LF and Natural Logic
Peter Ludlow · 2002
Abstract During the twentieth century, the focus of work in logic was principally on the developmentoflogicalcalculithatbearlittleapparentrelationtothestructureof natural language. That is, the syntactic forms postulated for purposes of logical reasoning (for example, the logical forms of the propositional and predicate calculi) do not obviously resemble the forms postulated within current grammatical theory. This apparent mismatch between logical form and grammatical form is ordinarily taken as an unsurprising consequence of the fact that, since Frege and Russell, one of the central goals of logic has been to help clarify (if not establish) the foundations of mathematics. Mathematics aside, however, it has also been held that natural language is a rather poor medium in which to couch logical reasoning, since natural language is ambiguous, vague, etc.