Insituation theory,situation semantics (pioneered byJon Barwise andJohn Perry in the early 1980s)[1] attempts to provide a solid theoretical foundation for reasoning about common-sense and real world situations, typically in the context oftheoretical linguistics,theoretical philosophy, or appliednatural language processing,
Situations, unlike worlds, are not complete in the sense that every proposition or its negation holds in a world. According toSituations and Attitudes, meaning is a relation between a discourse situation, a connective situation and a described situation. The original theory ofSituations and Attitudes soon ran into foundational difficulties. A reformulation based onPeter Aczel'snon-well-founded set theory[2] was proposed by Barwise before this approach to the subject petered out in the early 1990s.
Situation semantics is the first semantic theory that was used inhead-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG).[3]
Barwise and Perry's system was a top-down approach which foundered on practical issues which were early identified byAngelika Kratzer and others. She subsequently developed a considerable body of theory bottom-up by addressing a variety of issues in the areas ofcontext dependency in discourse and thesyntax–semantics interface.[4] Because of its practical nature and ongoing development this body of work "with possible situations as parts ofpossible worlds, now has much more influence than Barwise and Perry’s ideas".[5]
