202 The formalization of sentence-meaning

difficulty. One reaction is to say that what we have identified as a part of sentence-meaning is not in fact encoded in sen­tences as such, but is the product of the interaction between the meaning, properly so called, of the sentence itself and some­thing else: contextual assumptions and expectations, non-lin­guistic (encyclopaedic) knowledge, conversational implicatures, etc., and should be handled as a matter of prag­matics rather than semantics. The second reaction is to accept that it is indeed a part of sentence-meaning and to attempt to provide a truth-conditional account of the phenomena by extending the formalism and relaxing some of the restrictions associated with what one may now think of as classical versions of formal semantics. Both attitudes are represented among for­mal semanticists who have been concerned with the analysis of linguistic meaning in recent years.

I have made it clear, in the preceding chapter, that, in my view, formal linguistic semantics has failed, so far, to account satisfactorily for such phenomena as tense, mood and sentence-type and has not been sufficiently respectful of the principle of saving the appearances. I cannot emphasize too strongly, there­fore, that, in my view, this failure does not invalidate completely the attempts that have been made to deal with these and other phenomena. The failure of a precise, but inadequate, account often points the way to the construction of an equally precise, but more comprehensive, theory of the same phenomena. And even when it does not do this, it may throw some light, obliquely and by reflection, upon the data that it does not fully illuminate. Many examples of this can be cited. To take but one: so far, no fully satisfactory account of the meaning of the English words , 'some' and 'any' (and their congeners: 'someone', 'anyone', 'something', 'anything', etc.) has been provided within the framework of formal linguistic semantics. Nevertheless, our understanding of the range of potentially relevant factors which determine the selection of one or the other has been greatly increased by the numerous attempts that have been made to handle the data truth-conditionally. Those who doubt that this is so are invited to compare the treatment of 'any' and 'some' in older and more recent pedagogical grammars of English, not to

7.1 Formal semantics and linguistic semantics 203

mention scholarly articles on the topic. They will see immedi­ately that the more recent accounts are eminently more satisfac­tory.

What follows is a deliberately simplified treatment of some of the principal concepts of formal semantics that have been widely invoked by linguists in the analysis of the prepositional content of the sentences of natural languages. No account is taken, in this chapter, of anything other than what is uncontroversially a part of the propositional content of sentences in English. It will be clear, however, from what was said in Chapter 6, that natural languages vary considerably as to what they encode in the gram­matical and lexical structure of sentences and that, according to the view adopted in this book, much of sentence-meaning, in many natural languages including English, is non-propositional. Whether formal linguistic semantics can ever cover, or be co­extensive with, the whole of linguistic semantics is an open ques­tion. Formal linguistic semantics, in its present state of develop­ment, is certainly a long way from being co-extensive with linguistic semantics, either theoretically or empirically. But pro­gress is being made, and it is conceivable that, in due course, far more of the insights and findings of non-formal linguistic seman­tics, traditional and modern, will be successfully formalized (probably by relaxing the restriction of sentence-meaning to what is truth-conditionally explicable). In this connexion, it is worth noting that, as there is a distinction to be drawn between linguistic theory (in the traditional sense of 'theory' in which theories are not necessarily formalized) and theoretical linguistics (as the term 'theoretical linguistics' is nowadays used: i.e., to refer to such parts of linguistic theory as have been formalized, or mathematicized), so there is a distinction to be drawn between semantic theory and theoretical, or formal, semantics. In recent years, each has drawn upon and, in turn, influenced the other; and this process of mutual influence will no doubt con tinue.