Where the Buffalo Roam, Paul Dekker's homepage
Welcome to the site of a philosopher of language and logic. I am a member of the ILLC group Logic and Language, which is part of the Philosophy Department of the Faculty of Humanities. My work is concerned with formal aspects of the meaning and use of natural language. Specific interestsinclude modality, plurality, quantification and information structure. Generic interests include indexicality, satisfaction and truth.
Jigsaw Semantics
This is a contribution on the viability of formal semantics, to appear in the Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication, edited by Barbara Partee and Jurgis Skilters, "Formal Semantics and Pragmatics: Discourse, Context, and Models".
JSS
Presupposition
This is a lemma on the subject of presupposition, to appear in the Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Language, edited by Delia Graff Fara and Gillian Russell.
Presupposition11
Only If an Indefinite is Topical, the Pronoun Picks it Up
This is about irregular anaphoric dependencies, partly motivated by an internet search. The paper is from 2000, and has appeared in Rainer Baeuerle, Uwe Reyle, and Ede Zimmermann (eds.), 2010, Presuppositions in Discourse, CRiSPI volume 21.
OnlyIfAnIndefiniteIsTopical
Something About Might
A much needed provocative statement about epistemic `might' appeared in the Amsterdam Colloquium Proceedings, edited by Maria Aloni and Katrin Schulz, Springer 2010.
SomethingAboutMight2010
Dynamic Semantics
This is a lemma on the subject of dynamic semantics, to appear in the Handbook of Semantics, edited by Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn and Paul Portner.
DynamicSemantics2010
A Guide to Dynamic Semantics
ILLC Prepublications PP-2008-42.
This paper gives an introduction to the idea and workings of dynamic semantics.
A Guide to Dynamic Semantics
Herakleitos' Logos
Good old philosophy from Herakleitos is related to relatively modern logic in the guise of Wittgenstein.
T-Logica
A Multi-dimensional Treatment of Quantification in Extraordinary English
Linguistics and Philosophy 31, 2008, 101--127.
Montague Semantics and Karttunen and Peters pragmatics are combined into an up to date treatment of presupposition and quantification.
A Multi-Dimensional Treatment
De Uitleg
De werktitel van het boekje luidde "De Grap", maar die werd niet begrepen; vandaar de titel.
De Uitleg (.cover)
Questions in Dynamic Semantics, 2007
Maria Aloni, Alastair Butler, Paul Dekker (eds.), Elsevier, CRiSPI 17, pp. 358
This volume presents state of the art work of Amsterdam style work on the dynamic semantics of questions
Introduction QiDS
OptimalInquisitive Discourse, 2004/2007
Research on Language and Computation, Volume 2, Number 3, September 2004, pp. 35, also appeared in Aloni (et al.), Questions in Dynamic Semantics, Elsevier, CRiSPI 17, pp. 20.
A notion of "Optimal Inquisitive Discourse" is defined integrating informal ideas from structured meanings (Krifka) and dynamic (Groenendijk) semantics with insights from Gricean pragmatics as developed in relevance theory.
OID
The Pragmatic Dimension of Indefinites, 2004
Research on Language and Computation, Volume 2, nr. 3, pp. 365--399.
A natural pragmatic explanation of the interpretation of singular indefinite noun phrases combines and improves upon dynamic, E-type and choice function approaches.
tPDoI
Dynamics and Pragmatics of "Peirce' Puzzle", 2001
Journal of Semantics, Volume 18, Number 1, pp. 30
"If everybody passes, then everybody passes." is shown to be not fully equivalent with "There is someone such that if he passes then everybody passes." An intriguing puzzle in first order predicate logic, dueto and initially solved by Charles Sanders Peirce, is given its solution in a dynamic semantic framework.
DaPoPP
"She"'s Character, 2001
Myriam Bras and Laure Vieu, Semantic and Pragmatic Issues in Discourse and Dialogue, CRiSPI Volume 9, pp. 22
The indexical interpretation of pronouns is characterized in an `intentional space', a concept which is formulated within a many-sorted type theory.
SC
Meanwhile, Within the Frege Boundary, 2001
Linguistics and Philosophy, Volume 26, number 5, pp. 10.
When and how can we reduce one type n quantifier to (the composition of) n type one quantifiers? The question, raised by Keenan, is very interesting, and answered.
MwtFB
Coreference and Representationalism, 2000
K. von Heusinger and U. Egli (eds.), Reference and Anaphorical Relations, pp. 23.
Is a level of representation indispensable in the analysis of the semantics of natural language? The semantic frameworks of discourse representation theory, dynamic predicate logic, and situationsemantics, are evaluated as to their representational status. With surprising outcomes.
CaR
Cases, Adverbs, Situations and Events, 1997/2004
In: Hans Kamp and Barbara Partee (eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Context Dependence, IMS,Stuttgart and UFAL, Prague, appeared as Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning, Elsevier, CRiSPI, pp. 22.
Should the `situation-based approaches' to adverbial quantification turnout equivalent with the `bound variable approaches'? Proponents may have thought so, but if you make the idea precise, it rather should not.
CASE
Predicate Logic with Anaphora, 1994
Lynn Santelmann and Mandy Harvey (eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference, DMLL Publications, Cornell University, pp. 17.
Hans Kamp's discourse representation theoretic results can be formulated in a compositional way, using an orthodox interpretation of a language of predicate logic, which is extended with pronouns.
PLA
Existential Disclosure, 1993/2003
Linguistics and Philosophy, Volume 16, number 6, pp. 27, also appeared in J. Gutierrez-Rexach (ed.), Semantics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics, Volume VI, pp. 25, Routledge, London/New York.
This is an observation about dynamic semantics. If quantifiers or other operators are "dynamic", they are not "closed". This turns out to have interesting linguistic applications.
ED
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