Chapter published in:
The Semantics of Dynamic Space in French: Descriptive, experimental and formal studies on motion expression
Edited by Michel Aurnague and Dejan Stosic
[Human Cognitive Processing 66] 2019
► pp. 324–352

A computational account of virtual travelers in the Montagovian generative lexicon

| LIFO, Université d'Orléans, France
| LIRMM, Université de Montpellier, CNRS, Montpellier, France
| LIRMM, Université de Montpellier, CNRS, Montpellier, France

This chapter deals with the automated formal analysis of a specfic interpretation of fictive motion named the “virtual traveler”, involved for instance in the French equivalents of a sentence like The path descends for two hours where it is possible that no-one actually descends. Our analysis in computational semantics yields the intended logical formula in the framework of the Discourse Representation Theory. It relies on a framework, the Montagovian Generative Lexicon that integrates lexical semantics into compositional semantics.

Keywords: computational semantics, Discourse Representation Theory, lexical semantics, Montague semantics, type theory
Published online: 29 July 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.66.09lef
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