Episode 49: Hans Kamp discusses discourse representation theory
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What is formal semantics and why is the term considered misleading?
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Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman. And I'm Mark Hoppwood. With us today is Hans Kamp, visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. and senior research fellow at the Institute for Natural Language Processing at the University of Stuttgart. And he is here to talk with us about discourse representation theory. Hans Kamp, welcome.
Thank you.
Uh so Professor Camp, maybe to start with a fairly basic question. So you work in what's known as formal semantics. And I wonder if you could just uh say something briefly about what formal semantics is. What are you working on when you work on formal semantics?
Yeah, to begin with, formal semantics, in my view, is actually a rather misleading term. What we formal semanticists are interested in is pretty much the same thing that any linguist who is interested in semantics, that is in the meaning of what we say and write is interesting. And the word formal in formal semantics only indicates a certain way of going about this problem. And the term formal semantics became established in the late sixties and early seventies, really as a way of contrasting what was starting then and has been going on under the name formal semantics since then, from what there was by way of doing semantics in linguistics at the time. Most of what people, especially linguists, understood by semantics was something very informal.
There was a lot of work on historical linguistics in that connection. tracing the meanings of words in the course of history, how a word like damsel changes over time and gradually becomes less respectable than it was at first. Um things like that. Uh formal semantics emphasized something very different about language and was developed in analogy with formal semantics as a part of mathematical logic. Semantics in mathematical logic is also more usually referred to as model theory. and uh that is a way of explaining how the meaning and more particularly the truth conditions and conditions under which a sentence is true of complex expressions in particular sentences Is determined or are determined systematically by the what you assign as the semantics to the words or symbols from which they are put together.
So formal semantics of natural languages is an attempt to do this, to describe this kind of dependency of the complex whole on its smallest parts in a systematic way. So the focus is on the rules that could. connect the meanings of complex expressions with the meanings of their constituents. And originally in formal semantics there was actually very little by way of lexical semantics, as the semantics of individual words. And that has been one of its defects for quite a long time. In the meantime that's changed, there's now a lot of formal semantic word on the lexicon as well. But formal semantics really is what anybody or tries to do what anybody who wants to do semantics should be trying to do. Explain what the meanings of the smallest components of a sentence are and explaining how those systematically yield the meaning of the sentence as a whole.
Yeah, so for example, I mean the sentences we utter are built out of these simple parts. Let's just say words for now. I mean it gets simpler than that, but let's just say words. You know, the sentence Matt ate fish is made of three words, Matt ate and fish. And it means something definite, you know. Matt it's only true in the case where Matt ate some fish. It's not in the true in the case where Mark ate some fish or true in the case where Matt ate hamburgers.
How does static (Montague) semantics differ from dynamic semantics?
So a formal semantic theory would tell you how on the basis of the definitions of the words mat, ate, and fish, we get the meaning mat ate fish.
Exactly. And what one tries and should be trying to do in a case like that is to explain how the meaning and the truth conditions, the conditions under which uh the expression is true
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is formal semantics and why is the term considered misleading?
0:00–5:01
2
How does static (Montague) semantics differ from dynamic semantics?
5:01–10:47
3
Why do past‑progressive and simple‑past tenses affect meaning differently?
10:47–16:48
4
What problem do “donkey pronouns” illustrate for static semantic theories?
16:48–21:57
5
How does Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) model the influence of prior context?
21:57–27:49
6
In what ways has DRT been applied to computational linguistics and machine translation?
27:49–34:28
7
What philosophical insights does DRT offer about the mind’s representation of information?
34:28–40:36
8
What are the main conclusions and future directions for discourse representation theory?
40:36–46:14
Speakers
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