Some computational aspects of situation semantics

Abstract

Can a realist model theory of natural language be computationally plausible? Or, to put it another way, is the view of linguistic meaning as a relation between expressions of a natural language and things (objects, properties, etc.) in the world, as opposed to a relation between expressions and procedures in the head, consistent with a computational approach to understanding natural language? The model theorist must either claim that the answer is yes, or be willing to admit that humans transcend the computationally feasible in their use of language?Until recently the only model theory of natural language that was at all well developed was Montague Grammar. Unfortunately, it was based on the primitive notion of world and so was not a realist theory, unless you are prepared to grant that all possible worlds are real. Montague Grammar is also computationally intractable, for reasons to be discussed below.John Perry and I have developed a somewhat different approach to the model theory of natural language, a theory we call Situation Semantics. Since one of my own motivations in the early days of this project was to use the insights of generalized recursion theory to find a computationally plausible alternative to Montague Grammar, it seems fitting to give a progress report here.