Rich Thomason
Papers on Natural Language Semantics


My earlier work in natural language semantics concentrated on the logical interpretations of fragments of English, concentrating on syntactic structures and seeking to extend the  work of Richard Montague and also to use the task of formalizing natural language to inspire and guide the development appropriate logical frameworks.

That work isn't archived here.   The unpublished papers listed below have to do with using nomonotonic logics to explain semantic phenomena that have less to do with the meanings of sentences than with the meanings of words.


 

 

 
 Work by other people:
  1. "Two Puzzles Concerning Tense and Aspect in English," by Michael Bennett

 My own work:

  1. "Non-Monotonic Formalisms for Natural Language Semantics."

    2.         Uses nonmonotomic logic to formalize the meanings of some derived words.
            The construction studied in most detail in this draft is -able.
                                         PostScript         PDF
     
  2. "Formalizing the Semantics of Derived Words."

    3.         A less technical and condensed version of the above paper, 
            written mainly with philosophers in mind.
                                         PostScript         PDF
     
  3. "Formal Semantics for Causal Constructions"      PDF
     
  4. "Logic, Logicism, and Word Formation" (Slides and bibliography for a talk at Yale, February, 2017) PDF