Ces travaux s’intéressent à la modélisation formelle de la sémantique des langues naturelles. Pour cela, nous suivons le principe de compositionnalité qui veut que le sens d’une expression complexe soit une fonction du sens de ses parties. Ces fonctions sont généralement formalisées à l’aide du [lambda]-calcul. Cependant, ce principe est remis en cause par certains usages de la langue, comme les pronoms anaphoriques ou les présuppositions. Ceci oblige à soit abandonner la compositionalité, soit modifier les structures du sens. Dans le premier cas, le sens n’est alors plus obtenu par un calcul qui correspond à des fonctions mathématiques, mais par un calcul dépendant du contexte, ce qui le rapproche des langages de programmation qui manipulent leur contexte avec des effets de bord. Dans le deuxième cas, lorsque les structures de sens sont ajustées, les nouveaux sens ont tendance à avoir une structure de monade. Ces dernières sont elles-mêmes largement utilisées en programmation fonctionnelle pour coder des effets de bord, que nous retrouvons à nouveau. Par ailleurs, s’il est souvent possible de proposer le traitement d’un unique phénomène, composer plusieurs traitements s’avère être une tâche complexe. Nos travaux proposent d’utiliser les résultats récents autour des langages de programmation pour parvenir à combiner ces modélisations par les effets de bord. Pour cela, nous étendons le [lambda]-calcul avec une monade qui implémente les effects et les handlers, une technique récente dans l’étude des effets de bord. Dans la première partie de la thèse, nous démontrons les propriétés fondamentales de ce calcul (préservation de type, confluence et terminaison). Dans la seconde partie, nous montrons comment utiliser le calcul pour le traitement de plusieurs phénomènes linguistiques : deixis, quantification, implicature conventionnelle, anaphore et présupposition. Enfin, nous construisons une unique grammaire qui gère ces phénomènes et leurs interactions. / In formal semantics, researchers assign meanings to sentences of a natural language. This work is guided by the principle of compositionality: the meaning of an expression is a function of the meanings of its parts. These functions are often formalized using the [lambda]-calculus. However, there are areas of language which challenge the notion of compositionality, e.g. anaphoric pronouns or presupposition triggers. These force researchers to either abandon compositionality or adjust the structure of meanings. In the first case, meanings are derived by processes that no longer correspond to pure mathematical functions but rather to context-sensitive procedures, much like the functions of a programming language that manipulate their context with side effects. In the second case, when the structure of meanings is adjusted, the new meanings tend to be instances of the same mathematical structure, the monad. Monads themselves being widely used in functional programming to encode side effects, the common theme that emerges in both approaches is the introduction of side effects. Furthermore, different problems in semantics lead to different theories which are challenging to unite. Our thesis claims that by looking at these theories as theories of side effects, we can reuse results from programming language research to combine them.This thesis extends [lambda]-calculus with a monad of computations. The monad implements effects and handlers, a recent technique in the study of programming language side effects. In the first part of the thesis, we prove some of the fundamental properties of this calculus: subject reduction, confluence and termination. Then in the second part, we demonstrate how to use the calculus to implement treatments of several linguistic phenomena: deixis, quantification, conventional implicature, anaphora and presupposition. In the end, we build a grammar that features all of these phenomena and their interactions.

This thesis develops a theoretical formalism of formal semantics of natural language in the spirit of Montague semantics. The developed framework satisfies the principle of compositionality in a simple and elegant way, by being as parsimonious as possible: completely new formalisms or extensions of existing formalisms with even more complex constructions to fit particular linguistic phenomena have been avoided; instead, the framework handles these linguistic phenomena using only basic and well-established formalisms, such as simply-typed lambda calculus and classical logic. Dynamics is achieved by employing a continuation-passing technique and an exception raising and handling mechanism. The context is explicitly represented by a term, and, therefore, can be easily accessed and manipulated. The framework successfully handles cross-sentential anaphora and presuppositions triggered by referring expressions and has potential to be extended for dealing with more complex dynamic phenomena, such as presuppositions triggered by factive verbs and conversational implicatures.

The aim of the present thesis is to analyze the Norwegian existential construction (presenteringskonstruksjonen) with regard to syntax, static semantics, dynamic semantics, and functional sentence perspective (FSP). The thesis first introduces the firbasian FSP theory in general, demonstrating the concepts on Norwegian examples. Then the theories most relevant for the study of the existential construction are summarized. The analysis is carried out on a sample of 1000 instances (500 taken from fiction and 500 excerpted from academic prose), and focuses mainly on the notional subject, the verb, and a possible adverbial. The syntactic analysis includes the position and the structure of the notional subject and adverbials. In addition, the lexical semantics of the head words and static semantics of adverbials were observed. The FSP analysis focused on the FSP functions of the individual clause elements and the FSP patterns the existential construction may realize. In addition, the dynamic semantic roles were studied in relation to the static semantic roles. The aim of the analyses is to find out in what circumstances the existential construction may realize the presentation scale or the quality scale, and what functions the construction may perform. The thesis observes the application of FSP on real...

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