The expressions of a language distinguish between many different types of objects. These types can affect how the meanings of these expressions combine. This paper provides a formal picture of the process of meaning combination in a richly typed framework.

Syntactic representations based on word-to-word dependencies have a long tradition in descriptive linguistics, and receive considerable interest in many computational applications. However, dependency syntax has remained somewhat of an island from a formal point of view, which hampers the exchange of resources and computational methods with other syntactic traditions. In this article, we presen...

It is commonly believed that the meaning of a formal declarative knowledge representation language is determined by its formal semantics. This is not quite so. This paper shows an epistemological ambiguity that arises in the context of logic programming. Several different logic programming formalisms and semantics have been proposed. Hence, logic programming can be seen as an overlapping family...

Business rules are generally expressed in natural language, although some rules are at times illustrated graphically. SBVR is not a logic language for restating business rules in some other language that business people don’t use. Rather, SBVR provides a means for describing the structure of the meaning of rules expressed in the natural language that business people use. SBVR calls this “semant...

Formal modeling of computing systems yields models that are intended to be correct with respect to the requirements that have been formalized. The complexity of typical computing systems can be addressed by formal refinement introducing all the necessary details piecemeal. We report on preliminary results that we have obtained for tracing informal natural-language requirements into formal model...

Introduction To know the meaning of a declarative sentence is to know what the world should be like for the sentence to be true. To know the meaning of an interrogative sentence is to know what information is needed to resolve it. Like the meaning of a declarative sentence is equated with its truth-conditions—and identified with the set of worlds satisfying these conditions—the meaning of an in...

There are two different approaches to meaning formalization: one logical, another cognitive. The logical approach, going back to Frege and developed and explicitly applied to natural language semantics by Montague, is characterized by establishing semantics from primitive semantic structures of sentential type. This approach is most consistently represented by type logical grammars (see collect...

This paper deals with the meaning of natural language expressions, and how meanings of expressions are used in communication. The two disciplines that talk most about meanings of expressions are linguistics (semantics and pragmatics) and philosophy. This paper is about topics discussed in both disciplines. The first part of the paper is more philosophical in nature and discusses what is meaning...

Recent IS research (Straub et al 2002) comments that cross-cultural research in IS 'remains in its infancy' because of the 'lack of unanimity about the underlying meaning and definition of the underlying construct 'culture''. This paper extends previous work by the authors on the significance of culture in the development of both informal and formal models of trust in IS security using an estab...

The paper investigates a seeming paradox. Formal theories of meaning standardly assume that sentencesin real communication or in fictionare evaluated relative to utterance contexts. Therefore, such theories lead us to expect that texts in fiction always refer to speakers, which come as part of these utterance contexts. Intuition, on the contrary, tells us that many stories do not create the imp...