Dr Chris Fox

Previously, I was a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, Univer­sity of London, and at King’s College London, and also a research fellow at the Comp­uta­tional Linguist­ics Insti­tute in Saar­brücken.

My research is located in the inter­sec­tion of ling­uist­ics, comp­uter science, and phil­oso­phy. My main inter­est is in the formal inter­pre­ta­tion of lang­uage, and found­a­tional issues in seman­tics. My recent work has focused on founda­tional issues in the inter­preta­tion of imper­a­tive and deon­tic utter­ances. I am also expl­or­ing methodo­logical and onto­logical issues in formal seman­tic analy­sis.

My pub­lica­tions include two mono­graphs: The Ontol­ogy of Lang­uage (CSLI, 2000) and Founda­tions of Inten­sional Semant­ics (Blackwell, 2005), along with numer­ous other arti­cles. These works explore axiom­atic and proof-theor­etic accounts of mean­ing. I have co-edited the Hand­book of Natural Lang­uage Pro­cess­ing and Comp­uta­tional Ling­uist­ics (Wiley-Black­well, 2010) and the sec­ond edition of the Hand­book of Contemp­orary Semantic Theory (Wiley-Black­well, 2015).

The Ont­ology of Lang­uage. Chris Fox. CSLI. 2000. (Distri­buted by Chicago Univer­sity Press.)

Founda­tions of Int­ens­ion­al Seman­tics. Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin. Black­well. 2005.

Hand­book of Nat­ural Lang­uage Pro­cess­ing and Comp­u­ta­tional Ling­uist­ics. Alex Clark, Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin (eds). Wiley-Black­well. 2010.

Hand­book of Cont­emp­orary Sem­an­tic Theory (second edi­tion). Shalom Lappin and Chris Fox (eds). Wiley-Black­well. 2015.

(Note: This is a summary of selected publications. Details of most of my acad­emic publ­ica­tions are avail­able on a separate search­able pub­lica­tions page, which includes ab­stracts, BibT_EX entries, and links to papers.)

1. “‘Ought Implies Can’ and the Law”. Chris Fox and Guglielmo Feis. Inquiry. Volume 61. Number 4. 2018. pp370–393.
2. “Impera­tives”. Chris Fox. Hand­book of Contemp­or­ary Seman­tic Theory (2^nd ed). Wiley-Black­well. 2015.
3. “The Mean­ing of Formal Semantics”. In Seman­tics and Beyond. Philoso­phical and Linguis­tic Invest­iga­tions. De Gruyter. 2014. pp85–108.
4. “Type-Theore­tic Logic with an Opera­tional Account of Intension­ality”. Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin. Synthese. January 2014. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-013-0390-1.
5. “Impera­tives: a Judge­men­tal Analysis”. Studia Logica. Volume 100. Issue 4. 2012. pp879–905. DOI: 10.1007/s11225-012-9424-9
6. “In Defense of Axiom­atic Seman­tics”. Chris Fox and Raymond Turner. In Philo­sophical and Formal Approaches to Linguis­tic Analy­sis. Ontos Verlag. 2012. pp145–160.
7. “Obliga­tions and Permis­sions”. Language and Linguis­tics Compass. Volume 6. Issue 9. 2012. Wiley-Black­well. pp593–610. DOI: 10.1002/lnc3.352
8. “Expres­sive­ness and Complexity in Under­specif­ied Seman­tics”. Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin. Linguistic Analy­sis. Volume 36. Number 1–4. pp385–417. 2010. Fest­schrift for Jacob Lambek.
9. “The Good Samaritan and the Hygienic Cook”. In Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, Volume I: The formal turn. Ontos Verlag. 2010. pp103–118.
10. “Computa­tional Semantics”. In Handbook of Natural Language Process­ing and Computa­tional Linguis­tics. Edited by Alex Clark, Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin. Wiley-Black­well. 2010.
11. “Obliga­tions, Permis­sions and Trans­gres­sions: an altern­at­ive approach to deontic reason­ing”. Pro­ceed­ings of the Tenth Sympo­s­ium on Logic and Lang­uage. 2009. pp81–88.
12. “Under­speci­fied Inter­preta­tions in a Curry-Typed Repre­senta­tion Language”. Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin. Journal of Logic and Comp­uta­tion 15(2). 2005. pp131–143.
13. “An Expres­sive First-Order Logic with Flex­ible Typ­ing for Natural Language Seman­tics”. Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin. Logic Journal of the Inter­est Group in Pure and Applied Logics 12. 2004. pp135–168.
14. “Plurals and Mass Terms in Property Theory”. In Plural­ity and Quant­ifica­tion. Edited by F. Hamm and E. Hinrichs. Kluwer. 1998. pp113–175.
15. “Exist­ence Pre­sup­posi­tions and Categ­ory Mistakes”. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 42. 1994. pp325–339.
16. “Individ­uals and Their Guises: a Property-theoretic Analy­sis”. Pro­ceed­ings of the Ninth Amster­dam Col­loquium II. 1993. pp301–312.

This is my primary research interest. My work on formal seman­tics is focused on “non-Kripkean” proof-theoretic/​axiomatic analy­sis. Rather than view formal seman­tics as the activity of reduc­ing pheno­mena to set-theoretic, possible-worlds models, the aim is to formalise the basic onto­logical notions and their struct­ural behav­iours. This is motiv­ated by a methodo­logical view that formalism should reflect our intui­tions about onto­logical categories. Set theory is demon­strably insensi­tive to such notions ─ requir­ing an accompany­ing narra­tive to provide the intended inter­preta­tion ─ and is in that sense is not faith­ful to the terms in which we describe our seman­tic theories (follow­ing Feferman and Benacerraf).

Recently I have been work­ing on deontic reason­ing ─ reason­ing with obliga­tions and permis­sions ─ and on impera­tives and ques­tions. Currently I am explor­ing logical issues relat­ing to mereo­logical univers­al­ism and nihilism. This is concerned with the ques­tions of whether we compose natural objects out of arbitrary composi­tions of other objects (univers­al­ism), whether there is anyth­ing in the world that governs what objects we take there to be (which nihil­ism rejects), and whether, and in what way, logical formal­isa­tion can help us to reflect on these issues (as in Lewis’ and Sider’s work on uni­vers­al­ism). The focus of the work is trying to see what connex­ions there may be, if any, between such meta­physic­al questions and the prag­matic analy­sis of lang­uage. This work is revisit­ing some issues and argu­ments that were discus­sed in my thesis on Plurals and Mass Terms in Property Theory, and my mono­graph on The Ontology of Language.

Topics on which I have made contribu­tions

• Fine-grained intension­ality
• Impera­tives
• Deontic reason­ing
• Ques­tions and answers
• Methodo­logical issues
• Under­specifica­tion
• Anaphora and ellipsis
• Property Theory
• Type theory, includ­ing poly­morphic and dependent types
• Weak first-order theories
• Plurals and mass terms

I am a member of the editorial board for Seman­tics and Prag­matics, a member of the EPSRC College, and former member of the editorial board for Linguis­tics and Philo­sophy. I am a found­ing member of the inter­disciplin­ary Language and Computa­tion Group at Essex (LAC) which holds regular workshops. (Details are avail­able from the Language and Computa­tion Wiki.) Previously, I also helped establish and run the CSEE Logic Seminar Series. (Details of the logic talks from this series may still be found on the Logic Seminar Series web­site.)

Some of this work has been support­ed at various times by the Royal Society, EPSRC/SERC and ESRC.

I am a member of the Senior Manage­ment Team, and technical workstream director on the ESRC-funded centre on Human Rights, Big Data and Technology project.

We are explor­ing: (i) the use of social media by exist­ing human rights groups and NGOs; (ii) problems in the statistical analysis of social media for identify­ing human right abuses; techniques for systematic analysis of (iii) textual social media and (iv) image data, to identify or track potential human rights abuses, and improve humanitarian responses; and (v) ethical issues associated with big data and algorithmic analysis.

The project is based in the Human Rights Centre at Essex (Principal Investigator: Lorna McGregor; Co-Lead: Maurice Sunkin).

This work is funded by the ESRC.

I have an interest in the type-theoretic analysis of soft­ware engin­eer­ing languages and nota­tions and in formal models of processes. Previously I have also worked on weak conserva­tive approaches to reason­ing with computer programs: in general, many “interest­ing” ques­tions about computer programs are unanswer­able due to various versions of the halt­ing problem; weak, conserva­tive approaches attempt to approxi­mate such problems in order to produce “good enough” answers to common ques­tions.

I produced the first fully-auto­matic condi­tioned program slicer: program slic­ing is intended to elimin­ate program state­ments that are not required for the sub­computa­tion of interest; condi­tioned program slic­ing addi­tionally elimin­ates code that cannot be executed in a given context ─ it requires us to reason with the condi­tions under which dif­fer­ent program paths can be exec­uted.

Areas in which I have made contr­ibu­tions include: (i) Trans­lat­ing between formal process repre­senta­tion lang­uages and business models; (ii) Weak con­serva-tive reason­ing with process models; (iii) Trans­lat­ing control­led descrip­tions of proces­ses into formal models; (iv) Distri­buted work­flow manage­ment; (v) Variable depend­ence analy­sis; (vi) Program trans­forma­tion to aid test­ing; (vii) Condi­tioned program slic­ing; (viii) Slic­ing and condi­tion­ing of state-charts. (The last of these is inter­est­ing in that gener­ally state-chart proces­ses do not terminate; thought has to be given to using general­ised notions of reacha­bil­ity in place of term­ina­tion.)

Some of the work on process model­l­ing has been funded by the EU. Some of the research on program analysis has been supported by Daimler­Chrysler and the EPSRC.

Topics I have taught include:

• natural language semant­ics;
• logic;
• formal methods;
• arti­ficial intel­ligence;
• discrete mathe­matics;
• program seman­tics;
• algor­ithms; data-structures;
• automata theory;
• embed­ded systems;
• lang­uages and compil­ers; and
• the rela­tional model,

as well as super­vis­ing group projects, indi­vidual disser­ta­tions, and post­grad­uate research students.

I am happy to super­vise PhD and MPhil research in natural lang­uage seman­tics, comp­uta­tional ling­uist­ics, program analy­sis (applied and theore­tical) and relat­ed areas. Poss­ible topics include:

• Combin­ing type-logical grammar with intensional seman­tics
• Model­l­ing ques­tions and answers without poss­ible worlds
• Imple­ment­ing a type-theor­etic analy­sis of anaph­ora and ellip­sis
• Type-theor­etic analy­sis of impera­tive prog­ramm­ing lang­uages
• Type-theor­etic analy­sis of architec­tural lang­uages

Contact me if you wish to discuss these or any other research topics. Further details on the appli­ca­tion proced­ure for research degrees are given on the depart­men­tal web­site. There is also informa­tion about fees, scholar­ships, and alumni dis­counts on the univer­sity’s web pages.

• Member of the Senior Management Team for the ESRC-funded Human Rights and Big Data Technology project (HRBDT).
• Member of the editorial board of Semantics and Pragmatics.

• President of Essex UCU
• Head of the Human Language Technology group
• Member of the Research Advisory Group
• Postgraduate Director
• Member of the editorial board of Linguistics and Philosophy.
• Chair of Postgraduate Curriculum Development
• Chair of Linguistics’ Postgraduate Examination Board
• … and many more!