Volume 32, Issue 1 - There is no opposition between Formal and Cognitive Semantics

1. Introduction The history of modern semantics is characterised by two research traditions which are based on radically different views concerning both conceptual motivation and the purpose of semantic research. Realistic semantics conceives of semantics as characterising the relationsship between linguistic expressions and reality. In most cases this relationship is explicated by means of modeltheoretic concepts. The following quote from one of the founding fathers of realistic semantics clearly rejects a mentalist stance.

Although I am strongly inclined to agree with the headline of the target-paper, it is not clear to me to what extent it contributes to this position. This is primarily due to the unfortunate strategy to defer crucial parts of its demonstration and of the supporting arguments to Lambalgen and Hamm (2004). Either the reader is assumed to be familiar with this reference, but then he doesn't need the paper under discussion, or he is not, and then he is left in doubt about crucial points. My comments are made from of the latter position.

1. Introduction Hamm, Kamp, and van Lambalgen 2006 (hereafter HKL) propose to relate NL discourse to cognitive representations that also deal with world knowledge, planning, belief revision, etc. Their implementation involves translating NL discourse first into DRT, which explicates the linguistic information, and then into an event calculus, which uses world knowledge and non-monotonic reasoning to arrive at the final cognitive representation.

In [HKL00] (henceforth HKL), Hamm, Kamp and van Lambalgen declare “there is no opposition between formal and cognitive semantics,” notwithstanding the realist/mentalist divide. That divide separates two sides Jackendoff has (in [Jac96], following Chomsky) labeled E(xternalized)-semantics , relating language to a reality independent of speakers, and I(nternalized)-semantics , revolving around mental representations and thought. Although formal semanticists have (following David Lewis) traditionally leaned towards E-semantics, it is reasonable to apply formal methods also to I-semantics. This point is made clear in HKL via two computational approaches to natural language semantics, Discourse Representation Theory (DRT, [KR93]) and the Event Calculus (EC) presented in [LH05]. In this short note, I wish to raise certain questions about EC that can be traced to the applicability of formal methods to E-semantics and I-semantics alike. These opposing orientations suggest different notions of time, event and representation.

Scholars of linguistic meaning have always talked about sentences in terms of the things that they instruct their interpreters to do, find or check, and so the idea of an action-based model of interpretation is not entirely new. In denotational or ‘realist’ semantics, a sentence tells its interpreter how to determine its truth or falsity. In representational semantics, a sentence tells its interpreter to retrieve an array of semantic frames and make them fit together. When denotational semanticists started paying attention to narratives, they found an ingenious way to combine the representationalist idea of meaning as the integration of knowledge structures with the realist's view of meaning as truth conditions: they proposed that a sentence, rather than merely having a truth value , has a truth interval – the time for which it is true (Herweg 1991) – and that the interpreter can use linguistic and extralinguistic cues to determine whether or not two truth intervals overlap. Sometimes, however, the necessary contextual cues are lacking. For example, the English past tense, unlike its French analog, is aspectually neutral; therefore, the narrative passage in (1) is ambiguous:

1. Introduction Both formal semantics and cognitive semantics are the source of important insights about language. By developing precise statements of the rules of meaning in fragmentary, abstract languages, formalists have been able to offer perspicuous accounts of how we might come to know such rules and use them to communicate with others. Conversely, by charting the overall landscape of interpretations, cognitivists have documented how closely interpretations draw on the commonsense knowledge that lets us make our way in the world. There is no opposition between these insights. Sooner or later we will have a semantics that responds to both.

The paper by Fritz Hamm, Hans Kamp and Michiel van Lambalgen (in what follows abbreviated as ‘ hkl ’) is a very rich one. Not only does it contain a wealth of empirical and formal insights concerning the analysis of tense and aspect, planning and causality, and other phenomena, it also contains some penetrating remarks concerning the scope and method of semantic theory. It is the latter aspect of the paper that I want to make a few comments on in what follows.

1. Bierwisch Manfred Bierwisch starts his comment with the complaint that crucial parts of our paper rely on van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005). This is of course true, and it points to a predicament of which we have been aware: In order that we could say, within the space allotted to us, that which we wanted to say in this paper almost all the technical details of van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005) had to be left out. We do not agree, however, with Bierwisch' contention that someone familiar with the book could just as well have done without the paper. For one thing, the book, while acknowledging DRT as an important motivation for the ‘Proper Treatment of Events’ approach it presents, has no explicit discussion of the formal relations between the two theories, let alone any hints of how they could be put together. And precisely this is a central message of the paper: that there is a way of combining the two and that a combination of DRT and PTE techniques can help to bridge the gap between formal and cognitive aspects of linguistic structure and meaning.