On the proper treatment of context in NL
Jan van Eijck · 1999
The proper treatment of quantification in Natural Language proposed by Richard Montague some thirty years does not do proper justice to the fact that interpretation of texts both uses context and sets up new contexts. The dynamic turn in NL semantics is the attempt to model this basic fact, but the use of dynamically quantified variables introduces an undesirable element into this attempt. By extending a variable-free `incremental dynamics' with a flexible system of type scheme patterns and type scheme pattern matching, we arrive at a Montague style architecture for NL semantics that provides a proper treatment both of quantification and of context use and context change. 1 The Key Issue When processing natural language text, a context is incrementally built up of salient items, to be used as a domain for fixing anaphoric references (with constraints on where the referents are to be found). This context is used and extended at the same time, for introduction of new topics of conversa...