Reviews
Type-Logical Book Semantics
Bob Carpenter
(Lucent Technologies) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press (Language, speech, and communication series), 1997, xxi+575 pp; hardbound, ISBN 0-262-03248-1, $60.00; paperbound, ISBN 0-262-53149-6, $35.00
Reviewed by Stephen Pulman University of Cambridge
This is a very ambitious book, which tries to do several different things: give a detailed and self-contained introduction to type-logical semantics and categorial grammar; illustrate this framework with a comprehensive set of illustrations of semantic analysis of English; and relate all of this to current research within the categorial tradition. It apparently derives from the author's "introductory" course on natural language semantics, but the end result is very far from introductory (I suspect it would scare most beginning linguistics students to death) and the book contains a great deal of original and insightful analysis of interesting semantic phenomena. The first chapter contains a potted introduction to the history of formal and linguistic semantics and related aspects of the philosophy of language and logic; the second consists of an extended introduction to the lambda calculus, combinators, types, etc, and the third is a development of the particular higher-order logic used later. Of these chapters, the first is relatively superficial, but the second and third are very detailed and, more importantly, very clean I would guess Carpenter is an excellent teacher: he presents difficult material in an appealing way, and doesn't go overboard on terse notation or Greek letters. Chapter 4 introduces various flavors of categorial grammar, and Chapter 5 describes the Lambek calculus. By this time we are 180 pages or so into the book, and I was beginning to realize that I didn't (even) know as much as I thought I did about categorial grammar. Semantic analysis of English starts off with coordination and unbounded dependencies (Chapter 6). Carpenter provides his own analysis of these phenomena, incorporating various devices from the categorial literature. His reference to earlier work, here and throughout the book, is always very good, with short summaries of approaches to particular issues by other scholars, showing how they differ, or can be seen as different ways of doing the same thing. Chapter 7 is a long discussion of quantifiers and scope problems. Carpenter starts with Montague's "quantifying in" and Cooper's storage approach to scoping, and then argues that the type-logical treatment he develops captures some of the good features of these approaches, while avoiding most of their descriptive and theoretical problems. He then goes on to a more general discussion of NP meanings, covering definites indefinites, and generics, and possessives, followed by a somewhat tangential but interesting approach to comparatives, and finally discussing existential sentences. Chapter 8 provides an analysis of plural NPs, again giving some very useful summaries of earlier approaches, and gradually developing a semantics that can cope
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Computational Linguistics
Volume 25, Number 3
with most of the familiar phenomena: collective, distributive, group readings, etc. Chapter 9 discusses those (rather few) cases of pronouns that lend themselves to a categorial treatment: reflexives and reciprocals, essentially. The final three chapters look at various types of intensionality. Chapter 10 introduces tense and modal logic, and possible-worlds semantics, and presents them within the type-theoretical framework developed earlier. Chapter 11 analyzes various types of control phenomena, opacity with intensional verbs; and Chapter 12 describes tense, aspect, and various types of temporal modification. A substantial appendix gives some introductory material on set theory, first-order logic, and Boolean algebras. This is a huge book, full of interesting material. You could read it as a synthesis of many current approaches to linguistic description within a categorial framework, or as an introduction to semantic analysis using higher-order logic. You can also dip into it as a reference book to get a quick summary of recent work within this tradition on one of the many areas of linguistic description covered. There is little that is overtly computational, but much that could be easily translated into several different computational frameworks....