Types of entity eepresentations in MSDRT

Chair: Joulia Smortchkova

Abstract

MSDRT (Mental State Discourse Representation Theory) has developed a number of different Types of Entity Representations (its term for what is referred to by others as Mental Files). The different ER Types are for different kinds of entities, e.g. fictional entities as opposed to entities in the real world, or for events, states and actions. of various kinds as distinct from physical objects. The talk will be primarily concerned with the different forms of these different Types of ERs and the motivations for them.

Hans Kamp

Hans Kamp was born, and got his education up to and including the MA, in the Netherlands. After a PhD in Philosophy at UCLA on formal properties of Priorean Tense Logic, his work turned increasingly to model-theoretic semantics of natural language, following his Ph.D. supervisor Richard Montague. In the late seventies and early eighties Kamp developed Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), which, together with Heim's File Change Semantics, was the first formally worked out approach to the semantics of discourse. A primary current interest is the development of Mental State DRT, an extension of DRT in which files play a central part.