Description

A uniform formulation of natural language semantic representations 
as types is described, covering work on anaphora and presupposition
commonly labelled `dynamic semantics' (DS), and investigations into 
what T. Parsons calls `sub-atomic semantics' (SS), delving into
events. For DS, this consists of a proof-theoretic formulation 
(detailed by Ranta) that equates a proposition with the type of its 
proofs, providing a declarative alternative to the imperative
(assignment-based) languages of Quantified Dynamic Logic. 

For SS, systems of typed-lambda calculi (functional programming) are 
pushed down to regular languages, with events conceived as sequences 
of observations (much like comics and movies) that are accepted by 
finite automata. Mereological approaches to events and situations 
(e.g. Schubert) are reconstructed in terms of suitable entailments 
between the regular languages, grounded in time. Ideas from Reichenbach 
and Vendler discussed by Steedman in connection with the frame problem 
from AI are analyzed in a finite-state setting, and related to recent
applications of Shanahan's event calculus by Hamm and van Lambalgen.

A suitable notion of context will be presented in a lecture on records 
(in intuitionistic type theory) by Robin Cooper.