The Semantics of Belief-Sentences

Abstract

Bar-Hillel in 1954 suggested that formal semantics as developed by such logicians as Tarski and Camap had achieved insights and developed approaches which linguists might profitably make use of for the analysis of natural language. The long delay in taking up Bar-Hillel’s suggestion has stemmed in part from the rejection by some linguists (notably Chomsky, 1955) of the claimed relevance of formal to natural semantics, and in part from the preoccupation of linguists with the more tractable syntax and phonology of natural language to the almost total exclusion of serious attention to semantics. Within the last few years, however, linguists have begun to be more concerned with semantics, and to give more than lip service to the principle that semantic considerations should have equal weight with syntactic ones in evaluating competing theories of grammars.¹ The present study is a preliminary investigation into the mutual relevance of some formal semantical notions developed by Carnap and the natural-language syntactic theory developed by Chomsky.