Applications of logic

The study of language

The second half of the 20th century witnessed an intensive interaction between logic and linguistics, both in the study of syntax and in the study of semantics. In syntax the most important development was the rise of the theory of generative grammar, initiated by the American linguist Noam Chomsky. This development is closely related to the theory of recursive functions, or computability, since the basic idea of the generative approach is that the well-formed sentences of a natural language are recursively enumerable.

Ideas from logical semantics were extended to linguistic semantics in the 1960s by the American logician Richard Montague. One general reflection of the influence of logical semantics on the study of linguistic semantics is that logical symbolism is now widely assumed to be the appropriate framework for the semantical representation of natural language sentences.

Many of these developments were straightforward applications of familiar logical techniques to natural languages. In other cases, the logical techniques in question were developed specifically for the purpose of applying them to linguistic theory. The theory of finite automata, for example, was originally developed for the purpose of establishing which kinds of grammar could be generated by which kinds of automata.

In the early stages of the development of symbolic logic, formal logical languages were typically conceived of as merely “purified” or regimented versions of natural languages. The most important purification was supposed to have been the elimination of ambiguities. Slowly, however, this view was replaced by a realization that logical symbolism and ordinary discourse operate differently in several respects. Logical languages came to be considered as instructive objects of comparison for natural languages, rather than as replacements of natural languages for the purpose of some intellectual enterprise, usually science. Indeed, the task of translating between logical languages and natural languages proved to be much more difficult than had been anticipated. Hence, any discussion of the application of logic to language and linguistics will have to deal in the first place with the differences between the ways in which logical notions appear in logical symbolism and the ways in which they are manifested in natural language.

One of the most striking differences between natural languages and the most common symbolic languages of logic lies in the treatment of verbs for being. In the quantificational languages initially created by Gottlob Frege, Giuseppe Peano, Bertrand Russell, and others, different uses of such verbs are represented in different ways. According to this generally accepted idea, the English word is is multiply ambiguous, since it may express the is of identity, the is of predication, the is of existence, or the is of class inclusion, as in the following examples:

Lord Avon is Anthony Eden. Tarzan is blond. There are vampires. The whale is a mammal.

These allegedly different meanings can be expressed in logical symbolism, using the identity sign =, the material conditional symbol ⊃ (“if…then”), the existential and universal quantifiers (∃x) (“there is an x such that…”) and (∀x) (“for all x…”), and appropriate names and predicates, as follows:

a=e, or “Lord Avon is Anthony Eden.” B(t), or “Tarzan is blond.” (∃x)(V(x)), or “There is an x such that x is a vampire.” (∀x)(W(x) ⊃ M(x)), or “For all x, if x is a whale, then x is a mammal.”

When early symbolic logicians spoke about eliminating ambiguities from natural language, the main example they had in mind was this alleged ambiguity, which has been called the Frege-Russell ambiguity. It is nevertheless not clear that the ambiguity is genuine. It is not clear, in other words, that one must attribute the differences between the uses of is above to ambiguity rather than to differences between the contexts in which the word occurs on different occasions. Indeed, an explicit semantics for English quantifiers can be developed in which is is not ambiguous.

Logical form is another logical or philosophical notion that was applied in linguistics in the second half of the 20th century. In most cases, logical forms were assumed to be identical—or closely similar—to the formulas of first-order logic (logical systems in which the quantifiers (∃x) and (∀x) apply to, or “range over,” individuals rather than sets, functions, or other entities). In later work, Chomsky did not adopt the notion of logical form per se, though he did use a notion called LF—the term obviously being chosen to suggest “logical form”—as a name for a certain level of syntactical representation that plays a crucial role in the interpretation of natural-language sentences. Initially, the LF of a sentence was analyzed, in Chomsky’s words, “along the lines of standard logical analysis of natural language.” However, it turned out that the standard analysis was not the only possible one.

An important part of the standard analysis is the notion of scope. In ordinary first-order logic, the scope of a quantifier such as (∃x) indicates the segment of a formula in which the variable is bound to that quantifier. The scope is expressed by a pair of parentheses that follow the quantifier, as in (∃x)(—). The scopes of different quantifiers are assumed to be nested, in the sense that they cannot overlap only partially: either one of them is included in the other, or they do not overlap at all. This notion of scope, called “binding scope,” is one of the most pervasive ideas in modern linguistics, where the analysis of a sentence in terms of scope relations is typically replaced by an equivalent analysis in terms of labeled trees.

In symbolic logic, however, scopes have another function. They also indicate the relative logical priority of different logical terms; this notion is accordingly called “priority scope.” Thus, in the sentence

(∀x)((∃y)(x loves y))

which can be expressed in English as

Everybody loves someone

the existential quantifier is in the scope of the universal quantifier and is said to depend on it. In contrast, in

(∃y)((∀x)(x loves y))

which can be expressed in English as

Someone is loved by everybody

the existential quantifier does not depend on the universal one. Hence, the sentence asserts the existence of a universally beloved person.

When it comes to natural languages, however, there is no valid reason to think that the two functions of the logical scope must always go together. One can in fact build an explicit logic in which the two kinds of scope are distinguished from each other. Thus, priority ordering scope can be represented by [ ] and binding scope by ( ). One can then apply the distinction to the so-called “donkey sentences,” which have puzzled linguists for centuries. They are exemplified by a sentence such as

If Peter owns a donkey, he beats it

whose force is the same as that of

(∀x)((x is a donkey & Peter owns x) ⊃ Peter beats x)

Such a sentence is puzzling because the quantifier word in the English sentence is the indefinite article a, which has the force of an existential quantifier—hence the puzzle as to where the universal quantifier comes from. This puzzle is solved by realizing that the logical form of the donkey sentence is actually

(∃x)([x is a donkey & Peter owns x]) ⊃ Peter beats x)

There is likewise no general theoretical reason why logical priority should be indicated by a segmentation of the sentence by means of parentheses and not, for example, by means of a lexical item. For example, in English the universal quantifier any has logical priority over the conditional, as illustrated by the logical form of a sentence such as “I will be surprised if anyone objects”:

(∀x)((x is a person & x objects) ⊃ I will be surprised)

Furthermore, it is possible for the scopes of two natural-language quantifiers to overlap only partially. Examples are found in the so-called branching quantifier sentences and in what are known as Bach-Peters sentences, exemplified by the following:

A boy who was fooling her kissed a girl who loved him.