Temporal Interpretation of Japanese Relative Clauses with Dependent Type Semantics

Abstract

Natural language sentences have "dynamic" aspects in that their interpretation depends on contexts (e.g., anaphora). In formal semantics, it has been suggested that dependent type theory provides a natural explanation for dynamic phenomena. Since tense also involves context dependence, such type-theoretical formal semantics is a promising approach to temporal interpretation. In this study, we present a type-theoretical analysis of the temporal relations in Japanese relative clauses. We use Dependent Type Semantics, a compositional semantics based on dependent type theory. We demonstrate that our proposed theory explains various examples by dynamically determining the temporal interpretation of relative clauses in the same way as anaphora.