In
situation theory, situation semantics (pioneered by
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
He was born in Indepen ...
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 linguistics is a term in linguistics that, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to the theory of language, or the branch of linguistics that inquires into the ...
,
theoretical philosophy, or applied
natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...
,
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
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 t ...
(HPSG).
Kratzer
Barwise and Perry's system was a top-down approach which foundered on practical issues which were early identified by
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 dissert ...
and others. She subsequently developed a considerable body of theory bottom-up by addressing a variety of issues in the areas of
context dependency in discourse and the
syntax–semantics interface. Because of its practical nature and ongoing development this body of work "with possible situations as parts of
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 and modal logic. Their met ...
s, now has much more influence than Barwise and Perry’s ideas".
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). She is known as a pioneer in the field of formal semantics.
Biography
Bo ...
, "Reflections of Formal Semanticist as of Feb. 2005", p. 20. February 14, 2005.
See also
*
*
*
Notes
External links
"Situations in Natural Language Semantics"–
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''SEP'') is a freely available online philosophy resource published and maintained by Stanford University, encompassing both an online encyclopedia of philosophy and peer-reviewed original publication ...
Semantics
{{semantics-stub