Rich Thomason
Papers on Natural Language Semantics


 My earlier work in natural language semantics concentrated on the logical interpretations
 of fragments of English, concentrating on syntactic structures and seeking to extend the 
 work of Richard Montague and also to use the task of formalizing natural language to
 inspire and guide the development appropriate logical frameworks.

 That work isn't archived here.   The unpublished papers listed below have to do with
 using nomonotonic logics to explain semantic phenomena that have less to do with the
 meanings of sentences than with the meanings of words.
 

 
     
     
  1. "Non-Monotonic Formalisms for Natural Language Semantics."

    2.         Uses nonmonotomic logic to formalize the meanings of some derived words.
            The construction studied in most detail in this draft is -able.
                                         PostScript         PDF
     
  2. "Formalizing the Semantics of Derived Words."

    3.         A less technical and condensed version of the above paper, 
            written mainly with philosophers in mind.
                                         PostScript         PDF
     
  3. "Lexical Semantics for Causal Constructions"      PDF