Burghard B. Rieger:
Situations and Dispositions.\\
Some Formal and Empirical Tools for Semantic Analysis.
In: Bahner, W./Schildt, J./Viehweger, D. (Eds.):
Proceedings of the XIV. International Congress of Linguists 1987, Volume II,
Berlin (Akademie-Verlag) 1990, pp. 1233--1235.}
Abstract
Based on the concept of
situation, Barwise/Perry have arrived at a
new approach to formal semantics. Within their relational model of Situation Semantics,
natural language meanings
appear to be the derivable from information processing
which (natural/artificial) systems - due to their own structuredness -
perform by recognizing similarities or invariants between situations
that structure their surrounding realities (or
fragments thereof). By mapping these invariants as uniformities
across situations,
cognitive systems attuned to them constitute what appears
to be their view of reality: a
flow of situations related by uniformities of entities like individuals,
properties, relations, locations, etc. which constrain ``a world teaming
with meaning''.
Words in natural language (as types) appear to be such uniformities whose employment
(as tokens) in texts exhibit a
special form of structurally conditioned constraints.
Not only allows their use speakers/hearers to convey/understand meanings differently in different
discourse situations (efficiency), but at the same time
the discourses' total vocabulary and word usages also provide
an empirically accessible basis for the numerical analysis of structural
(as opposed to referential) aspects
of event-types and how these are related by virtue of word-uniformities
across phrases,
sentences, and texts uttered.
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