20 October 2000, DIP-colloquium, Michiel van Lambalgen

20 October 2000, DIP-colloquium, Michiel van Lambalgen
SPEAKER: Michiel van Lambalgen (ILLC, UvA)
TITLE: Event calculus, nominalisation and the progressive
PLACE: MFR, Philosophy department, ground flour
DATE: Friday 20th October 2000
TIME: 15.00-17.00

ABSTRACT
Ever since Vendler we know that nominalisations come in two varieties: perfect (having a noun-like character) and imperfect (having a verb-like character). The resulting nominals differ in both their external and internal distributional properties. Formally, nominalisation is an operation that transforms formulas into terms. However, since we need a truth predicate, the definition of such an operation is nontrivial. By grafting Feferman's (1984) type-free calculus on a variant of the event calculus (originally due to Kowalski and Sergot (1986), this version due to Shanahan (1995)) we obtain a system in which the two nominalisations can be performed formally, with the right distributional properties (and such that the HoldsAt predicate of the event calculus matches the truth predicate of Feferman's system). The added bonus of Shanahan's event calculus is that it is capable of dealing with continuous change and nonmonotonicity. This will be seen to provide an elegant solution of the so-called `imperfective paradox' involving the progressive. This pertains also to cases where the object need not exist, as in `Mary is drawing a circle'.

We shall discuss a number of examples from the literature, a.o. Bonomi's `Multiple Choice Paradox' (1997) to see how they fit in the present framework. (Joint work with Fritz Hamm, Tuebingen.) Home Page: http://www.hum.uva.nl/computerlinguistiek/dip/ (but still out of date)

More information can be found on the DIP (Discourse Processing) homepage, or by contacting the DIP Colloquium organizing committee at DIP@hum.uva.nl