Martin Stokhof

Navigation

Home
Research
Papers
Teaching
CV
Links
Contact

Research

Dynamic semantics

Dynamic semantics as a compositional alternative for the representational framework of discourse representation theory originated in the late 1980's, early 1990's. Several joint papers with Jeroen Groenendijk and Frank Veltman on topics in this area are available in the Papers section.

Questions

The work with Jeroen Groenendijk on questions goes back to our joint dissertation of 1984. Partitioning Logical Space, the annotated Leuven handout from 1991, gives a reasonably comprehensive overview of that work. Along with several other papers on questions it is available in the Papers section.

Interpretation and semantics

The relationship between philosophical theories of interpretation (radical interpretation à la Quine and Davidson, but also the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer and the "practical" approach of Wittgenstein's later work) and various theories of formal semantics (classical Montague grammar, discourse representation theory, dynamic semantics) is investigated in two papers on radical interpretation and one on compositionality (see, again, the Papers section). The relationship with theories of "embodied cognition" is a recent concern.

Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein, finally, has been an ongoing interest, in particular the contents of his ethical and religious views and their ontological and epistemological status. In 2002 World and Life as One. Ethics and Ontology in Wittgenstein's Early Thought, appeared with Stanford University Press. Currently the main focus is on the relationship between values and realism in the later work, in particular On Certainty.