Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings

This is a collection of papers that helped shape the field of formal semantics in linguistics. It covers key central themes and includes an introduction and references. This should be a useful resource for students and scholars of semantics. Introduction / Paul Portner and Barbara H. Partee -- The proper treatment of quantification in ordinary English / Richard Montague -- A unified analysis of the English bare plural / Greg N. Carlson -- Generalized quantifiers and natural language / Jon Barwise and Robin Cooper -- The logical analysis of plurals and mass terms : a lattice-theoretical approach / Godehard Link -- Assertion / Robert C. Stalnaker -- Scorekeeping in a language game / David Lewis -- Adverbs of quantification / David Lewis -- A theory of truth and semantic representation / Hans Kamp -- File change semantics and the familiarity theory of definiteness / Irene Heim -- On the projection problem of presuppositions / Irene Heim -- Toward a semantic analysis of verb aspect and the English "imperfective" progressive / David R. Dowty The national category of modality / Angelika Kratzer -- The algebra of events / Emmon Bach -- Generalized conjunction and type ambiguity / Barbara H. Partee and Mats Rooth -- Noun phrase interpretation and type-shifting principles / Barbara H. Partee -- Syntax and semantics of questions / Lauri Karttunen -- Type-shifting rules and the semantics of interrogatives / Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof -- On the notion of 'affective' in the analysis of negative-polarity items / William A. Ladusaw