Abstract

In the dissertation I develop a formal language which integrates recent linguistic developments in a variant of the standard first order logic. The standard logic is modified to represent arguments based on variable polyadicity, thematic relations and irreferential terms. By introducing more structure into the metalogic, my theory solves problems with variable polyadicity, i.e., the property of natural language verbs which may take different numbers of arguments in different sentences. My treatment of variable polyadicity also incorporates a representation of thematic roles and thematic role implication. I argue that there is a thematic role, Created Object, which in imperfective creation sentences appears to imply that the noun phrase playing this role is irreferential: e.g., 'the house' in 'Kelly is building the house.' From this observation I argue that the traditional model theoretic semantics is inadequate to represent natural language, and advocate instead a semantics based on free logic. In the free logic I advocate, the imperfective progressive creation sentence is true just in case a correlative past tense sentence becomes true in the nearest possible world where the Created Object-term refers. The new language satisfactorily represents more English arguments than the standard first order theory, and these results are achieved without making essential use of events.