Comparative logic as an approach to comparison in natural language
Flavio De Paoli · Journal of Semantics · 1999
Montague grammarians claim that the logical analysis of language sketched in standard textbooks of first order logic is too coarse to be appropriate to such natural languages as English. In the following we shall defend the opposite view—at least as far as a very narrow fragment of English is concerned, traditional logical analysis is perfectly adequate provided we are ready to pay the price of abandoning classical logic in favour of logics containing a sufficiently rich stock of logical constants. Within the framework of Casari's comparative logic, we shall outline a model of a restricted fragment of English. We shall address such issues as the construction of complex noun phrases, the distinction between gradable and vague adjectives, the structure of comparative sentences and of antonym adjectival pairs.