Formal Linguistics and Formal Logic

Abstract

The recent, and apparently growing, trend among linguists to ransack textbooks of logic might be merely an intellectual fashion, destined like all fashions to fade. But it would be foolish, if not insulting, simply to dismiss it in this way, especially as the interest has not been entirely one-sided. Philosophers, too, are becoming increasingly keen, despite the inaccessibility of some of the material, to acquaint themselves with the results of linguistic research (see, for example, Vendler, 1967). When two disciplines start to become conscious of each other, this awareness may reveal something of interest about the nature of the problems, whether substantive or methodological, which they then find themselves confronting. The boundaries between disciplines are notoriously complex and untidy, and all we can hope to do here is to delineate roughly some of the many interconnexions between logic and linguistics, and then to consider to what extent and in what ways we might expect them to gain by contact with each other. And whether or not the benefits are really all on one side, we may perhaps, as linguists, be forgiven for revealing a selfish preoccupation with what the study of formal logic has to offer us.