The older linguistic domain that uses the term ontology is model-theoretic formal semantics, which in one of its simplest guises uses the ontology of first order logic: individuals, sets of tuples of individuals and truth values. But progress in the semantic analysis of natural language made it soon obvious that a less parsimonious ontology is required for this purpose and so the number of ontological categories started to grow. To point out just a few milestones: Montague (1973) added possible worlds and moments of time to the basic ontology and projected from there, using a recursively defined set of types, an infinite ontology of possible denotations; Link (1983) devised an integrated ontology for individuals and substances by providing both with a semilattice structure; Davidson’s (1967) proposal to grant events the status of a basic ontological category has been welcomed and fruitfully employed in linguistics, and Barwise and Perry’s idea (1983) of enriching the ontology by admitting situations as ‘first-class citizens’ had a similar impact. In short, many contributed to the task of freeing linguistic ontology from the constraints of philosophical ontology
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