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Montague's semantics for adverbs was a component of a general program for developing a formal semiotic theory of natural languages such as English. The task of the syntactic part of the program is to develop a recursive definition of the sets of phrases of various syntactic categories of expressions (eg noun phrases, intransitive verb phrases, adverb phrases, sentences) of a fragment of English. The semantic part of the program furnishes an interpretation of this fragment in terms of intensional model theory, and the pragmatic part deals with the interpretation of context-dependent or" indexical" expressions such as I, here, and now. In Montague's linguistic writings2 the general semiotic program is the center of attention, and detail is not lavished on specifics such as the treatment of adverbs. One function of this paper is to remedy this defect.

Also, though we accept the main features of Montague's semiotic program …