•  135
    Why compositionality?
    In Greg Carlson & J. Pelletier (eds.), Reference and Quantification: The Partee Effect, Csli Press. pp. 83-106. 2005.
    The paper identifies some background assumptions of compositionality in formal semantics and investigates how they shape formal semantics as a scientific discipline.
  •  151
    The Company of Objects / Het Gezelschap der Dingen
    In Kasper Tine and Andreasen Melzer (ed.), Inventory, Johan Deumens. 2008.
    Objects come to us, and we to them, in many different ways: by touch, vision, smell; in thought, language, imagination. We access them directly and manipulate them; or we approach them indirectly and keep our distance. Sometimes we do so at the same time: we pick up an object and ask ourselves where we bought it, or what it is for; we look at an object and admire its shape or colour. But often we simply take the object and use it, and neither its material properties, nor its history need concern …Read more
  •  94
    Hand or Hammer? On formal and natural languages in semantics
    Journal of Indian Philosophy 35 (5-6): 597-626. 2007.
    This paper does not deal with the topic of ‘the generosity of artificial languages from an Asian or a comparative perspective’. Rather, it is concerned with a particular case taken from a development in the Western tradition, when in the wake of the rise of formal logic at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century people in philosophy and later in linguistics started to use formal languages in the study of the semantics of natural languages. This undertaking rests on ce…Read more
  •  47
    The Architecture of Meaning: Wittgenstein's Tractatus and formal semantics
    In D. K. Levy & Alfonso Zamuner (eds.), Wittgenstein’s Enduring Arguments, Routledge. pp. 211-244. 2008.
    With a few notable exceptions formal semantics, as it originated from the seminal work of Richard Montague, Donald Davidson, Max Cresswell, David Lewis and others, in the late sixties and early seventies of the previous century, does not consider Wittgenstein as one of its ancestors. That honour is bestowed on Frege, Tarski, Carnap. And so it has been in later developments. Most introductions to the subject will refer to Frege and Tarski (Carnap less frequently) —in addition to the pioneers just…Read more
  •  343
    Dynamic predicate logic
    Linguistics and Philosophy 14 (1): 39-100. 1991.
    This paper is devoted to the formulation and investigation of a dynamic semantic interpretation of the language of first-order predicate logic. The resulting system, which will be referred to as ‘dynamic predicate logic’, is intended as a first step towards a compositional, non-representational theory of discourse semantics. In the last decade, various theories of discourse semantics have emerged within the paradigm of model-theoretic semantics. A common feature of these theories is a tendency to …Read more