The papers in this volume are those given at the Cambridge Colloquium on Formal Semantics of Natural Language, April 1973. The purpose of that colloquium was twofold: to stimulate work in natural language semantics and to bring together linguists, philosophers, and logicians working in different countries and, often, from different points of view. Both purposes were, it seems to us, achieved, though of course it was not feasible to represent all countries and all points of view at a single conference.

The questions treated in the colloquium papers represent the following current areas of interest: problems of quantification and reference in natural language, the application of formal logic to natural language semantics, the formal semantics of non-declarative sentences, the relation between natural language semantics and that of programming languages, formal pragmatics and the relation between sentences and their contexts of use, discourse meaning, and the relation between surface syntax and logical meaning.

The papers have been loosely grouped under the six rubrics given in the table of contents. These rubrics were not given to the authors in advance and are intended only as a rough guide to the reader.