A Crash Course in DRT

Abstract

The last chapter introduced a typology of abstract entities in natural language metaphysics. To investigate and analyze the typology further, I need to give a detailed semantics of sentential and verbal nominals. In order to do this, I will introduce the semantic framework, Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), within which the analysis will take place. That is the task of the present chapter. Much of this chapter rehearses material and motivation in DRT that has already surfaced elsewhere. All of this fragment, for instance, is covered in Kamp and Reyle (199+).¹ But unlike the top-down analysis of Kamp and Reyle, the analysis and construction procedure of the DR-theoretic structures presented here is bottom up. It describes a program that has been implemented in LISP and PROLOG.² The principal novel contribution of this chapter is to give a semantics for the bottom up construction procedure that shows the construction process is semantically coherent and gives the right results. This semantics yields insights into the possibility of a compositional treatment of DRT, and it also lays the foundations for the semantic analysis of sentential nominals.