Indefinites as Epsilon Terms: A Labelled Deduction Account

This paper gives an account of indefinites as epsilon terms within a model of utterance processing as a task of labelled deduction, in which partially specified inputs are progressively resolved during the interpretation process. The formal tools used are labelled deduction (Gabbay), the epsilon calculus (Meyer-Viol 1995), and a tree-logic (LOFT - Blackburn & Meyer-Viol 1994) which characterises the structure as it is incrementally built. The system has been partly implemented in SWI-Prolog as part of a longer-term project and the model is a transition system which defines the steps which license movement from state to state.Article