In this seminar series I will propose that a particular version of type theory, TTR or type theory with records (Cooper, 2005a,b, 2012; Ginzburg, 2012), provides us with a cognitive perspective on language which relates our linguistic abilities to more general perceptual abilities and at the same time enables us to combine several different approaches to linguistic analysis (such as Montague semantics, discourse representation theory, HPSG, information state based dialogue analysis) into a single coherent and explanatory theory.
Lecture 1: Types, event perception and reasoning: an introduction to TTR We will introduce TTR, emphasizing its relation to perception, in particular event perception. We will argue that human reasoning ability as evidenced in language has its origin in the perception of events.
Lecture 2: Fernando’s string theory of events and event structure We will show how the view of event perception from Lecture 1 relates to the analysis of aspect which has been proposed by Tim Fernando in a series of papers relating event structure to finite state automata and give a type theoretic account of aspectual classes (situation types). We will suggest that something like frames (as in FrameNet) play an important role in characterizing the event structure associated with predicates (Cooper, 2010). We apply this string theory of events also to speech events and discuss how this view interacts with a view of incremental parsing.
Lecture 3: Quantification, negation and inference in dialogue In recent work (Cooper, 2011; Cooper and Ginzburg, 2011; Breitholtz and Cooper, 2011) we have suggested that traditional concerns of linguistic semantics take on a different perspective when considered in the light of dialogue. We suggest that our reasoning is based on local resources rather than a single monolithic logical system. The idea is that agents acquire patterns of inference on the basis of perception and interaction with other agents and associate collections of such rules with certain domains and types of dialogue situation (e.g. who the interlocutor is).
Lecture 4: Semantic coordination and the acquisition of word meaning We will develop further the notion of resource introduced in Lecture 3 (Cooper and Ranta, 2008; Larsson and Cooper, 2009; Cooper and Larsson, 2009) and suggest that it is important to explain how we coordinate our language with each other as has been suggested in the psychological literature. We shall argue that semantic coordination plays a central role in the semantic acquisition by children. Our type theoretic notion of frame from Lecture 2 plays an important role in allowing us to characterize the kind of adjustments we make to meaning during the course of coordination.
References
(Most of these references can be found, at least in prefinal version, on the TTR website.)
Artstein, Ron, Mark Core, David DeVault, Kallirroi Georgila, Elsi Kaiser and Amanda Stent, eds. (2011) SemDial 2011 (Los Angelogue): Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue.
Breitholtz, Ellen and Robin Cooper (2011) Enthymemes as Rhetorical Resources, in Artstein et al. (2011).
Cooper, Robin (2005a) Austinian truth, attitudes and type theory, Research on Language and Computation, Vol. 3, pp. 333–362.
Cooper, Robin (2005b) Records and Record Types in Semantic Theory, Journal of Logic and Computation, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 99–112.
Cooper, Robin (2010) Frames in formal semantics, in H. Loftsson, E. Rögnvaldsson and S. Helgadóttir (eds.), IceTAL 2010, Springer Verlag.
Cooper, Robin (2011) Copredication, Quantfication and Frames, in S. Pogodalla and J.-P. Prost (eds.), Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics: 6th International Conference, LACL 2011, pp. 64–79, Springer.
Cooper, Robin (2012) Type Theory and Semantics in Flux, in R. Kempson, N. Asher and T. Fernando (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 14: Philosophy of Linguistics, Elsevier BV. General editors: Dov M. Gabbay, Paul Thagard and John Woods.
Cooper, Robin and Jonathan Ginzburg (2011) Negation in Dialogue, in Artstein et al. (2011).
Cooper, Robin and Staffan Larsson (2009) Compositional and ontological semantics in learning from corrective feedback and explicit definition, in J. Edlund, J. Gustafson, A. Hjalmarsson and G. Skantze (eds.), Proceedings of DiaHolmia: 2009 Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, pp. 59–66.
Cooper, Robin and Aarne Ranta (2008) Natural Languages as Collections of Resources, in R. Cooper and R. Kempson (eds.), Language in Flux: Dialogue Coordination, Language Variation, Change and Evolution (Communication, Mind and Language 1), pp. 109–120, College Publications, London.
Ginzburg, Jonathan (2012) The Interactive Stance: Meaning for Conversation, Oxford Uni- versity Press, Oxford.
Larsson, Staffan and Robin Cooper (2009) Towards a formal view of corrective feedback, in A. Alishahi, T. Poibeau and A. Villavicencio (eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition, pp. 1–9.