Michael Kohlhase, Susanna Kuschert

• The goal of this paper is to lay a logical foundation for discourse theories by providing analgebraic foundation of compositional formalisms for discourse semantics as an analogon tothe simply typed (lambda)-calculus. Just as that can be specialized to type theory by simply providinga special type for truth values and postulating the quantifiers and connectives as constantswith fixed semantics, the proposed dynamic (lambda)-calculus DLC can be specialized to (lambda)-DRT byessentially the same measures, yielding a much more principled and modular treatment of(lambda)-DRT than before; DLC is also expected to eventually provide a conceptually simple basisfor studying higher-order unification for compositional discourse theories.Over the past few years, there have been a series of attempts [Zee89, GS90, EK95, Mus96,KKP96, Kus96] to combine the Montagovian type theoretic framework [Mon74] with dynamicapproaches, such as DRT [Kam81]. The motivation for these developments is to obtain a generallogical framework for discourse semantics that combines compositionality and dynamic binding.Let us look at an example of compositional semantics construction in (lambda)-DRT which is one ofthe above formalisms [KKP96, Kus96]. By the use of fi-reduction we arrive at a first-order DRTrepresentation of the sentence A i man sleeps. (i denoting an index for anaphoric binding.)