Metalinguistic Focus in P-HYPE
Semantics
Luke Edward Burke
Abstract P-HYPE is a hyperintensional situation semantics in which hyperinten-
sionality is modelled as a ‘side effect’, as this term has been understood in natural
language semantics [8, 42], and in functional programming [21]. In [5], we com-
bine [2]’s perspective-sensitive semantic theory with a hyperintensional situation
semantics, HYPE [28], using monads from category theory in order to ‘upgrade’ an
ordinary intensional semantics to a possible hyperintensional counterpart. In [6] we
expand our semantic theory to capture cases of intra-sentential anaphora. We here
supplement the framework with the pointed power set monad so that we can account
for certain cases of hyperintensionality involving metalinguistic focus [29] which
seem to resist treatment in P-HYPE as it stands. This gives a mini case study in
how to combine monads together in order to integrate different side effects in one
language, one of the advantages of monads as a tool in compositional semantics.
1 Introduction
Hyperintensional semantic theories, as we are understanding them in this paper, are
semantic theories that sometimes distinguish the semantic values of sentences that
express logical and mathematical truths (or falsities), where by ‘logical truths’ we
are referring to the validities of classical logic. Such sentences are often assigned
the same semantic value in semantic theories of natural language based on standard
possible world semantics [18].
L. E. Burke (B )
Department of Philosophy, The University of London, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT London,
England
University College London, London, England
Foundations of Computer Science, The University of Bamberg, An der Weberei 5 (ERBA), 96047
Bamberg, Germany
Universität Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany
e-mail: l.burke@ucl.ac.uk; luke.burke@uni-bamberg.de
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license
to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
A. Giordani and J. Malinowski (eds.), Logic in High Definition, Trends in Logic 56,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53487-5_10
203