Hans Kamp

Hans Kamp
Born	September 5, 1940 Den Burg, Texel, North Holland
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic philosophy
Main interests	Philosophy of Language, Semantics
Notable ideas	Discourse Representation Theory

Johan Anthony Willem "Hans" Kamp (born 1940) is a Dutch philosopher and linguist, responsible for introducing Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) in 1981.

Kamp received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UCLA in 1968, and has taught at Cornell University, University of London, University of Texas, Austin, and University of Stuttgart. His dissertation, Tense Logic and the Theory of Linear Order (1968) was devoted to functional completeness in tense logic, the main result being that all temporal operators are definable in terms of "since" and "until" - provided that the underlying temporal structure is a continuous linear ordering. Kamp's 1971 paper on "now" (Theoria) was the first employment of double-indexing in model theoretic semantics. His doctoral committee included Richard Montague as chairman, Chen Chung Chang, Alonzo Church, David Kaplan, Yiannis N. Moschovakis, and Jordan Howard Sobel.

Kamp became a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997. Kamp was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in 1996 and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2015.

See also

• Anaphora (linguistics)
• Donkey pronoun
• Donkey sentence
• Irene Heim
• Lambda calculus
• Montague grammar
• Quantification (linguistics)
• Two-dimensional semantics

References

• CV and mini-biography hosted by University of Stuttgart
• Faculty site at The University of Texas at Austin
• Kamp, Hans. 'A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation'. In J. Groenendijk and others (eds.). Formal Methods in the Study of Language. Amsterdam: Mathematics Center, 1981.
• Kamp, Hans and Uwe Reyle. `From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory'. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.