Please join us this Friday as Greg Kobele from the Linguistics Department presents work on Logical Form and direct compositionality.

Date and time: Friday, December 2, 11:00 a.m. – 12:50 p.m.

Location: Stuart 209 (Philosophy seminar room)

Title: LF-interpretation, compositionality

Abstract:

LF-interpretation is not compositional: the meaning of an
expression is not a function of the meanings of its parts, and this
because most of the parts used in building more complex expressions are
not assigned any meaning at all according to the LF-interpretation
scheme.  (What is the meaning of the VP “praise every boy”?)  I present
an intuitive, sequent-style notation for a directly compositional
reformulation of LF-interpretation, and show that the vanilla Heim and
Kratzer/Fox version hereof is in fact elegantly expressible in terms of
delimited continuations.  The interpretation of ‘tucking-in’
constructions, as exemplified by analyses of Parasitic Scope or
multiple-wh movement, can be given a uniform and straight forward (and
still variable free) treatment using the sequent-style notation.
Although the focus of the talk is on understanding our theories of
semantic interpretation, I will mention some of the attendant benefits
of compositionality in this setting, such as efficient and correct (1)
exact generation, (2) incremental interpretation in parsing, and (3)
ellipsis resolution in discourse.