Hans Kamp

Hans Kamp (born September 5, 1938) is a German philosopher and linguist known for his significant contributions to the fields of semantics and pragmatics, particularly in the development of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT).

Kamp received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1968. He has held positions at various universities, including Bedford College, London, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Stuttgart.

Kamp's most influential work is the development of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), first outlined in his seminal 1981 paper, "A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation." DRT is a framework for analyzing the meaning of discourse that emphasizes the dynamic and context-dependent nature of interpretation. Unlike traditional truth-conditional semantics, DRT focuses on how the interpretation of a sentence updates the context for the interpretation of subsequent sentences. Key concepts in DRT include discourse referents, which represent entities introduced into the discourse, and discourse representation structures (DRSs), which are formal representations of the meaning of a discourse segment. DRT has been influential in understanding phenomena such as anaphora, presupposition, and temporal reference.

Beyond DRT, Kamp has also made important contributions to the study of tense, aspect, and narrative. His work has had a lasting impact on the fields of formal semantics, computational linguistics, and artificial intelligence.