Anatomy of a Linguist
Anatomy of a Linguist
What Keeps Us Up at Night
Mathematical Parallels In his final column, T. R. Williamson challenges us to consider the similarities he believes exist between words and numbers.
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mongst certain subfields of linguistics exists the tendency to rely upon tools or methods developed within mathematics for linguistic analyses. This style can be traced back to the work of Frege[1], whose rejection of psychological explanations for the rules of logic inspired Tarski to define truth as a reference to a possible world[2]. This in turn inspired Davidson and Montague to apply such concepts to the analyses of sentences of natural languages[3][4]. Therein, it is proposed that the meaning of any sentence can be understood as a function towards a possible world in which the cons-
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tituents of that sentence, and their combination, were true[5]. This is ‘mathematical’ insofar as it uses formal logic with lots of nice symbols that tightly define the parameters for natural language semantics. Similar too are the tools applied in understanding the generation of linearised syntactic constructions within the generative framework of linguistics[6], inasmuch as they are derived by the operations provided by the Universal Grammar we all purportedly have in our heads that determine, on some deeper level, the similarities between all Earth’s languages.
