11. On Kamp’s “A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation”

First published in 1981, Hans Kamp’s paper, “A theory of truth and semantic representation”, introduced Discourse Representation Theory, or DRT for short, which soon became one of the main frameworks in semantics and pragmatics, and in the meantime has been applied to an exceptionally wide range of phenomena, including anaphora, definites and proper names, quantification, tense and aspect, presupposition, implicatures, and attitude reports. DRT’s key innovations were two. First, it introduced a level of representation which was new to semantics. Kamp defined a formal language, with a model-theoretic interpretation, which served to represent the contents not only of individual sentences, but of entire discourses as well. Secondly, this formal language featured a new species of variables, called discourse referents, which were the keystone of DRT’s unified treatment of anaphoric pronouns. Discourse representations and discourse referents are the main topics of this commentary.