O Departamento de Filosofia da UFRN, através da Base de Pesquisa "Lógica,
Conhecimento e Ética", dá inicio a sua programação anual dos Seminários de
Lógica e Filosofia Formal, com a palestra:

Extending Montague's Semantics to Discourse Dynamics and Presupposition
Handling.

Ekaterina Lebedeva
PhD Candidate Equipe Calligramme
INRIA Nancy Grand Est Research Centre -France

Local:  UFRN, Setor II, sala E1
Data: 25 / 03 / 2011  às 16 h.


Abstract

Defining natural language discourse semantics compositionally has been one
of the main challenges in the areas of natural language semantics and
pragmatics. In [Montague 1970], Montague argued that there are no essential
differences between natural and formal programming languages. He developed a
semantics that assigns a lambda term to each word of a sentence. The meaning
of the whole sentence is then obtained by composing the lambda terms via
functional application [Montague 1973].

However, Montague’s semantics was originally limited to a single sentence,
and extending it to discourses made of several sentences turned out to be
non-trivial due to linguistic phenomena such as donkey anaphora. This
problem was recently tackled by de Groote [2006], who extended Montague’s
semantics by using a continuation-passing-style technique [Strachey and
Wadsworth 2000].

Current work aims at using and improving this continuation-based approach in
order to handle other kinds of linguistic side effects, such as
presuppositions [Karttunen 1974], which are informally what is taken for
granted and not explicitly expressed in a discourse.  Preliminary results
[de Groote and Lebedeva 2010] showed that presuppositions stemming from
proper names (and definite descriptions) can indeed be handled by de
Groote’s continuation-based approach extended with an exception raising and
handling mechanism.

In my talk, I will briefly introduce Montague's semantics. I will proceed
with showing how it can be extended with continuation-passing style
technique and which advantages such an extension brings. Then I will
demonstrate the phenomenon of presupposition and show a solution to handle
presuppositions stemming from proper names.

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