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Logical Syntax and Semantics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Yehoshua Bar-Hillel
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel*
Affiliation:
Hebrew University, Jerusalem
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Extract

Though considerations of meaning in linguistics can be replaced, up to a point, by rigorous structural procedures, i.e. procedures involving solely the kinds and order of the elements of the language under investigation, they cannot be replaced by distributional procedures, despite the claim recently made by Harris. Distributional procedures may be sufficient to establish the rules by which all longer expressions (especially sentences) can be constructed out of the elements, but they are inadequate for the establishment of certain other rules that would mirror the so-called logical properties and relations of sentences and other expressions.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 30 , Issue 2-Part1: April-June , June 1954 , pp. 230 - 237
Copyright
Copyright © 1954 by the Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 Zellig S. Harris, Methods in structural linguistics 8 fn. 7 (Chicago, 1951).

The work on which the present paper is based was done while the author was employed by the Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was supported in part by the Air Materiel Command, the Signal Corps, and the Office of Naval Research, and in part by the Rockefeller Foundation.

The author is grateful to the Editor of Language, who read an earlier draft of this paper and suggested many changes and deletions, thereby improving its cogency and reducing the number of its errors.

2 Rudolf Carnap, The logical syntax of language 1-2 (New York and London, 1937). The German original, Die logische Syntax der Sprache, was published in Vienna in 1934.

3 The term ‘structural linguist’ is used throughout this paper to mean ‘some American structural linguists’, of whom Bloch, Harris, Hockett, Smith, and Trager are a representative sample.

4 See Logical syntax 170.

5 Structure of English 8 fn. 6.

6 Discourse analysis, Lg. 28.20 fn. 13 (1952).

7 Following the usage of Charles S. Peirce, a sign-type is the abstract class of all concrete sign-tokens which (by some criterion) belong-to-the-same-type. Cf. Y. Bar-Hillel, A quasi-arithmetical notation for syntactic description, Lg. 29.49 (1953); Cherry, Halle, and Jakobson, Toward the logical description of languages in their phonemic aspect, Lg. 29.45 fn. 13 (1953).

8 From now on the qualifier almost will be omitted.

9 Kenneth L. Pike, More on grammatical prerequisites, Word 8.106-21 (1952), and the references mentioned there.

10 On recursive definitions in empirical science, Proc. 11th Internat. Congress of Philosophy 5.160-5 (Brussels, 1953).

11 Foundations of logic and mathematics, International encyclopedia of unified science, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Chicago, 1939); Introduction to semantics (Cambridge, Mass., 1942); Meaning and necessity (Chicago, 1947).

12 Der Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalisierten Sprachen [written 1933], Studia philosophica 1.261-405 (1936); The semantic conception of truth and the foundation of semantics, Philosophy and phenomenological research 4.341-76 (1944). The latter is reprinted in Readings in philosophical analysis 52-84 (ed. H. Feigl and W. Sellars; New York, 1949) and in Semantics and the philosophy of language 13-47 (ed. L. Linsky; Urbana, Ill., 1952).

13 For instance, Notes on existence and necessity, Journal of philosophy 40.113-27 (1943), reprinted in Semantics and the philosophy of language 77-91.

14 So far as I know, Carnap has not used these terms in print, but they fit the main argument of Meaning and necessity, and were used by him in correspondence.

15 For instance, Two dogmas of empiricism, Philosophical review 60.22 (1951).

16 For a somewhat different approach to the problems discussed here, see Haskell B. Curry, Mathematics, syntactics, and logic, Mind 62.172-83 (1953).