Richard Montague

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Richard Montague (1930-1971) was a mathematician and semanticist who studied under Alfred Tarski at the University of Berkeley, California. In a series of papers written in 1970, including the postthumously published The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English (1973), he developed a formalism for the semantics of natural language drawing on the model theory approach developed by Tarski which later came to be called "Montague Semantics" or "Montague Grammar". The adjective "Montagovian" is used to refer to Montague's work and related approaches.

Montague was murdered in his home at the age of 40. No suspects were ever charged with this crime.

In 1981, Hans Kamp, a student of Montague's, introduced Discourse Representation Theory, which among other things, provides a more comprehensive account of so-called "donkey sentences".