Lewis, David (1972). "General Semantics", in Davidson and Gil Harman, eds., Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht: Reidel.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....it unique in a given context or, given a name, how to restrict the context so that this name may convey a unique meaning. What is common to the various uses of the term context in the linguistic literature is that they all refer to factors, relevant to the understanding of communicative behavior [14, 68, 69]. According to these factors, context is distinguished into five categories [14] 1. Linguistic context: the surrounding linguistic material (textual or spoken) Closely related to what is sometimes called dialogue history. 2. Semantic context: the underlying goals that the participant of a ....

David Lewis. General Semantics. In Donald Davidson and Gilbert Herman, editors, Semantics of Natural Language. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1972.

....the right constraints is not easy, as the scope behaviour of natural language expressions tends to be in uenced by the wider syntactic context. In Alshawi [1] details are given on how scoping mechanisms can be incorporated in large scale natural language systems. 27 10 Further Reading Lewis [11] gives a good introduction to the process of building meanings in a compositional way. Excellent introductions to Montague grammar are Dowty, Wall and Peters [4] and Gamut [7] The viewpoint that the real mystery in the understanding of natural language lies in the way human beings grasp meanings ....

D. Lewis. General semantics. Synthese, 22:18-67, 1970. 28

....and that we can then define two propositions as being related if they have some subject matter in common. Our Subject function can be seen as an extension of this function to a multi modal language. Other studies of the notion of topic exist in the literature, in particular those of Lewis [Lew72] and Goodman [Goo61] Both are quite different from Epstein s. Goodman s notion of absolute aboutness is defined purely extensionally. Hence for him logically equivalent formulas are about the same topics, while this is not the case for us. Moreover, as he focusses on the informative aspect of ....

D.K. Lewis. General semantics. In D. Davidson and G. Harman, editors, Semantics of natural language. D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1972.

....of this function to a multi modal language. 4 In the rest of the section we give our metalinguistic theory of topics. 3 Accepting an act means that we admit that it has been performed. 4 Other studies of the notion of topic exist in the philosophical logic literature, in particular [ 32, 22, 12 ] . 9 Themes and topics. A theme is what something is about. We suppose that the set of themes is nonempty. In our running example, the themes are destinations, classes, and prices. For i 2 AGT , ma i is called an atomic context. ma i stands for the mental attitude of agent i . A context is a ....

D.K. Lewis. General semantics. In D. Davidson and G. Harman, editors, Semantics of natural language. D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1972.

.... of a phrase combined with different kinds of contextual information to develop the ultimate contribution of the phrase to the interpretation A minimalist answer to the above questions is the compositional approach to interpreta Pereira and Pollack 4 tion, arising from the philosophy of language [29, 25] and widely explored in linguistic [11, 7] and in computational settings [38, 37] Compositional interpretation assigns to each phrase a denotation, a set theoretic object characterizing the contribution of the phrase to the truth conditions of sentences containing it, and makes the denotation of ....

D. K. Lewis. General semantics. In D. Davidson and G. Harman, editors, Semantics of Natural Language. D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1972.

....given appropriate resource management choices. In retrospect, one can see that the core components of the type logical architecture were worked out in 1958. But it took a quarter of a century before Lambek s work had a clear impact on the linguistic community. Contributions such as [Lyons 68, Lewis 72, Geach 72] are continuations of the rule based Ajdukiewicz Bar Hillel tradition. Ironically, when linguists developed a renewed interest in categorial grammar in the early Eighties, they did not adopt Lambek s deductive view on grammatical composition, but fell back on an essentially rule based ....

Lewis, D. (1972), `General semantics'. In D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.) Semantics of Natural Language. Reidel, Dordrecht, 169--218. 47

....was already thinking of their semantic role, but I find that a bit misleading. In the following I shall mainly speak of types. 2 These are indeed the two main primitive categories Ajdukiewicz had in mind, though he did not rule out the possibility of different choices. Some authors, for instance Lewis (1970), have insisted on a third one, Common Noun, and others have considered dispensing with Proper Noun in favour of Noun Phrase, or even Verb Phrase. 3 I shall use standard set theoretic notation and terminology: note only that if f is a function, I write Df and Rf for the domain and the range ....

Lewis D. K. (1970), `General Semantics', Synthese 22, 18-67.

....[1] 14 See [21] for the details. 15 Ajdukiewicz [1] p. 231. 16 Compare Bar Hillel et al. 2] 17 Compare Cresswell [4] pp. 266 67. 18 See note 1 above. 19 To my knowledge, the intensional character of variable binders was first pointed out in Lewis [7] though the 1986 Postscript [8] marks a change of view recommending to treat variable binding outside the categorial framework, in the spirit of Cresswell [3] 20 Etchemendy [5] 21 Garca Carpintero [6] p. 121. 22 Along the lines of [19] and [22] 23 I have examined some possible accounts in [23] 24 See Muskens ....

Lewis, D. K., `Postscript to "General Semantics"', in Philosophical Papers. Volume 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 230-232. MODEL-THEORETIC CONVENTIONALISM 18

....See Lesniewski [9] and Ajdukiewicz [1] 14 See [21] for the details. 15 Ajdukiewicz [1] p. 231. 16 Compare Bar Hillel et al. 2] 17 Compare Cresswell [4] pp. 266 67. 18 See note 1 above. 19 To my knowledge, the intensional character of variable binders was first pointed out in Lewis [7], though the 1986 Postscript [8] marks a change of view recommending to treat variable binding outside the categorial framework, in the spirit of Cresswell [3] 20 Etchemendy [5] 21 Garca Carpintero [6] p. 121. 22 Along the lines of [19] and [22] 23 I have examined some possible ....

Lewis, D. K., `General Semantics', Synthese 22 (1970), 18-67.

....is, of course, 1 See Van Fraassen [1968, 1969] Skyrms [1968] Lambert [1969] Thomason [1970, 1972] Fine [1975] Kamp [1975, 1981] Bencivenga [1978, 1980b, 1981] Klein [1980] Pinkal [1983] van Bendegem [1993] McGee and McLaughlin [1994] among others. The discussion of vagueness in Lewis [1970], Grant [1974] Dummett [1975] and Przel eki [1976] also contain supervaluational ideas, although the connection is not made explicit. In this sense, the approach seems to trace back to Mehlberg [1958] 29. 2 to be found in the greater hostility that such forms of semantic anomaly have ....

Lewis, D. K. [1970], `General Semantics', Synthese 22, 18-67.

....relevant properties of this material, as revealed by linguistic analysis. Semantic context. The semantic context is formed by the underlying task and the task domain (the objects, properties and relations relevant to the task) 4 For extensive discussions of aspects of context see also Lewis (1972); Lyons (1977) 5 ffl Global aspects: the underlying task as a whole, in particular its overall goal, and global characteristics of the task domain; ffl Local aspects: specific facts in the domain of discourse; the current state of the underlying task. Physical context. The physical dimension ....

Lewis, D. (1972) General Semantics. In Davidson, D. and Harman, G. (eds.) Semantics of natural language. Reidel, Dordrecht.

....can each participant hear the other well, etc. ffl expected, conventional type of reaction ( reactive pressures ) e.g. responding to a welcome greeting with another greeting. 4 This list is not exhaustive; for more extensive discussions of the notion of context see e.g. Allwood, 1976; Lewis, 1972; Lyons, 1977. One may well wander whether any exhaustive listing of potentially relevant context aspects is at all possible. In fact, we have added the weather conditions as part of the situational context aspects somewhat tongue in cheek; indeed, it may be argued that, when the sun shines after ....

Lewis, D. (1972) General Semantics. In Davidson, D. and Harman, G. (eds.) Semantics of natural language. Reidel, Dordrecht.

.... system of possible types of act (here, again, like Habermas, he was taking a cue from Austin) It is now widely conceded that this formalistic reinterpretation, although for a time backed up by a significant body of research in linguistics (Bach Harnish, 1979, 1991; Green, 1973; Katz, 1977; Lewis, 1972; Ross. 1970; Sadoch; 1974; as well as Searle himself) led to a dead end, both because of logical incoherences within the model itself (Levinsion, 1983) and empirical inadequacies in accounting for the actual dynamics of conversation (Schegloff, 1992) Why did it fail Two principal reasons can ....

Lewis, D. (1972). General semantics. In D. Davidson & G. Harmon, eds, The logic of grammar (pp. 169-218). Encino, CA: Dickenson.

....equivalence constant in typed logic. The quantifiers 9 and 8 are constants of type ( e; t) t) with the following interpretations. ffl [ 8] h, where h is the function in f0; 1g D (e;t) which maps the function that characterizes D e to 1 and every other characteristic function to 0. ffl [[9]] h, where h is the function in f0; 1g D (e;t) which maps the function that characterizes ; to 0 and every other characteristic function to 1. It is possible to add constants for quantification over different types. e.g. to express second order quantification (i.e. quantification over ....

....Imposing the right constraints is not easy, as the scope behaviour of natural language expressions tends to be influenced by the wider syntactic context. In Alshawi [1] details are given on how scoping mechanisms can be incorporated in large scale natural language systems. 7 Further Reading Lewis [9] gives a good introduction to the process of building meanings in a compositional way. Good introductions to Montague grammar are Dowty, Wall and Peters [3] and Gamut [6] The viewpoint that the real mystery in the understanding of natural language lies in the way human beings grasp meanings of ....

D. Lewis. General semantics. Synthese, 22:18--67, 1970.

....given appropriate resource management choices. In retrospect, one can see that the core components of the type logical architecture were worked out in 1958. But it took a quarter of a century before Lambek s work had a clear impact on the linguistic community. Contributions such as [Lyons 68, Lewis 72, Geach 72] are continuations of the rule based Ajdukiewicz Bar Hillel tradition. Ironically, when linguists developed a renewed interest in categorial grammar in the early Eighties, they did not adopt Lambek s deductive view on grammatical composition, but fell back on an essentially rule based ....

Lewis, D. (1972), `General semantics'. In D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.) Semantics of Natural Language. Reidel, Dordrecht, 169--218.

....3 The use of type shifting has a long history, perhaps best known by Montague s (1973) reanalysis of type e as a function of type (e t) t. It has its roots in logic (Lambek, 1958; Curry and Feys, 1958; Benthem, 1989) and has been used in linguistics for the analysis of quantifier phrases (Lewis, 1970; Geach, 1972) conjoined verbs (Partee and Rooth, 1983) non constituent coordination (Steedman, 1985; Dowty, 1988) and unbounded dependencies (Ades and Steedman, 1982) Dowty (1988, p.160) following Partee and Rooth (1983) conjectures that type shifting can shed some light on how children ....

Lewis, D.: 1970, `General Semantics'. Synthese 22, 18--67.

....indices to truth values. intensional In its graded sense, as an attribute of theories, this is related to the strength of equality in that theory. The weaker (stronger resp. the sense of equality, the more intensional (extensional resp. the theory. intensional isomorphism Proposal of Lewis [ 46 ] , following Carnap [ 18 ] to explicate the notion of sameness of meaning. An intensional isomorphism maps intensions to intensions, intensions of syntactic constituents to intensions of constituents, and so on recursively. intensional verb Example John seeks a girlfriend might mean that John ....

D. Lewis. General semantics. Synthese, 22:18--67, 1970.

....quantifiers as it goes along, and hence determines what concepts and objects are available at a certain locus. Here one could adopt instrumentalism, as once suggested by Lewis: In order to say what a meaning is, we may first ask what a meaning does, and then fid something that does that. (Lewis 1972, 173) Instead, we think it is crucial to develop models with genuine predictive power based on psychological and philosophical insights. It is our hope that this will lead to a better understanding of our semantic capacities. This essay aims to be a first step in that direction. 1 ....

Lewis, D. 1972. General Semantics. In Semantics of Natural Language, ed. D Davidson and G. Harman. 169--218. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.

....a sentence, playing the part of an assertion sign, a question sign, or a command sign. Thus, in addition to the signs for sentential operators such as negation and conjunction that contribute to the sense of the sentence, he proposed that signs for force indicating expressions are also necessary. Lewis (1976) expresses a similar opinion. According to Lewis (1976) a sentence should be divided into two components: the sentence radical and the mood. The sentence radical specifies a state of affairs, and the mood determines whether the speaker is declaring that the state of affairs holds, commanding that ....

....sign, or a command sign. Thus, in addition to the signs for sentential operators such as negation and conjunction that contribute to the sense of the sentence, he proposed that signs for force indicating expressions are also necessary. Lewis (1976) expresses a similar opinion. According to Lewis (1976), a sentence should be divided into two components: the sentence radical and the mood. The sentence radical specifies a state of affairs, and the mood determines whether the speaker is declaring that the state of affairs holds, commanding that it hold, or asking whether it holds. Lewis s use of ....

Lewis, D. (1976) "General semantics," in B. H. Partee, ed., Montague Grammar, Academic Press, New York, San Francisco, London, 1--50.

....a general distinction we normally make between representation and what is represented. However, notwithstanding the intuitive distinction between the two above mentioned theories of context, the line of demarcation is not so easy to pose. In his classical paper on General Semantics Lewis [14] thought it useful to put many parameters in the index, enclosing the background knowledge of the speaker. As soon as [15] accepted Kaplan s theory of double indexing (an index for possible words and an index for contexts) he held to his strategy to put inside the index for contexts relevant ....

D. Lewis. General Semantics. Synthese, 22:18--67, 1970. Reprinted in [16].

No context found.

Lewis, David (1972). "General Semantics", in Davidson and Gil Harman, eds., Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht: Reidel.

No context found.

Lewis, David 1970. General Semantics, in Lewis [1983: 189--232].

No context found.

David Lewis. General Semantics. In Donald Davidson and Gilbert Herman, editors, Semantics of Natural Language. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1972.

No context found.

D. Lewis. General semantics. In D. Davidson and G. Harman, editors, Semantics of Natural Language, pages 169--218. D. Reidel, Dordrecht, Holland, 1972. Reprinted in [7]. 42

No context found.

Lewis, David. 1972. General Semantics. In Semantics of Natural Language, ed. D. Davidson and G. Harman. D. Reidel, Dordrecht.

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