Zhaohui Luo

This book studies formal semantics in modern type theories (MTTsemantics). Compared with simple type theory, MTTs have much richer type structures and provide powerful means for adequate semantic constructions. This offers a serious alternative to the traditional settheoretical foundation for linguistic semantics and opens up a new avenue for developing formal semantics that is both model-theoretic and proof-theoretic, which was not available before the development of MTTsemantics. This book provides a reader-friendly and precise description of MTTs and offers a comprehensive introduction to MTT-semantics. It develops several case studies, such as adjectival modification and copredication, to exemplify the attractiveness of using MTTs for the study of linguistic meaning. It also examines existing proof assistant technology based on MTT-semantics for the verification of semantic constructions and reasoning in natural language. Several advanced topics are also briefly studied, including dependent event types, an application of dependent typing to event semantics.

The book develops a type theory, studies its properties, and explains its uses in applications to computer science. In particular, it shows how the study of type theory may offer a powerful and uniform language for programming, program specification and development, and logical reasoning. The type theory developed here reflects a conceptual distinction between logical propositions and computational data types. Starting from introducing the basic concepts, the author explains intuitively the meaning and use of the type-theoretic language with proof-theoretic justifications, and discusses various issues in the study of type theory. The pragmatic use of the language is illustrated by developing an approach to specification and data refinement in type theory, which supports modular development of spcdifications, programs and proofs.