Edited by Klaus von Heusinger & Alice ter Meulen

Celebrating Hans Kamp’s Selected Writings in Amsterdam

From interview with Alice ter Meulen: “The lack of mutual interest between Chomsky and Montague – to the extent that there was any perception of the other’s achievements, it seems to have been largely negative – may seem strange in one way, since they were motivated by the same deep insight and concern: that natural languages, for reasons that we now find commonplace, but that weren’t at the time, were subject to far greater systematicity than had been assumed until then or at least than anyone had been prepared to openly assert. The relation between form and meaning, they both saw clearly and posited emphatically, had to be essentially lawlike, and for natural languages this had to be in some important sense by ‘design’ – just as for formal languages, even if the designing and the designers were different.”