Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1979. / Bibliography: leaves [207]-211. / Microfiche. / vii, 211 leaves 29 cm

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2009. / Title from file title page. Andrea Scarantino, committee chair; George Graham, Eddy Nahmias, committee members. Description based on contents viewed Sept. 14, 2009. Includes bibliographical references (p. 51-54).

Habilitationsschrift--Göttingen. / Bibliography: p. [329]-333.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1964. / Typescript. Vita. Abstracted in Dissertation abstracts, vol. 25 (1964) no. 6, p. 3616. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 1985. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2005. / Vita. Thesis advisor: Jaegwon Kim. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 160-167). Also available online.

David Lewis articulated minimal constraints on a formal theory of natural language semantics that have been widely adopted by subsequent theorists: compositionality and sentence truth in a given context. In the process, Lewis distinguished between the compositional semantic value of an expression and its propositional content relative to a context. This dissertation consists of a series of essays in which I address several questions that arise from this distinction, including how we should understand semantic values, how we should understand propositional content, and how we should understand the relation between them. Related to this, I explore and address a number of interesting and unresolved methodological issues that arise in relation to context-sensitivity, and provide an account of the role of speaker intentions in a formal theory of natural language semantics. Additionally, I provide a detailed analysis of the role of context in a theory of natural language semantics and its connection to various aspects of language use and communication. I also motivate coherence with syntactic structure (in the tradition of generative grammar) as an additional constraint on a formal theory of natural language semantics and assess its import for how we theorize about tense and modality and issues related to the syntax-semantics interface, including covert structure and logical form. In broad strokes, this dissertation addresses issues concerning the aims, scope and criteria of a theory of natural language semantics. I approach these issues from the perspective of generative grammar, a theoretical framework that aims to characterize our understanding of natural language independent of its use. These essays help to clarify what should be expected of a formal theory of natural language semantics and its contribution to theories of speech acts and communication.

A generalized inclusion (g.i.) frame consists of a set of points (or "worlds") W and an assignment of a binary relation Rw on W to each point w in W. generalized inclusion frames whose Rw are partial orders are called comparison frames. Conditional logics of various comparative notions, for example, Lewis's V-logic of comparative possibility and utilitarian accounts of conditional obligation, model the dyadic modal operator > on comparison frames according to (what amounts to) the following truth condition: oc>13"holds at w" if every point in the truth set of a bears Rw to some point where holds. In this essay I provide a relational frame theory which embraces both accessibility semantics and g.i. semantics as special cases. This goal is achieved via a philosophically significant generalization of universal strict implication which does not assume accessibility as a primitive. Within this very general setting, I provide the first axiomatization of the dyadic modal logic corresponding to the class of all g.i. frames. Various correspondences between dyadic logics and first order definable subclasses of the class of g.i. frames are established. Finally, some general model constructions are developed which allow uniform completeness proofs for important sublogics of Lewis' V. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate

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