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THE
JOURNAL OF SYMBOLIC
LOGIC
REVIEWS
Numerical cross references are to previous reviews in this JOURNAL or to A bibli-
to one of the reviews or one of the publications reviewed or listed on page 307 of
volume 22, with reliance on the context to show which one is meant; and "XXIII
23(1)" will refer to the first item listed on page 23 of volume 23, i.e., to Boehner's
article, History of scholastic logic.
References such as 7145, 1253 are the entries so numbered in the Bibliography.
Similar references preceded by the latter A or containing the fraction i or a decimal
point (as A15524, 186j1, 2882.1) are to the Additions and corrections. A reference
followed by the letter A is a double reference to an entry of the same number in the
Bibliography and in the Additions and corrections.
PAUL ZIFF.
Semantic
Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1960, xi +
analysis.
255 pp.
The author's principal purpose is to present a metatheoretical account of the
semantics of a natural language. He wishes to show how one might arrive at dictionary
entries for the morphemic elements of a natural language and examines what sorts of
methodological problems might be encountered along the way. Although he does not
attempt to provide a discovery procedure for dictionary entries, he does outline in
some detail what he expects would be the major steps in such an investigation. We
shall try to reproduce this outline here, greatly oversimplifying as we go.
It is assumed at the outset that the linguist has a grammar of the language, in the
sense of Chomsky (cf. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic structures, The Hague 1957),
i.e., one which generates all and only the grammatical utterances of the language
and assigns a structural description to each. The procedure is then to pair utterance
types with sets of conditions such that the pairing [uid, wj] expresses a regularity to
be found in connection with the utterance ua. These pairings are obtained in two
differentways: (a) by observations carried out in the context of utterance - in which
case the regularity takes the form "Generally, when ui is uttered, then conditions wj
are satisfied"; and (b) by projection (to be discussed below) - in which case the
regularity takes the form "If ui is uttered, then, in a standard case, conditions wj
are satisfied." Since many regularities of the first sort will obtain which will not be
relevant to an analysis of the meaning of morphological elements of ui (let ui be "I have
a toothache ." and the condition wtbe that the Sun is ninety-three million miles from
the Earth, a condition which will presumably be associated with every utterance),
proposed pairings are judged for possible relevance according to certain principles,
and those judged irrelevant are excluded (cf. Chapter II).
Accordingly, let 0 be the set of utterances for which relevant observational pairings
have been obtained. These pairings are then used to associate with each morphological
element mi of 0 that has meaning in the language conditions which might plausibly
193
194
REVIEWS