From Discourse to Logic
Introduction to Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory
Authors: Kamp, Hans, Reyle, Uwe
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- About this book
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Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specifically than that, it is about a particular way of dealing with those subjects, known as Discourse Representation Theory, or DRT. DRT is an approach towards natural language semantics which, some thirteen years ago, arose out of attempts to deal with two distinct problems. The first of those was the semantic puzzle that had been brought to contempo rary attention by Geach's notorious "donkey sentences" - sentences like If Pedro owns some donkey, he beats it, in which the anaphoric connection we perceive between the indefinite noun phrase some donkey and the pronoun it may seem to conflict with the existential meaning of the word some. The second problem had to do with tense and aspect. Some languages, for instance French and the other Romance languages, have two morphologically distinct past tenses, a simple past (the French Passe Simple) and a continuous past (the French Imparfait). To articulate precisely what the difference between these tenses is has turned out to be surprisingly difficult.
- Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Preliminaries
Pages 7-57
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DRT and Predicate Logic
Pages 59-139
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Quantification and Connectives
Pages 141-232
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Loose Ends
Pages 233-304
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The Plural
Pages 305-482
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
-
- Book Title
- From Discourse to Logic
- Book Subtitle
- Introduction to Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory
- Authors
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- Hans Kamp
- Uwe Reyle
- Series Title
- Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy
- Series Volume
- 42
- Copyright
- 1993
- Publisher
- Springer Netherlands
- Copyright Holder
- Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
- eBook ISBN
- 978-94-017-1616-1
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-94-017-1616-1
- Softcover ISBN
- 978-0-7923-1028-0
- Series ISSN
- 0924-4662
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- VIII, 717
- Topics
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