Formal Semantics of Natural Language as a Challenge and an Alternative to the Linguistic Relativism

Abstract

The article presents the program of formal semantics of natural language as an alternative
to the linguistic relativism, which is popular in contemporary Russian philosophy of language
and epistemology. The authors describe the state of contemporary relativism and establish its
links with the criticism of natural language in classical analytic philosophy and the latter’s
further development. As an alternative to this view the authors discuss the work performed in
the tradition started, on one end by N. Chomsky’s analysis of syntax, R. Montague’s semantic
analysis of natural language and H.P. Grice’s theory of implicatures. The authors enumerate
several so-called linguistic universals in syntax, semantics and pragmatics in order to illustrate
the infl uential background behind the universalist approach to the study of natural language.