1.2 First-Order Logic: Basic Concepts

In order to talk about meanings, we need a way for representing them. In this chapter, we're going to use the language of first-order logic for this purpose. So, when we say that we construct a meaning representation for some sentence, that means that we construct a formula of first-order logic that we take to represent this meaning.

You may say: ``What's the point in that? You're not giving the meaning of that sentence, you're just translating it to some artificial language that nobody uses.''

Is the situation really like that? No! Using first-order logic as a meaning-representation language has many advantages. Here are two of them:

We assume that you've already heard about first order logic. In the following we'll only shortly review its syntax and postpone the discussion of semantic concepts like truth or models for formulas to Section 5.1. In the rest of this chapter it's enough to have some intuition about what the right first order formula is for a given sentence. So as regards semantics, all we will do is sometimes give rough natural language equivalents to first-order formulas and their building blocks, to help you get this intuition.



Aljoscha Burchardt, Alexander Koller and Stephan Walter
Version 1.2.5 (20030212)