Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specifically than that, it is about a particular way of dealing with those subjects, known as Discourse Representation Theory, or DRT. DRT is an approach towards natural language semantics which, some thirteen years ago, arose out of attempts to deal with two distinct problems. The first of those was the semantic puzzle that had been brought to contempo� rary attention by Geach's notorious "donkey sentences" - sentences like If Pedro owns some donkey, he beats it, in which the anaphoric connection we perceive between the indefinite noun phrase some donkey and the pronoun it may seem to conflict with the existential meaning of the word some. The second problem had to do with tense and aspect. Some languages, for instance French and the other Romance languages, have two morphologically distinct past tenses, a simple past (the French Passe Simple) and a continuous past (the French Imparfait). To articulate precisely what the difference between these tenses is has turned out to be surprisingly difficult.

Synopsis

This is the first textbook that approaches natural language semantics and logic from the perspective of Discourse Representation Theory, an approach which emphasizes the dynamic and incremental aspects of meaning and inference. The book has been carefully designed for the classroom. It is aimed at students with varying degrees of preparation, including those without prior exposure to semantics or formal logic. Moreover, it should make DRT easily accessible to those who want to learn about the theory on their own. Exercises are available to test understanding as well as to encourage independent theoretical thought. The book serves a double purpose. Besides a textbook, it is also the first comprehensive and fully explicit statement of DRT available in the form of a book.The first part of the book develops the basic principles of DRT for a small fragment of English (but which has nevertheless the power of standard predicate logic). The second part extends this fragment by adding plurals; it discusses a wide variety of problems connected with plural nouns and verbs. The third part applies the theory to the analysis of tense and aspect.

Many of the problems raised in Parts Two and Three are novel, as are the solutions proposed. It is intended for undergraduate and graduate students interested in linguistics, theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence and cognitive science. It is also suitable for students with no previous exposure to formal semantics or logic.

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