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Situation Semantics
In situation theory, situation semantics (pioneered by Jon Barwise and John Perry in the early 1980s) attempts to provide a solid theoretical foundation for reasoning about common-sense and real world situations, typically in the context of theoretical linguistics, theoretical philosophy, or applied natural language processing, Barwise and Perry Situations, unlike worlds, are not complete in the sense that every proposition or its negation holds in a world. According to ''Situations and Attitudes'', meaning is a relation between a discourse situation, a connective situation and a described situation. The original theory of ''Situations and Attitudes'' soon ran into foundational difficulties. A reformulation based on Peter Aczel's non-well-founded set theory was proposed by Barwise before this approach to the subject petered out in the early 1990s. HPSG Situation semantics is the first semantic theory that was used in head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG). Kratzer Bar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Situation Theory
Situation theory provides the mathematical foundations to situation semantics, and was developed by writers such as Jon Barwise and Keith Devlin in the 1980s. Due to certain foundational problems, the mathematics was framed in a non-well-founded set theory. One could think of the relation of situation theory to situation semantics as like that of type theory to Montague semantics. Basic types Types in the theory are defined by applying two forms of type abstraction, starting with an initial collection of basic types. Basic types: *TIM: the type of a temporal location *LOC: the type of a spatial location *IND: the type of an individual *RELn: the type of an n-place relation *SIT: the type of a situation *INF: the type of an infon *TYP: the type of a type *PAR: the type of a parameter *POL: the type of a polarity (i.e. 0 or 1) Infons are made of basic types. For instance: If l is a location, then l is of type LOC, and the infon is a fact. See also * State of affairs (philosophy) R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Pollard
Carl Jesse Pollard (born June 28, 1947) is a Professor of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. He is the inventor of head grammar and higher-order grammar, as well as co-inventor of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG). He is currently also working on convergent grammar (CVG). He has written numerous books and articles on formal syntax and semantics. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere .... External linksCarl Pollard's website 1947 births Living people Linguists from the United States Syntacticians Ohio State University faculty {{US-linguist-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Barbara Partee
Barbara Hall Partee (born June 23, 1940) is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). Biography Born in Englewood, New Jersey, Partee grew up in the Baltimore area. She is the younger sister of professional baseball player Dick Hall. She attended Swarthmore College, where she majored in mathematics with minors in Russian and philosophy. She did her graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Noam Chomsky. Her 1965 PhD dissertation from MIT was entitled ''Subject and Object in Modern English''. Partee began her professorial career at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1965 as an assistant professor of linguistics. She taught there until 1972, when she transferred to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, soon becoming a full professor. During her time at UMass Amherst, she has taught numerous students who would become notable linguists including Gennaro Chierch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Possible World
A possible world is a complete and consistent way the world is or could have been. Possible worlds are widely used as a formal device in logic, philosophy, and linguistics in order to provide a semantics for intensional logic, intensional and modal logic. Their metaphysics, metaphysical status has been a subject of controversy in philosophy, with Modal realism, modal realists such as David Lewis (philosopher), David Lewis arguing that they are literally existing alternate realities, and others such as Robert Stalnaker arguing that they are not. Logic Possible worlds are one of the foundational concepts in modal logic, modal and intensional logics. Formulas in these logics are used to represent statements about what ''might'' be true, what ''should'' be true, what one ''believes'' to be true and so forth. To give these statements a formal interpretation, logicians use structures containing possible worlds. For instance, in the relational semantics for classical propositional mo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syntax–semantics Interface
In linguistics, the syntax–semantics interface is the interaction between syntax and semantics. Its study encompasses phenomena that pertain to both syntax and semantics, with the goal of explaining correlations between form and meaning.Chierchia (1999) Specific topics include scope,Partee (2014) binding, and lexical semantic properties such as verbal aspect and nominal individuation,Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995)Van Valin & LaPolla (1997)Van Valin (2005) p.67 semantic macroroles,Van Valin (2005) p.67 and unaccusativity.Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995) The interface is conceived of very differently in formalist and functionalist approaches. While functionalists tend to look into semantics and pragmatics for explanations of syntactic phenomena, formalists try to limit such explanations within syntax itself. It is sometimes referred to as the ''morphosyntax–semantics interface'' or the ''syntax-lexical semantics interface''.Hackl (2013) Functionalist approaches Within f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Context (language Use)
In semiotics, linguistics, sociology and anthropology, context refers to those objects or entities which surround a ''focal event'', in these disciplines typically a communicative event, of some kind. Context is "a frame that surrounds the event and provides resources for its appropriate interpretation". It is thus a relative concept, only definable with respect to some focal event within a frame, not independently of that frame. In linguistics In the 19th century, it was debated whether the most fundamental principle in language was contextuality or compositionality, and compositionality was usually preferred.Janssen, T. M. (2012) Compositionality: Its historic context', in M. Werning, W. Hinzen, & E. Machery (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of compositionality', pp. 19-46, Oxford University Press. Verbal context refers to the text or speech surrounding an expression (word, sentence, or speech act). Verbal context influences the way an expression is understood; hence the norm of no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Angelika Kratzer
Angelika Kratzer is a professor emerita of linguistics in the department of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Biography She was born in Germany, and received her PhD from the University of Konstanz in 1979, with a dissertation entitled ''Semantik der Rede''. She is an influential and widely cited semanticist whose expertise includes modals, conditionals, situation semantics, and a range of topics relating to the syntax–semantics interface. Among her most influential ideas are: a unified analysis of modality of different flavors (building on the work of Jaakko Hintikka); a modal analysis of conditionals; and the hypothesis ("the little v hypothesis") that the agent argument of a transitive verb is introduced syntactically whereas the theme argument is selected for lexically. She co-wrote with Irene Heim the semantics textbook ''Semantics in Generative Grammar'', and is co-editor, with Irene Heim, of the journal ''Natural Language Semantics.'' Key publi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ivan Sag
Ivan Andrew Sag (November 9, 1949 – September 10, 2013) was an American linguist and cognitive scientist. He did research in areas of syntax and semantics as well as work in computational linguistics. Personal life Born in Alliance, Ohio on November 9, 1949, Sag attended the Mercersburg Academy but was expelled shortly before graduation. He received a BA from the University of Rochester, an MA from the University of Pennsylvania—where he studied comparative Indo-European languages, Sanskrit, and sociolinguistics—and a PhD from MIT in 1976, writing his dissertation (advised by Noam Chomsky) on ellipsis. Sag received a Mellon Fellowship at Stanford University in 1978-79, and remained in California from that point on. He was appointed a position in Linguistics at Stanford, and earned tenure there. He was married to sociolinguist Penelope Eckert. Academic work Sag made notable contributions to the fields of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and language processing. His early ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar
Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) is a highly lexicalized, constraint-based grammar developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag. It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as opposed to a dependency grammar, and it is the immediate successor to generalized phrase structure grammar. HPSG draws from other fields such as computer science ( data type theory and knowledge representation) and uses Ferdinand de Saussure's notion of the sign. It uses a uniform formalism and is organized in a modular way which makes it attractive for natural language processing. An HPSG grammar includes principles and grammar rules and lexicon entries which are normally not considered to belong to a grammar. The formalism is based on lexicalism. This means that the lexicon is more than just a list of entries; it is in itself richly structured. Individual entries are marked with types. Types form a hierarchy. Early versions of the grammar were very lexicalized with few grammatical rules (schema). More r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jon Barwise
Kenneth Jon Barwise (; June 29, 1942 – March 5, 2000) was an American mathematician, philosopher and logician who proposed some fundamental revisions to the way that logic is understood and used. Education and career Born in Independence, Missouri to Kenneth T. and Evelyn Barwise, Jon was a precocious child. A pupil of Solomon Feferman at Stanford University, Barwise started his research in infinitary logic. After positions as assistant professor at Yale University and the University of Wisconsin, during which time his interests turned to natural language, he returned to Stanford in 1983 to direct the Center for the Study of Language and Information. He began teaching at Indiana University in 1990. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. In his last year, Barwise was invited to give the 2000 Gödel Lecture; he died prior to the lecture. Philosophical and logical work Barwise contended that, by being explicit about the context in whic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Non-well-founded Set Theory
Non-well-founded set theories are variants of axiomatic set theory that allow sets to be elements of themselves and otherwise violate the rule of well-foundedness. In non-well-founded set theories, the foundation axiom of ZFC is replaced by axioms implying its negation. The study of non-well-founded sets was initiated by Dmitry Mirimanoff in a series of papers between 1917 and 1920, in which he formulated the distinction between well-founded and non-well-founded sets; he did not regard well-foundedness as an axiom. Although a number of axiomatic systems of non-well-founded sets were proposed afterwards, they did not find much in the way of applications until Peter Aczel’s hyperset theory in 1988. The theory of non-well-founded sets has been applied in the logical modelling of non-terminating computational processes in computer science (process algebra and final semantics), linguistics and natural language semantics (situation theory), philosophy (work on the Liar Paradox), an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Aczel
Peter Henry George Aczel (; born 31 October 1941) is a British mathematician, logician and Emeritus joint Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. He is known for his work in non-well-founded set theory, constructive set theory, and Frege structures. Education Aczel completed his Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics in 1963 followed by a DPhil at the University of Oxford in 1966 under the supervision of John Crossley. Career and research After two years of visiting positions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Rutgers University Aczel took a position at the University of Manchester. He has also held visiting positions at the University of Oslo, California Institute of Technology, Utrecht University, Stanford University and Indiana University Bloomington. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2012. Aczel is on the editorial board of the ''Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic'' and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |