Situations and Dispositions . Some Formal and

Revising some fundamental assumptions in model theory, Barwise/Perry [1] have arrived at a new approach to formal semantics, based on the concept of situation. Within their relational model of semantics, meaning appears to be the derivative of information processing which (natural/artificial) systems — due to their own structuredness — perform by recognizing similarities or invariants between situations that structure their surrounding realities (or fragments thereof). By mapping these invariants as uniformities across situations, cognitive systems attuned to them constitute what appears to be their view of reality: a flow of situations related by uniformities like individuals, properties, relations, locations, etc. which constrain “a world teaming with meaning”. Complementory to this sign-system-view of the external world, the symbol-system-view of natural languages makes words (as types) appear to be such uniformities whose employment (as tokens) in texts exhibits a special form of structurally conditioned constraints. Not only allows their use speakers/hearers to convey/understand meanings differently in different discourse situations (efficiency), but at the same time the discourses’ total vocabulary and word usages also provide an empirically accessible basis for the analysis of structural (as opposed to referential) aspects of event-types and how these are related by virtue of worduniformities across phrases, sentences, and texts uttered. Thus, as a means for the intensional (as opposed to the extensional) description of (abstract, real, and actual) situations, the regularities of word-usages may serve as a representational format to specify those constraints dynamically which underlie and condition any word’s linguistic meaning, the interpretations it allows within possible contexts of use, and the information its actual employment on a particular occasion may convey. Under the notion of semantic dispositions [2] a textlinguistic access has been found which may prove to become an empirical tool to the analysis and dynamic representation of structural constraints underlying linguistic meanings. Based upon the empirical analysis of discourse that real speakers/writers produce in actual situations of performed or intended communication (1), the present approach (2) makes essential use of algorithmic means to map fuzzy word meanings and their connotative interrelations in a format of stereotypes. Their dependencies (3) are generated procedurally selecting only those relations which can be — under differing aspects differently — considered relevant. Such dynamic dispositional dependencies would seem to be an operational prerequisite to and a promising candidate for any emPublished in: Bahner, W./Schildt, J./Viehweger, D. (Eds.): Proceedings of the XIV. International Congress of Linguists 1987, Volume II, Berlin (Akademie-Verlag) 1990, pp. 1233–1235.