Reconciling NSM and Formal Semantics

Abstract

Formal semantics and Natural Semantic Metalanguage are widely held to be radically incompatible as ways to study meaning in naural language. Here I will show that they can to some extent be reconciled. In particular, for linguists working with NSM, formal semantics can be viewed as providing mathematical accounts of some of the same phenomena that NSM studies, such as entailment, and for the formal semanticist, NSM offers a small target in the form of mini-languages that exhibit the essential logico-semantic features of full natural languages, such as extensionality, intensionality and hyperintensionality, and algebraic principles such as transitivity, symmetry etc. or various of the primes. Therefore, although these two approaches are likely to remain distinct enterprises for the foreseeable future, some intercommunication is possible and indeed desirable.