Johan Anthony Willem "Hans" Kamp (born 5 September 1940)
is a Dutch philosopher and
linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingui ...
, responsible for introducing
discourse representation theory
In formal linguistics, discourse representation theory (DRT) is a framework for exploring meaning under a formal semantics approach. One of the main differences between DRT-style approaches and traditional Montagovian approaches is that DRT includ ...
(DRT) in 1981.
Kamp was born in
Den Burg.
He received a Ph.D. in
Philosophy from UCLA in 1968, and has taught at
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to ...
,
University of London
The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degre ...
,
University of Texas, Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...
, and
University of Stuttgart
The University of Stuttgart (german: Universität Stuttgart) is a leading research university located in Stuttgart, Germany. It was founded in 1829 and is organized into 10 faculties. It is one of the oldest technical universities in Germany wi ...
. His dissertation, ''Tense Logic and the Theory of Linear Order'' (1968) was devoted to
functional completeness In logic, a functionally complete set of logical connectives or Boolean operators is one which can be used to express all possible truth tables by combining members of the set into a Boolean expression.. ("Complete set of logical connectives").. (" ...
in
tense logic In logic, temporal logic is any system of rules and symbolism for representing, and reasoning about, propositions qualified in terms of time (for example, "I am ''always'' hungry", "I will ''eventually'' be hungry", or "I will be hungry ''until'' I ...
, the main result being that all temporal operators are definable in terms of "since" and "until", provided that the underlying temporal structure is a continuous
linear ordering. Kamp's 1971 paper on "now" (published in ''
Theoria
Christian mysticism is the tradition of mystical practices and mystical theology within Christianity which "concerns the preparation f the personfor, the consciousness of, and the effect of ..a direct and transformative presence of God" ...
'') was the first employment of
double-indexing in
model theoretic semantics
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and compu ...
. His doctoral committee included
Richard Montague
Richard Merritt Montague (September 20, 1930 – March 7, 1971) was an American mathematician and philosopher who made contributions to mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. He is known for proposing Montague grammar to formalize t ...
as chairman,
Chen Chung Chang
Chen Chung Chang (Chinese: 张晨钟) was a mathematician who worked in model theory. He obtained his PhD from Berkeley in 1955 on "Cardinal and Ordinal Factorization of Relation Types" under Alfred Tarski. He wrote the standard text on model t ...
,
Alonzo Church
Alonzo Church (June 14, 1903 – August 11, 1995) was an American mathematician, computer scientist, logician, philosopher, professor and editor who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer scie ...
,
David Kaplan,
Yiannis N. Moschovakis, and
Jordan Howard Sobel.
Kamp became a corresponding member of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences ( nl, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, abbreviated: KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed ...
in 1997. He was awarded the
Jean Nicod Prize
The Jean Nicod Prize is awarded annually in Paris to a leading philosopher of mind or philosophically oriented cognitive scientist. The lectures are organized by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique as part of its effort to promote i ...
in 1996 and was elected a
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2015.
Publications
* Kamp, Hans
'A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation'.In J. Groenendijk and others (eds.). ''Formal Methods in the Study of Language''. Amsterdam: Mathematics Center, 1981.
* Kamp, Hans and Uwe Reyle
`From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory'.Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.
See also
*
Anaphora (linguistics)
In linguistics, anaphora () is the use of an expression whose interpretation depends upon another expression in context (its antecedent or postcedent). In a narrower sense, anaphora is the use of an expression that depends specifically upon an a ...
*
Donkey pronoun
Donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning (it is bound semantically) but whose syntactical role in the sentence poses challenges to grammarians. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their form ...
*
Donkey sentence
Donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning (it is bound semantically) but whose syntactical role in the sentence poses challenges to grammarians. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal ...
*
Irene Heim
*
Lambda calculus
Lambda calculus (also written as ''λ''-calculus) is a formal system in mathematical logic for expressing computation based on function abstraction and application using variable binding and substitution. It is a universal model of computation t ...
*
Montague grammar __notoc__
Montague grammar is an approach to natural language semantics, named after American logician Richard Montague. The Montague grammar is based on mathematical logic, especially higher-order predicate logic and lambda calculus, and makes use ...
*
Quantification (linguistics)
*
Two-dimensional semantics
Two-dimensionalism is an approach to semantics in analytic philosophy. It is a theory of how to determine the sense and reference of a word and the truth-value of a sentence. It is intended to resolve the puzzle: How is it possible to discover ...
References
1940 births
Living people
People from Texel
Linguists from the Netherlands
20th-century Dutch philosophers
Semanticists
Jean Nicod Prize laureates
Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
University of California, Los Angeles alumni
Academic staff of the University of Stuttgart
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