Dynamic Montague grammar

Jeroen Groenendijk · Martin Stokhof

287 citations0/0 files stored

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation Philosophy and Theoretical Science Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge

Abstract

this paper is based was presented on several occasions, the first of which was the Stuttgart conference on discourse representation theory, held in November 1987. Various people have given us the benefit of their comments and criticisms, for which we thank them all. Special thanks go to Paul Dekker and Fred Landman for many stimulating and helpful discussions. Part of the research for this paper was done while the first author was engaged on a research project commissioned by Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The present version was written while both authors were engaged on the Dyana-project (EBRA-3175) commissioned by the European Community. MG is built on this principle, which, for philosophical and methodological reasons, we think is one of the most central principles in natural language semantics (see Groenendijk & Stokhof [1989] for some discussion). Consequently, confronting other frameworks with MG, trying to unify them, is also putting things to the test. Can this analysis be cast in a compositional mould? But also, what consequences does compositionality have in this case? (And, to be sure, some of the latter may cause us to reject it after all.) So, we feel there is ample reason for the undertaking of this paper. But for those who are not really inspired by such grandiose considerations, we may add that, after all, in DRT, too, one would want to overcome the limitations of a first-order system in some way. Well, this paper offers one. * We shall proceed as follows. In section 2, we motivate making a distinction between variables and discourse markers. In section 3, we present a system of dynamic intensional logic (DIL), along the lines of Janssen [1986]. In section 4, we indicate how DIL can be used as a means to represent the meani...