From the Linguist List: “Becoming a semanticist back in the 1970s was quite different from what it is in the days of Heim & Kratzer (incidentally, two of my old Konstanz friends). The field had not been established as a sub-discipline of linguistics, and despite some serious integrative attempts (thanks to Barbara Partee), it was still perceived as an esoteric pastime of a small community of logicians, philosophers of language, and (few) linguists. In Germany, this community was particularly strong, with enough funding to have spectacular conferences bringing together some of the best researchers in the field. I attended quite a few of them, though rarely presenting anything, during the time I worked on my dissertation, which was supposed to be about the interface between logical and lexical semantics. I never finished that dissertation, for at least two reasons. The first was that I kept changing my mind over the very subject area: my original strategy had been to formulate model-theoretic constraints on meaning postulates to keep them from overgenerating (a serious issue at the time, and still), but the more I worked on it, the less confident I became that model theory is the right framework for natural language semantics. The other reason was that I was easily distracted, working on a lot of other problems at the same time, and with more success (in terms of publications). One of my favourite topics was Groenendijk’s and Stokhof’s fascinating partition semantics of interrogatives. When investigating its logical underpinnings, I found that one of Montague’s implicit hypotheses about semantic analysis – that his intensional type logic provides a restrictive framework of compositional semantics – was not quite right. I wrote a short article about this and showed it to my would-be supervisor Arnim von Stechow, who saw to it that I would submit it as my dissertation. In the event it was accepted by him (and the co-promoters) and also got published in a logic journal. Rather than being proud of these 13 pages in print, I have always felt a bit ashamed for never having written a proper dissertation; but in the meantime I got used to being introduced as the guy who must have written the shortest linguistics dissertation ever.”

Adrian Brasoveanu.

“Capturing the particular ways in which natural language interpretation proceeds is usually taken to involve rich abstract representations and fairly complex operations over such representations. From this perspective, two general goals of formal semantics are to identify patterns of interpretation that seem to involve such abstract (non-overt / latent) representations and operations and to design logical systems in which the ‘right’ range of representations and operators can be defined and in which these representations and operators interact in the ‘right’ way.

At the same time, providing solid empirical foundations for increasingly sophisticated formal semantics theories requires increasingly sophisticated methods of empirical investigation and statistical analysis of the resulting data. In addition, semantic theories should be complemented and further constrained by cognitive theories of how such structured, abstract and compositionally assembled representations and operations can be learned / induced from ‘raw’ observed data and the kinds of mechanisms that underlie their processing in actual natural language usage.”