Course Notes on Natural Language Syntax and Semantics
This node contains one installment of the course notes for
MIT's graduate
course on the foundations of artificial intelligence.
This installment is a short treatment of
the syntax and semantics of natural language. It presents
a simplified version of Montague grammar. Montague grammar was
selected as introductory material because it provides a unified
account of syntax and semantics and also exhibits a tight technical
parallel between the syntactic categories of natural language and
the types of strongly typed programming languages. This analogy
makes Montague grammar particularly accessible to computer science
students. Some limitations of the Montague grammar approach are also
discussed.
postscript.
Some related work can be found in
my node on obviousness and computational properties of natural language syntax.
David McAllester, February, 1995