Johan Anthony Willem Kamp

Contributor to formal semantics and philosophy of language. Contributed early foundational research to core theoretical topics including temporal reference, vagueness, modality, the semantics of modifiers and the semantics-pragmatics interface. His novel Discourse Representation Theory provided a dynamic approach to the interaction of text and context for the analysis of anaphora, word meaning, quantification, and context-dependence, crucially bringing non-truth functional aspects of meaning into a formal theory. Recent work has challenged Fregean anti-psychologism and brought formal and cognitive semantics together, with innovative semantic analyses that simultaneously yield computational applications and novel cognitive insights.