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Part of
History of Linguistics 2011: Selected Papers from the 12th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS XII), Saint Petersburg, 28 August - 2 September 2011
Edited by Vadim Kasevich, Yuri A. Kleiner and Patrick Sériot
[Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 123] 2014
► pp. 137–144

Looking for a semantic theory

The path taken by Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1931–1960)

ORCID logo | Laboratoire d’Histoire des Théories Linguistiques CNRS | Université Paris Diderot | Sorbonne Paris Cité

In the early 1930s, the Polish philosopher and logician Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963) proposed a new formal approach to natural language which, unlike Chomsky’s, was based on a joint calculus of the grammaticality and meaning of sentences. This methodological choice, which resulted from Ajdukiewicz’s reflections on the nature of language, led him to consider different conceptions of meaning implementable in a syntactical algorithm. The aim of this paper is to retrace the various solutions provided by Ajdukiewicz to meet this challenge that will continue to be a real issue for future categorial grammars.

Published online: 29 August 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sihols.123.12god
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