‘Two-dimensional semantics’ denotes a family of semantic theories rooted in intensional semantics, held together by shared general ideas, yet divided by deep divergences in semantic aims and philosophical aspiration. 2dtheorists agree that our sentences’ truth-values vary with what the facts are, as well as with what the sentences mean. To model this twofold dependence of truth on fact and mean...

This paper proposes an alternative to formal annotation for the representation of semantics, and presents an extension to it capable of handling multimedia (text and images) documents. The article argues that meaning is not a property of a document, but an outcome of a contextualized and situated process of interpretation. The consequence of this position is that one should not quite try to rep...

let $k$ be a field of characteristic$p>0$, $k[[x]]$, the ring of formal power series over $ k$,$k((x))$, the quotient field of $ k[[x]]$, and $ k(x)$ the fieldof rational functions over $k$. we shall give somecharacterizations of an algebraic function $fin k((x))$ over $k$.let $l$ be a field of characteristic zero. the power series $finl[[x]]$ is called differentially algebraic, if it satisfies...

We study the computational complexity of polyadic quantifiers in natural language. This type of quantification is widely used in formal semantics to model the meaning of multi-quantifier sentences. First, we show that the standard semantic constructions that turn simple quantifiers into complex ones, namely Boolean operations, iteration, cumulation, and resumption, are tractable. Then, we provi...

In his development of formal semantics for natural language Montague [1970a]– Montague [1973], Richard Montague modeled the meaning (Frege’s sense) of a term A by its Carnap intension CI(A), the function which assigns to each state a, specifying a “possibleworld”, “time” and“context of use”, the denotationden(A)(a) of A in that state. Now this is surely not right: among other things, it makes “...

Volume 1 left off. In the years immediately following World War II, logical positivism was drawing its last breaths, and new approaches to philosophy were gathering steam. In America, Quine was attempting to strip positivism of two of its cherished doctrines—the analytic/synthetic distinction, and the verificationist analysis of individual sentences—while rehabilitating its commitments to the c...

This paper presents the first possible world semantics for concessive conditionals (i.e., even if A, C conditionals) constructed in a compositional way. First, the meaning of if is formalized through a semantics that builds on the proposal given by Stalnaker [1968]. A major difference from Stalnaker’s approach is that irrelevant conditionals (i.e., conditionals where the antecedent and the cons...

This paper investigates the formal semantics of reduplication in Cantonese, i.e. how the meaning of reduplicated forms are encoded and computed with the given meaning from the base forms. In particular, this paper argues that reduplication denotes a summation function that adds up arguments (be they object-, eventor degreearguments) and return a collection of the elements. The surface differenc...