Hans Kamp  (Stuttgart/University of Texas at Austin) will present his forthcoming work (for a David Kaplan volume) on definites in a special colloquium on Friday, April 21, from 3:00 to 6:00 pm in N400. The colloquium is part of Daniel Altshuler’s seminar. Here is a link to the paper Hans will talk about. Please don’t distribute it without permission. There will be a dinner at Barbara’s place afterwards. She will send out more info (including an RSVP) later this week.

Hans Kamp is the founder of Discourse Representation Theory. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Discourse Representation Theory: “In the early 1980s, Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) was introduced by Hans Kamp as a theoretical framework for dealing with issues in the semantics and pragmatics of anaphora and tense (Kamp 1981); a very similar theory was developed independently by Irene Heim (1982). The distinctive features of DRT […] are that it is a mentalist and representationalist theory of interpretation, and that it is a theory of the interpretation not only of individual sentences but of discourse, as well. In these respects DRT made a clear break with classical formal semantics, which during the 1970s had emanated from Montague’s pioneering work […], but in other respects it continued the tradition, e.g., in its use of model-theoretical tools.”