99. Barbara Partee | Linguistics

Can formal semantics really explain meaning compositionally, or do intonation, context, and discourse do more of the work than we admit?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestBarbara Partee is Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and her work has focused on formal semantics and language.2. Interview SummaryBarbara Partee frames the interview around how to make the intuitive slogan of ‘compositionality’ precise: yes, sentence meaning depends on the meanings of parts and how they’re combined, but every term in that slogan (“meaning,” “part,” “combined,” “structure”) is theory-laden, so different formalizations yield different predictions. She illustrates how semantic considerations can adjudicate between syntactic analyses, using relative clauses: if “boy” and “who loves Mary” are both treated as predicates, composition can be simple set intersection—yielding “boy ∩ loves-Mary”—whereas building the definite “the boy” too early wrongly hardwires uniqueness and then can’t be “undone.” Along the way she credits insights from Richard Montague and notes parallels with W. V. O. Quine (including Quine’s Word and Object) about treating common nouns as predicates rather than names.A major through-line is that many apparent counterexamples to ‘compositionality’ are really prompts to enrich what counts as “structure.” Partee points to intonation and focus as meaning-relevant (and often truth-condition- or presupposition-relevant): shifting stress in “John didn’t invite Mary to the party” changes what’s being denied, and similar effects show up with contrastive stress and “just anyone.” She also treats some constructions as having built-in “slots” that syntax doesn’t resolve, like genitives: “John’s team” contains an implicit relation variable (team John plays for/owns/writes about, etc.) that must be fixed pragmatically by context and shared expectations. This sets up her broader picture of semantics working in tandem with pragmatics and discourse—e.g., modeling how conversation updates a common ground, referencing work associated with Hans Kamp and Irene Heim on discourse and ‘context change’ perspectives.In the latter part of the conversation she zooms out to what formal semantics has clarified over the decades: once you allow intermediate “open” structures (roughly, lambda-abstracts) rather than only closed sentences, quantification and scope phenomena stop looking like hacks and start looking systematic. She then uses anaphora puzzles—‘pronouns of laziness,’ donkey sentences, and the ‘paycheck’ pattern (traceable in the literature to Peter Geach and his Reference and Generality)—to show how natural language can require richer machinery than simple bound-variable models. Finally, she emphasizes both the strengths and limits of formal semantics: it excels at logical/structural effects (the kind that even large-scale statistical systems can miss, as in negation), but it can’t ignore lexical meaning entirely—illustrated by mass/count noun distinctions, cross-linguistic classifier strategies, and a lattice-based way of modeling why plurals and mass nouns pattern together.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:53 - Compositionality08:11 - Idealization13:50 - Relevance of idealizations19:02 - Non-syntactic expression24:43 - Genetives28:41 - Pronouns of laziness33:45 - Pragmatic pronouns36:31 - Pragmatics40:32 - Anaphoric and deictic42:25 - Other sorts of pronouns43:34 - Takeaways47:35 - Progress in linguistics59:14 - Time and tense1:06:24 - Meaning1:14:20 - Many and few1:24:26 - Difficult puzzles1:31:18 - Modal terms1:33:30 - Value of linguistics1:41:12 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe