Logical Form in Linguistics
The logical form of a sentence (or utterance) is a
formal representation of its logical structure—that
is, of the structure that is relevant to specifying its
logical role and properties.
There are a number of (interrelated) reasons for
giving a rendering of a sentence’s logical form.
Among them is to obtain proper inferences (which
otherwise would not follow; cf. Russell’s theory
of descriptions), to give the proper form for the
determination of truth-conditions (e.g., Tarski’s
method of truth and satisfaction as applied to
quantification), to show those aspects of a
sentence’s meaning that follow from the logical
role of certain terms (and not from the lexical
meaning of words; cf. the truth-functional
account of conjunction), and to formalize or
regiment the language in order to show that it is
has certain metalogical properties (e.g., that it is
free of paradox or that there is a sound proof
procedure).
Logical analysis—that is, the specification of
logical forms for sentences of a language—
presumes that some distinction is to be made
between the grammatical form of sentences
and their logical form. In LOGIC, of course, there
is no such distinction to be drawn. By design, the
gramatical form of a sentence specified by the
syntax of, for instance, first-order predicate logic
simply is its logical form. In the case of natural
language, however, the received wisdom of
the tradition of FREGE, Russell, Wittgenstein,
Tarski, Carnap, Quine, and others has been that on
the whole, gramatical form and logical form
cannot be identified; indeed, their nonidentity has
often been given as the raison d’être for logical
analysis. Natural languages have been held to be
insufficiently specified in their grammatical form
to reveal directly their logical form, and that no
mere paraphrase within the language would be
sufficient to do so. This led to the view that, as far
as natural languages were concerned, logical
analysis was a matter of rendering sentences of
the language in some antecedently defined logical
(or formal) language, where the relation between
the sentences in the languages is to be specified by
some sort of contextual definition or rules of
translation. In contemporary linguistic theory,
there has been a continuation of this view in work
inspired largely by Montague (especially,
Montague 1974). In large part because of
technical developments in both logic (primarily in
the areas of type theories and POSSIBLE WORLDS
SEMANTICS) and linguistics (with respect to
categorial rule systems), this approach has
substantially extended the range of phenomena
that could be treated by translation into an
interpreted logical language, shedding the
pessimism of prior views as to how systematically
techniques of logical análisis can be formally
applied to natural language (see Partee 1975;
Dowty, Wall, and Peters 1981; Cooper 1983).
Within linguistic theory, however, the term
“logical form” has been much more closely
identified with a different view that takes natural
language to be in an important sense logical, in
that grammatical form can be identified with
logical form. The hallmark of this view is that the
derivation of logical forms is continuous with the
derivation of other syntactic representations of a
sentence. As this idea was developed initially by
Chomsky and May (with precursors in generative
semantics), the levels of syntactic representation
included Deep Structure, Surface Structure, and
Logical Form (LF), with LF—the set of syntactic
structures constituting the “logical forms” of the
language—derived from Surface Structure by the
same sorts of transformational rules that derived
Surface Structure from Deep Structure. As with
other approaches to logical form, quantification
provides a central illustration. This is because,
since Frege, it has been generally accepted that the
treatment of quantification requires a
transformation” of a sentence’s surface
form. On the LF approach, it was hypothesized
(originally in May 1977) that the syntax of natural
languages contains a rule—QR, for Quantifier
Raising—that derives representations
at LF for sentences containing quantifier phrases,
functioning syntactically essentially as does WH-
MOVEMENT (the rule that derives the structure of
“What did Max read?”). By QR, (1) is derived as
the eepresentation of “Every linguist has read
Syntactic Structures” at LF, and because QR may
iterate, the representations in (2) for “Every
linguist has read some book by Chomsky”.
(1) [ every linguist1 [ t1 has read Syntactic
Structures]]
(2) a. [ every linguist1 [ some book by Chomsky2 [
t1 has read t1]]]
b. [ some book by Chomsky2 [ every linguist1 [ t1
has read t2]]]
With the aid of the syntactic notions of “trace of
movement” (t1, t2) and “c-command” (both of
which are independently necessary within
syntactic theory), the logically significant
distinctions of open and closed sentence, and of
relative scope of quantifiers, can be easily defined
with respect to the sort of representations in (1)
and (2). Interpreting the trace in (1) as a variable,
“t1 has read Syntactic Structures” stands as an
open sentence, falling within the scope of the c-
commanding quantifier phrase “every
linguist1;” similar remarks hold for (2), except
that (2a) and (2b) can be recognized as
representing distinct scope orderings of the
quantifiers (see Heim 1982; May 1985, 1989;
Hornstein and Weinberg 1990; Fox 1995;
Beghelli and Stowell 1997; and Reinhart 1997 for
further discusión of the treatment of quantification
within the LF approach). A wide range of
arguments have been made for the LF approach to
logical form. Illustrative of the sort of argument
presented is the argument from antecedent-
contained deletion (May 1985). A sentence such
as “Dulles suspected everyone that Angleton did”
has a verb phrase elided (its position is marked by
the pro-form “did”). If, however, the ellipsis is to
be “reconstructed” on the basis of the surface
form, the result will be a structural regress,
as the “antecedent” verb phrase, “suspected
everyone that Angleton did” itself contains the
ellipsis site. However, if the reconstruction is
defined with respect to a structure derived by QR:
(3) everyone that Angleton did [Dulles suspected
t], the antecedent is now the VP “suspected t,”
obtaining, properly, an LF-representation
comparable in form to that which would result if
there had been no deletion:
(4) everyone that Angleton suspected t [Dulles
suspected t].
Among other well-known arguments for LF are
weak crossover (Chomsky 1976), the interaction
of quantifier scope and bound variable anaphora
(Higginbotham 1980; Higginbotham and May
1981), superiority effects with multiple wh-
constructions (Aoun, Hornstein, and Sportiche
1981) and wh-complementation in languages
without overt wh-movement (Huang 1982). Over
the past two decades, there has been active
discussion in linguistic theory of the precise
nature of representations at LF, in particular with
respect to the representation of binding (see
BINDING THEORY) as this pertains to quantification
and ANAPHORA, and of the semantic interpretation
of such representations (cf. Larson and Segal
1995). This has taken place within a milieu of
evolving conceptions of SYNTAX and SEMANTICS
and has led to considerable refinement in our
conceptions of the structure of logical forms and
the range of phenomena that can be analyzed.
Constant in these discussions has been the
assumption that logical form is integrated into
syntactic description generally, and hence that the
thesis that natural languages are logical is
ultimately an empirical issue within the general
theory of syntactic rules and principles.
See also COMPOSITIONALITY; LOGICAL FORM,
ORIGINS OF; MORPHOLOGY; QUANTIFIERS;
SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE
—Robert C. May
References
Aoun, J., N. Hornstein, and D. Sportiche (1981). Some
aspects of wide scope quantification. Journal of
Linguistic Research 1: 69–95.
Beghelli, F., and T. Stowell (1997). Distributivity and
negation: The syntax of each and every. In A.
Szabolcsi, Ed., Ways of Taking Scope. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
Chomsky, N. (1976). Conditions on rules of grammar.
Linguistic Analysis 2: 303–351.
Cooper, R. (1983). Quantification and Syntactic
Theory. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Dowty, D., R. E. Wall, and S. Peters. (1981).
Introduction to Montague Semantics. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Fox, D. (1995). Economy and scope. Natural Language
Semantics 3: 283–341.
Higginbotham, J. (1980). Pronouns and bound
variables. Linguistic Inquiry 11: 679–708.
Higginbotham, J., and R. May. (1981). Questions,
quantifiers, and crossing. The Linguistic Review 1: 41–
79.
Heim, I. (1982). The Semantics of Definite and
Indefinite Noun Phrases. Ph.D. diss., University of
Massachusetts, Amherst.
Hornstein, N., and A. Weinberg. (1990). The necessity
of LF. The Linguistic Review 7: 129–168.
Huang, C.-T. J. (1982). Logical Relations in Chinese
and the Theory of Grammar. Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Larson, R., and G. Segal. (1995). Knowledge of
Meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
May, R. (1977). The Grammar of Quantification. Ph.D.
diss., Massachussets Institute of Technology. (Facsimile
edition Publisher by Garland Publishing, New York,
1991.)
May, R. (1985). Logical Form: Its Structure and
Derivation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
May, R. (1989). Interpreting logical form. Linguistics
and Philosophy 12: 387–435.
Montague, R. (1974). The proper treatment of
quantification in ordinary English. In R. Thomason,
Ed., Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard
Montague. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Partee, B. (1975). Montague grammar and
transformational grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 6: 203–
300.
Reinhart, T. (1997). Quantifier scope: How labor is
divided between QR and choice functions. Linguistics
and Philosophy 20: 399–467.
Further Readings
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fiengo, R., and R. May (1994). Indices and Identity.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Frege, G. (1892). On Sense and Reference, trans. by M.
Black. In P. Geach and M. Black, Eds., Translations
from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Blackwell.