An Annotational Approach to Compositional Semantics

In this paper1 I will discuss a framework for semantics which allows us to record truth-conditional and compositional analyses as dependency-style corpus annotations in a direct and fine-grained fashion. This method eliminates the need for a semantic representation formalism by decomposing semantic information into simple statements about (word or morpheme) tokens. A collection of such data would form a new kind of linguistic treebank. The main purpose of this article is to show that the present approach makes it possible to combine formal semantics and corpus-oriented study of language use in new and interesting ways. The methodology of this framework, which I call Token Dependency Semantics (TDS, Dahllöf [4]), is in several respects different from the common one(s) in traditional formal semantics. TDS nevertheless delivers a fairly conventional (but ontologically restrained) analysis of truth-conditional meaning. Currently, there is a detailed TDS account for a sample fragment of English. A system based on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) implements the description of this fragment. The HPSG system, which runs on a computer (Dahllöf [5]), shows that it is possible to apply the TDS semantics according to a conventional method in computational semantics, viz. integrated as a component of a grammar. The TDS idea is however independent from HPSG and in important respects different from all other HPSG-based proposals on semantics. The plan of the paper is as follows: Section 2 explains the basic ideas behind TDS and their background. In section 3, I take a more general look at the metho-