. Adverbs of quantification: David Lewis.
8. A theory of truth and semantic representation: Hans Kamp.
9. File change semantics and the familiarity theory of definiteness:
Irene Heim.
10. On the projection problem for presuppositions: Irene Heim.
11. Toward a semantic analysis of verb aspect and the English 'imperfective'
progressive: David R. Dowty.
12. The notional category of modality: Angelika Kratzer.
13. The algebra of events: Emmon Bach.
14. Generalized conjunction and type ambiguity: Barbara Partee and Mats Rooth.
15. Noun phrase interpretation and type shifting principles: Barbara
H. Partee.
16. Syntax and semantics of questions: Lauri Karttunen.
17. Type-Shifting Rules and the Semantics of Interrogatives: Jeroen
Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof.
18. On the notion affective in the analysis of Negative-Polarity Items:
William A. Ladusaw. Index.

In *Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings*, Paul Portner and Barbara Partee have collected the fruits of 30 years of research by linguists and logicians into the formal structure of natural language. And as this work has previously been exceptionally difficult to acquire (including the late Richard Montague's seminal "Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English") even the rather high sticker price of this volume is justified in terms of the historical and contemporary relevance of that particular essay alone (much of the work contained within this volume was influenced *in the main* by Montague Grammar).

The book also contains original statements by Hans Kamp and Irene Heim on dynamic semantic theory, a trend of recent years which perhaps deserves to be revisited (the work done by Groenendijk and Stokhof in particular is much more fully articulated than one might be led to believe, and the virtues of "static semantics" perhaps somewhat other than Davidsonians might think), as well as classic essays by David Lewis, Robert Stalnaker and Emmon Bach. Is semantics possible? Yes, but this volume will not answer the question of in what respect it is necessary, and as such it is exemplary of one of Montagovianism's chief virtues.

This is a great book if you are part of a younger generation that did not grow up professionally while these papers were first being written/discussed. A few selections seem out of place, or perhaps are not quite as foundational as others, but overall it is a collection well worth having. Read from beginning to end you will have a basic handle on a large number of central topics in semantics.

As a primer I recommend "Introduction to Montague Semantics" by Dowty, Wall, and Peters. Most papers within "... The Essential Readings" take for granted an understanding of PTQ theory that is historically hard to acquire just based off Montegue's original paper (which is included as Chapter 1 of "... The Essential Readings").