Chapter 5
In: The Lvov-Warsaw School and Contemporary Philosophy of Language
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Abstract
This paper considers Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s approach to “syntactic connexity” and Stanisław Leśniewski’s theory of “semantic categories”. Their relationship to Edmund Husserl’s “pure logical grammar” is discussed and their influence on contemporary theoretical linguistics is investigated, where it is claimed that Bar-Hillel “quasi-arithmetical notation” for syntactic description does not account for the non-linear character of the so-called “proper succession” which Ajdukiewicz takes up from Łukasiewicz. This non-linear feature can be found also in Haskell Curry’s binary operation of application. Curry’s ideas on grammatical structure and Šaumjan’s semiotic theory of language make use of the application to represent natural language syntax. It is then reasonable to conclude that these unorthodox developments have profited from an original interpretation of some contributions of the Lvov-Warsaw School.