Page 398 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Formal Semantics
Gabbay D 1996 Labelled Deductive Systems. Blackwell, Oxford
Gabbay D, Kempson R 1992 Natural-language content: A truth-theoretic perspective. In: Proceedings of the 8th Amsterdam Formal Semantics Colloquium, Amsterdam
Hausser R R 1979 How do pronouns denote? In: Heny F, Schnelle H (eds.) Syntax and Semantics, vol. 10. Academic Press, London
Heim I 1982 The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases (Doctoral thesis, University of Massachusetts) Heim I 1990 E-type pronouns and donkey anaphora.
Linguistics and Philosophy 13:137-78
Kamp H 1981 A theory of truth and discourse represen-
tation. In: Groenendijk J A G , Janssen T M V , Stokhof M B J (eds.) Formal Methods in the Study of Language. Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam
Kamp H, Reyle U 1993 From Discourse to Logic. Reidel, North-Holland
Karttunen L 1968 What do Referential Indices Refer to? Santa Monica publication no. P-3SS4
Katz J J 1972 Semantic Theory. Harper and Row, New York Kempson R 1988 Logical form: The grammar-cognition
interface. Journal of Linguistics 24(2): 393-431
Kempson R, Gabbay D in press Crossover: a unified view.
Journal of Linguistics
Kempson R, Meyer-Viol W, Gabbay D in press Syntactic computation as labelled deduction. In: Borsley R, Roberts I (eds.) Syntactic Categories. Academic Press, New York
Klein E1980 A semantics for positive and comparative adjec- tives. Linguistics and Philosophy 4:1-45
Lewis D 1972 General semantics. In: Davidson D, Harman G Semantics of Natural Languages. Reidel, Dordrecht May R 1985 Logical Form: Its Structure and Derivation. MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA
Morgan J 1973 Sentence fragments and the notion 'sentence.'
In: Kachru B B, Lees R B, Malkiel Y, Pietrangeli A, Saporta S (eds.) Issues in Linguistics: Papers in Honor of Henry and Renee Kahane. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL
Partee B H 1984a Nominal and temporal anaphora. Linguis- tics and Philosophy 13:243-86
Partee B 1984b Compositionality. In: Landman F, Veltman F (eds.) Varieties of Formal Semantics.Foris, Dordrecht
Reinhart T 1983 Coreference and bound anaphora: A restatement of the anaphora question. Linguistics and Philosophy 6:47-88
Reinhart T 1986 Center and periphery in the grammar of anaphora. In: Lust B (ed.) Studies in the Acquisition of Anaphora, vol. 1. Reidel, Dordrecht
Sperber D, Wilson D 1986 Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford
Stump G T 1985 The Semantic Variability ofAbsolutive Con- structions. Reidel, Dordrecht
Thomason R H (ed.) 1974 Formal Philosophy: Selected Pap- ers of Richard Montague. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
van Eijk J, Kamp H 1997 Representing discourse in context. In: van Benthem J, ter Meulen A (eds.) Handbook of Logic and Language. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
The term 'situation semantics' covers a variety of the- ories and conceptions of meaning and the logic of information, and, particularly, the development of a partial semantics for natural language. Within this context, situations are the basic building blocks of reality. They constitute the cornerstones of a theoretic framework that allows for an integrated classification of the world, of meaning, and of the mental states that cognitive beings can be in.
At the heart of the enterprise lies the work of the founding fathers of situation semantics: Jon Barwise and John Perry. In the early 1980s they launched a campaign for a more 'realistic/ situation-based sem- antics, and against traditional formal semantic theories which were rejected as too coarse-grained. A series of publications culminated in the still canonical book on the subject: Situations and Attitudes(Barwise and Perry 1983; S&A henceforth). The book intro- duced the basic themes which, even 10 years after,
continued to engage the situation semantic entre- preneurs.
In this article some of those themes are addressed. In the first section, the key notions 'meaning/ 'realism,' 'partiality,' and 'relativity' are explained. The second section is a short introduction to situation theory, a theory of the classification of reality and meaning. Then there is a sketch of how a situation theoretic semantics of natural language can be built up, including a treatment of the notoriously prob- lematic 'prepositional' attitude reports. The last section surveys a number of extensions and devel- opments.
1. KeyNotions
1.1 Meaning and Information
Traditionally, formal semantics has focused on developing a theory of truth and truth-preserving inference. The descriptive content of an indicative sen-
376
Situation Semantics
P. J. E. Dekker andH. L. W. Hendriks