Structures for Semantics

Formalization plays an important role in semantics. Doing semantics and following the literature requires considerable technical sophistica tion and acquaintance with quite advanced mathematical techniques and structures. But semantics isn't mathematics. These techniques and structures are tools that help us build semantic theories. Our real aim is to understand semantic phenomena and we need the technique to make our understanding of these phenomena precise. The problems in semantics are most often too hard and slippery, to completely trust our informal understanding of them. This should not be taken as an attack on informal reasoning in semantics. On the contrary, in my view, very often the essential insight in a diagnosis of what is going on in a certain semantic phenomenon takes place at the informal level. It is very easy, however, to be misled into thinking that a certain informal insight provides a satisfying analysis of a certain problem; it will often turn out that there is a fundamental unclarity about what the informal insight actually is. Formalization helps to sharpen those insights and put them to the test.

Autorentext

Fred Landman is Professor of Semantics in the Linguistics Department at Tel Aviv University.He received his Ph.D. at the University of Amsterdam. He was Associate Professor of Semantics at Cornell University before moving to Tel Aviv. He is the recipient of a Humboldt Foundation Research Award. Landman has published many articles on a wide range of topics in semantics, including well known articles on groups and plurality, polarity sensitive any, the progressive, the adjectival theory of indefinites, and the mass-count distinction. He is the author of four previous books: Towards a Theory of Information, Structures for Semantics, Events and Plurality, and Indefinites and the Type of Sets.

Inhalt
One: Logic and Set Theory.- 1.1. First Order Logic.- 1.2. Second Order Logic.- 1.3. First Order Theories.- 1.4. Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory.- Two: Partial Orders.- 2.1. Universal Algebra.- 2.2. Partial Orders and Equivalence Relations.- 2.3. Chains and Linear Orders.- Three: Semantics with Partial Orders.- 3.1. Instant Tense Logic.- 3.2. Algebraic Semantics, Functional Completeness and Expressibility.- 3.3. Some Linguistic Considerations Concerning Instants.- 3.4. Information Structures.- 3.5. Partial Information and Vagueness.- Four: Constructions with Partial Orders.- 4.1. Period Structures.- 4.2. Event Structures.- Five: Intervals, Events and Change.- 5.1. Interval Semantics.- 5.2. The Logic of Change in Interval Semantics.- 5.3. The Moment of Change.- 5.4. Supervaluations.- 5.5. Kamp's Logic of Change.- Six: Lattices.- 6.1. Basic Concepts.- 6.2. Universal Algebra.- 6.3. Filters and Ideals.- Seven: Semantics with Lattices.- 7.1. Boolean Types.- 7.2. Plurals.- 7.3. Mass Nouns.- Answers To Exercises.- References.