There are three major currents in semantic theory these days. First there is what Chierchia [1990] aptly calls “what is alive of classical Montague semantics”. Secondly, there is Discourse Representation Theory. Thirdly, there is

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A mutual default is a rule, capable of tolerating exceptions, that is mutually supposed by a group G: i.e., the rule is supposed by all members of the group, is supposed by all members of the group to be supposed by all members of the group, etc. A family of propositional attitudes Bi indexed for i C G (and representing, say, supposition) is coordinated for G if Bi applies to the same propositions for all members i of G, and is commonly supposed by the members of G to do so. This paper is a preliminary exploration of formal postulates that ensure maintenance of coordi-nation of a propositional attitude, representing the common ground of a conversation, in dynamic environments that allow for assertional speech acts. I present results showing that mutually sup-posed rules of conversation provide a mechanism for preserving coordination. If coordination can be assumed, reasoning about propositional attitudes can be greatly simplified, through collapse of iterated operators. I also show how coordination maintenance can be secured, at least in unexceptional cases, when rules of conversation are defeasible; this relaxation of the theory is needed because plausible conversational rules are subject to exceptions.

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In this paper it is shown how simple texts that can be parsed in a Lambek Categorial Grammar can also automatically be provided with a semantics in the form of a Discourse Representation Structure in the sense of Kamp [1981]. The assignment of meanings to texts uses the Curry-Howard-Van Benthem correspondence. 1

In this paper we demonstrate that a broad class of higher-order functional programs can be transformed into semantically equivalent multidimensional intensional programs that contain only nullary variable definitions. The proposed algorithm systematically eliminates user-defined functions from the source program, by appropriately introducing context manipulation (i.e. intensional) operators. The transformation takes place in M steps, where M is the order of the initial functional program. During each step the order of the program is reduced by one, and the final outcome of the algorithm is an M-dimensional intensional program of order zero. As the resulting intensional code can be executed in a purely tagged-dataflow way, the proposed approach offers a promising new technique for the implementation of higher-order functional languages. 1

Introduction In this paper, we discuss a new analysis of the left periphery of German nite sentences. With the term left periphery we refer to that region of a nite sentence which contains sentence initial nite verbs that might either be preceded by a constituent (verb second sentences, V2) or not (verb rst sentences, V1), or sentence initial complementizers that might either be lexical or complex (verb nal sentences, VF). Our analysis builds on empirical generalizations previously formulated in the topological elds model of German sentence structure. It accounts for the movement of nite verbs without lexical rules, traces nor a feature inv(erted), and eliminates the Head-Filler-Schema for unbounded dependencies. Its main idea is to lexicalize the left periphery or, in other words, to explain the topological makeup of the left periphery of nite sentences in terms of certain properties of a class of lexical elements. An eminent characteris

Gottlob Frege (1892) is credited with the so-called “principle of compositionality”, also called “Frege’s Principle”, which one often hears expressed this way: Frege’s Principle (so-called) “The meaning of a sentence is a function of the meanings of the words in it and the way they are combined syntactically.” (Exactly how Frege himself understood “Frege’s Principle ” is not our concern here; 1 rather, it is the understanding that this slogan has acquired in contemporary linguistics that we want to pursue, and this has little further to do with Frege.) But why should linguists care what compositionality is or whether natural languages “are compositional ” or not? 2.1.1 An “Empirical Issue”? Often we hear that “compositionality is an empirical issue ” (meaning the question whether natural language is compositional or not)—usually asserted as a preface to expressing skepticism about a “yes ” answer. In the most general sense of Frege’s Principle, however, the fact that natural languages are compositional is beyond any serious doubt. Consider that:

First-order modal logic is very much under current development, with many di#erent semantics proposed. The use of rigid objects goes back to Saul Kripke. More recently several semantics based on counterparts have been examined, in a development that goes back to David Lewis.