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Abstracts.2020.NLSemantics
by Warrick Macmillan
I will give an overview of natural language (NL) semantics, from the vantage of Modern Type Theories. This will a survey of semantics developed in the tradition of Montague, and then further refined by Sundholm & Ranta by applying Martin-Lof's Type Theory to treat NL quantifiers as dependent types. I will trace some of the historical development with explicit constructions from the classic and modern view, focusing on more recent work by Chatzikyriakidis , Luo, and more. One particular emphasis will target common nouns : whereas classically they are treated as Propositions, the contemporary account treats them as types. The type common noun is really a univere, and therefore allows for a use of subtyping for making simpler ontological distinctions. Additionally, I will conclude with some live coding which may include GF, Agda, and Coq time permitting. Although much of this work is more expository and a recapitulation of others work, I will include a more personal view on how I view it in the context of the NL, PL distinction.
##Reading & References (additional notes to be published posthumously) obviously the talk is meant to be a segway to any of these more complete materials
D. R. Dowty, R.E. Wall and S. Peters: Introduction to Montague Semantics. general, complete overview of Montague semantics (the original papers are incredibly dense)
Partee: Montague’s approach to semantics (some nice slides with examples)
Ranta, A. (1994). Type-Theoretical Grammar. Oxford University Press.
Bernardy, JP and Chatzikyriakidis S., 2017. A Type-Theoretical System for the FraCaS Test Suite: Grammatical Framework Meets Coq. Proceedings of IWCS 2017, Montpellier, France.
S. Chatzikyriakidis and Z. Luo. Proof Assistants for Natural Language Semantics. Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics 2016 (LACL 2016), Nancy. 2016.
S. Chatzikyriakidis and Z. Luo. Introduction to Modern Perspectives in Type Theoretical Semantics. In S. Chatzikyriakidis and Z. Luo (eds.), Modern Perspectives in Type Theoretical Semantics, Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, Springer. 2017.
Z. Luo. MTT-semantics is model-theoretic as well as proof-theoretic. Manuscript (49pp). July 2019.
ESSLLI 2019 - Course materials "From Modern Type Theories to Montague Semantics: A Meaningful Comparison". Notes by Luo & Stergios