Abstract
The aim of this contribution is to investigate the influence of logical tools on the development of semantic theories and vice versa. Pre-19th-century logic was limited to a few sentence forms and their logical interrelations. Modern predicate logic and later type logic, both inspired by investigating the meaning of mathematical sentences, widened the view for new sentence forms and thereby made logic relevant for a wider range of expressions in natural language. In a parallel course of developments the problem of different levels of meaning like sense and reference, or intension and extension were studied and initiated a shift to modal contexts in natural language. Montague bundled in his intensional type-theoretical framework a great part of these development in a unified formal framework which had strong impact on the formal approaches in natural language semantics. While the logical developments mentioned so far could be seen as direct answers to natural language phenomena, the first approaches to dynamic logic did not get their motivation from natural language, but from the semantics of computer programming. Here, a logical toolset was adapted to specific problems of natural language semantics.
