Montague Grammar in OED

Barbara Partee sends an email with the news that the most recent update of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) now includes the term “Montague Grammar”. She writes:

If your institution has a subscription to the online edition, you can see it. I don’t know whether having the web links below will help, or whether you just have to figure out how to get there through your library. The ‘front page’ link is below, and if you get there, you can just enter Montague grammar in the ‘find word’ box and be taken to it. The second link below is the actual entry. It was evidently added December 12; I knew it was supposed to happen in December, but I only found it just now.

http://dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl

http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/00315183

If you don’t have access, you can ask somebody who does (e.g. me) to go to the entry and then “mail” it to you — you’ll get a link which will be good for 3 days.

It will appear in the next print edition. That will take awhile; they’ve been working on this comprehensive revision since 1993, and publishing the results in quarterly installments online since 2000.

Of course the term is now mainly ‘historical’ — and I told them so when they were getting me to help them with it — but that’s apparently quite normal for the OED.

They give both British and American pronunciations for ‘Montague’ — I first became aware of the difference when Arnim von Stechow was visiting Amherst years ago and started using the British (approximately same as German) pronunciation and then switched to an exaggerated version of the American pronunciation (different first vowel and no ‘t’) (to tease us.)

I was really impressed with the researchers. They had correctly tracked down the first occurrence to Bob Rodman’s 1972 edited UCLA occasional papers (the ‘Unicorn volume’), and had tracked me down as its apparent originator, which is also correct (I double-checked), and we had an interesting correspondence.

I didn’t have the address of everyone I could think of to share the news with — feel free to spread the word. Maybe let’s the world of (sometime) Montague grammarians and friends and family of Montague grammarians drink an extra toast to Montague on New Year’s Eve!

Cheers,

Barbara

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