About

Hans Kamp is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. His academic focus is on the philosophy of language, specifically on propositional attitudes and the intersection of language and thought. Kamp's work involves exploring how language relates to mental states and the structure of meaning, contributing to the understanding of linguistic representation and cognition. His role at the university emphasizes research and teaching in these areas, engaging with students and colleagues on topics related to language philosophy and the theoretical underpinnings of propositional attitudes. Kamp's expertise and scholarly activities are centered around advancing the philosophical understanding of language, thought, and their interrelations.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Cognitive science
• Psychology
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Algorithm

Selected publications

• Thoughts about ‘Thinking about Things’

  2024-02-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Certain simple sentences with empty names fail to determine truth values. Examples are (1.a) and (1.b). 1 There is water on Vulcan. There is no water on Vulcan.

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• Can't Believe It Went By So Fast

  Annual Review of Linguistics · 2023-09-15 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This autobiographical sketch starts with my arrival as a PhD student at UCLA in 1965. It focuses on the most prominent line of my intellectual development, from work in Priorean tense logic for my dissertation and essays intended to fit within the framework of Montague Grammar to the discourse-oriented framework of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) and eventually to the unequivocally cognitive approach of Mental State Discourse Representation Theory (MSDRT), which is the core of my present view and work.

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• The links of causal chains

  Theoria · 2022-02-13 · 2 citations

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  Abstract This paper is about the Causal Theory of Names, as outlined by Kripke in Naming and Necessity . The paper argues that causal chains which connect users in command of a name N with those present at the baptismal event in which N was introduced are branches of networks of ‘ N ‐labelled’ entity representations in the minds of past and present users of N. These networks of N ‐labelled entity representations are special cases of networks that result in general from the use of referring expressions. Such networks are an important part of the fabric that holds a speech community together and point towards a view of language as a social practice. The theory of networks and chains is developed within MSDRT (‘Mental State Discourse Representation Theory’), an extension of DRT designed for the description of utterance contents, propositional attitudes, mental states and the ways in which mental states change in the course of verbal communication. The last section of the paper explores the view of languages as social practices somewhat further in the light of the network theory developed in the sections leading up to it.

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• Discourse representation theory

  Handbook of pragmatics online/Handbook of pragmatics · 2022 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Linguistics

  Discourse Representation Theory is a specific name for the work of Hans Kamp in the area of dynamic interpretation of natural language.Also, it has gradually become a generic term for proposals for dynamic interpretation of natural language in the same spirit.These proposals have in common that each new sentence is interpreted in terms of the contribution it makes to an existing piece of interpreted discourse.The interpretation conditions for sentences are given as instructions for updating the representation of the discourse.This article first introduces the problem that discourse representation theory, in its specific sense, sets out to solve.Then the basic ideas of the theory are listed, various extensions of the basic theory are discussed, the relation to partial interpretation of language is sketched, and proof theory for discourse representation structures is presented.The paper ends with a brief account of the use of 'unresolved' discourse representation structures for the representation of ambiguities.

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• Referential and Attributive Descriptions

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology

  This chapter looks at Donnellan’s referential–attributive distinction from a communication-theoretic perspective, which distinguishes between utterance production and utterance interpretation – in this case between the referential and the attributive use of definite descriptions and their referential and attributive interpretation. The framework is MSDRT, an extension of DRT that provides mental state descriptions (MSDs) for utterance producers and recipients. MSDs consist of propositional attitude representations (PRs) and entity representations (ERs). ERs represent entities from the outside world (their referents), to which they are linked by causal relations and which they can contribute to the contents of the agent’s PRs. The referential use and interpretation of a description are analyzed as those which producer and interpreter take to refer to the referent of one of their ERs (while the attributive use and interpretation take it to refer to whatever satisfies its descriptive content). This approach differentiates more finely between different use scenarios than other approaches and throws new light on the question whether the referential and the attributive use are mutually exclusive and whether they are jointly exhaustive.

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• Sharing real and fictional reference

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Computer Science

  This chapter extends the framework of MSDRT (Mental State Discourse Representation Theory) to the problem of reference in fiction, and to the role and function of fictional names. Central to the investigation is the notion of an Entity Representation (ER), a central feature of MSDRT and used previously in the communication-theoretic analysis of the pragmatics and semantics of non-fictional names in Kamp (2015). As argued in that paper, the use of proper names within a speech community leads to networks of connected ERs in the mental states of their users. These networks provide the names with a kind of intersubjective identity. In this respect, fictional names resemble non-fictional names—those that refer to real entities, that exist in the actual world in which we live. This chapter proposes an analysis of fictional names and fictional reference that capitalizes on this resemblance.

  PublisherDOI

• Cognitive and linguistic aspects of composition in German particle verbs

  Human cognitive processing · 2019-05-20

  book-chapter

  Abstract Most German particle verbs (PVs) are composed of a prepositional particle (P) and a base verb (BV). For instance, anstrahlen is formed from the P an and the BV strahlen . The meaning of a PV results from often systematic interactions between the P and BV meanings. But many Ps and BVs are ambiguous and, moreover, a single P meaning and a single BV meaning can be combined in several ways. Finally, the interactions between P and BV meanings depend on the context. This chapter presents a case study of how two particles, auf and ab , interact with certain BVs and contextual factors, while focusing on the difference between abstract and concrete BV/PV concepts, and between abstract and concrete contexts.

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• Tense and Aspect in Discourse Representation Theory

  2019-03-21 · 16 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter is about the treatment of tense and aspect in Discourse Representation Theory. The focus is on the role that different tense forms and other sentence constituents with temporal and/or aspectual meaning components have on the interpretation of sentence sequences: how the occurrence of such a constituent in a sentence links its interpretation temporally or aspectually to that of the sentence of sentences preceding it. The concern on the discourse linking role of tenses and other sentence constituents led to DRT in the first place, with its architecture that is geared to deal with the systematic properties of incremental discourse interpretation. Novel about the chapter is its discussion of the distinction between temporal cross-sentential discourse links that are fully determined by the choice of tense forms alone and those which also rely on world knowledge and discourse relations. DRT work on sentence- and word-internal structure is not discussed.

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• 11. Discourse Representation Theory

  2019-02-18 · 4 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) originated from the desire to account for aspects of linguistic meaning that have to do with the connections between sentences in a discourse or text (as opposed to the meanings that individual sentences have in isolation). The general framework it proposes is dynamic: the semantic contribution that a sentence makes to a discourse or text is analysed as its contribution to the semantic representation - Discourse Representation Structure or DRS - that has already been constructed for the sentences preceding it. Interpretation is thus described as a transformation process which turns DRSs into other (as a rule more informative) DRSs, and meaning is explicated in terms of the canons that govern the construction of DRSs. DRT’s emphasis on semantic representations distinguishes it from other dynamic frameworks (such as the Dynamic Predicate Logic and Dynamic Montague Grammar developed by Groenendijk and Stokhof, and numerous variants of those). DRT is - both in its conception and in the details of its implementation - a theory of semantic representation, or logical form. The selection of topics for this survey reflects our view of what are the most important contributions of DRT to natural language semantics (as opposed to philosophy or artificial intelligence).

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• Epistemic Specificity from a Communication-Theoretic Perspective

  Journal of Semantics · 2018-12-04 · 21 citations

  article1st author

  This paper offers a DRT-based analysis of epistemic specificity. Following Farkas (1996), we distinguish between scopal, partitive and epistemic specificity. After arguing in Section 1 that the three main variants of specificity are irreducible to each other, the paper then focuses on epistemic specificity. In the analysis of epistemically specific indefinites we distinguish between specific use and specific interpretation. Specific use is defined as a relation between (the semantic representation of) a linguistic form and (the representation of) the speaker’s mental state: In the speaker’s state the sentence containing the relevant indefinite corresponds to a singular proposition. Specific interpretation is in a sense a derivative notion: It characterises the representation constructed by the hearer just in case he construes an indefinite as having been used specifically by the speaker, and builds his own representation accordingly. The representation language we employ is a descendant of the original DRT-language presented in Kamp & Reyle (1993). This framework is tailor-made for the representations of attitudes of cognitive agents (for discussion see Kamp (2013)); in the analysis reported in the present paper it enables us to distinguish between (i) the representation of an utterance that is derived via (standard) linguistic analysis, and (ii) – (iii) the representations that the individual discourse participants have or construct for this utterance. The key concept of the analysis is the notion of an anchored entity representation: Anchored entity representations are constituents of mental states that are causally linked, via their anchors, to the entities that they represent. In general, when a speaker uses a noun phrase to refer to an entity represented by one of her entity representations and thereby activates an entity representation in the mind of the hearer, the anchor of the hearer’s representation, |$ER_H$|⁠, will often be structurally different from that of the speaker’s own entity representation |$ER_S$|⁠, although normally the two representations will be coreferential. There will be a structural difference in particular when the speaker refers to the entity represented by |$ER_S$| through making a specific use of an indefinite noun phrase. If the hearer takes her to have used the indefinite specifically, he will construct an entity representation |$ER_H$| whose anchor links it to its referent as the entity represented by the speaker’s representation |$ER_S$|⁠. Anchors of this type are called ‘vicarious anchors’. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the linguistic status of epistemic specificity. Data from English have been taken to suggest that specificity is an epiphenomenon, viz. that it need not be captured at the level of grammatical representation. But data from Romanian appear to suggest otherwise: The behaviour of Romanian indefinites marked with the Accusative preposition pe suggests that the specificity properties of these indefinites need to be marked at the level of (compositional) semantics, viz. at the level of those representations that are obtained directly from syntactic input. Our (tentative) conclusion is that the linguistic status of specific indefinites can be subject to cross-linguistic variation.

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Frequent coauthors

• Uwe Reyle

  22 shared

• Antje Roßdeutscher

  7 shared

• Barbara H. Partee

  5 shared

• Fritz Hamm

  3 shared

• Nicholas Asher

  3 shared

• Michael Klein

  3 shared

• Jan van Eijck

  University of Amsterdam

  3 shared

• Dana Scott

  University of California, Berkeley

  2 shared