Dr Chris Fox

• Currently an assoc­iate mem­ber of The Centre for Ling­uistic Theory and Studies in Proba­bility (CLASP), Univer­sity of Gothen­burg (Sweden).
• Research focus, over the past 30 years: the seman­tic analy­sis of lang­uage, and relat­ed metho­do­logic­al quest­ions.
• Prior to CLASP: Reader at the Univer­sity of Essex; academic faculty at Goldsmiths College, Univer­sity of London; and at King’s College London; research fellow at the Comp­uta­tional Linguist­ics Insti­tute in Saar­brücken.

• Currently work­ing on vari­ous music proj­ects per­form­ing, arr­ang­ing, re­cord­ing, and pro­duc­tion).
• Collab­orations include: Line Break, (previously The Emerg­ency Room), the Good In­ten­sions, Drumzkool, and others.
• Instru­ments include: electric bass, guitar, piano, fiddle, and percus­sion.

• Research located in the inter­sec­tion of ling­uist­ics, comp­uter science, and phil­oso­phy, with a parti­cular focus (over 30 years) on the formal inter­pre­ta­tion of lang­uage, and found­a­tional/methodo­logical issues in seman­tic analy­sis.
• Topics contributed to include: 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.

• Previous work includes program analysis (parti­cu­larly in human compre­hension of computer programs), and on process model­ling.
• More recent concerned with the uses and abuses of tech­nology in the context of human and humani­tarian rights.

• Key pub­lica­tions include two mono­graphs, and two co-edited hand­books, along with around 100 arti­cles and papers.
• Major role in securing grant income of £15M+.

• Topics taught include: natural language semant­ics; logic; formal meth­ods; arti­ficial intel­ligence; discrete mathe­matics; program seman­tics; algor­ithms; data-­struct­ures; automata theory; embed­ded systems; lang­uages and compil­ers; the rela­tional model; and tech­nical stage craft, as well as super­vis­ion of group projects, indi­vidual disser­ta­tions, and post­grad­uate re­search stud­ents.

• Supervised around 10 students to completion of PhDs, and dozens of masters-level students.
• Assum­ing suitable arrange­ments can be made, [co]super­vision may be available at PhD and MPhil level in natural lang­uage seman­tics, comp­uta­tional ling­uist­ics, program analy­sis (applied and theore­tical) and relat­ed areas.

• 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!

1. The Ont­ology of Lang­uage. Chris Fox. CSLI. 2000. (Distri­buted by Chicago Univer­sity Press.)
2. Founda­tions of Int­ens­ion­al Seman­tics. Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin. Black­well. 2005.
3. Hand­book of Nat­ural Lang­uage Pro­cess­ing and Comp­u­ta­tional Ling­uist­ics. Alex Clark, Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin (eds). Wiley-Black­well. 2010.
4. 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 acad­emic publ­ica­tions are avail­able on a separate search­able pub­lica­tions page, which includes ab­stracts, BibT_EX entries, and links to papers.)

1. “Philosophy of Language, Ontology and Logic”. Chris Fox The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press. 2021. pp107–123.
2. “‘Ought Implies Can’ and the Law”. Chris Fox and Guglielmo Feis. Inquiry. Volume 61. Number 4. 2018. pp370–393.
3. “Impera­tives”. Chris Fox. Hand­book of Contemp­or­ary Seman­tic Theory (2^nd ed). Wiley-Black­well. 2015.
4. “The Mean­ing of Formal Semantics”. In Seman­tics and Beyond. Philoso­phical and Linguis­tic Invest­iga­tions. De Gruyter. 2014. pp85–108.
5. “Type-Theore­tic Logic with an Opera­tional Account of Intension­ality”. Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin. Synthese. January 2014. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-013-0390-1.
6. “Impera­tives: a Judge­men­tal Analysis”. Studia Logica. Volume 100. Issue 4. 2012. pp879–905. DOI: 10.1007/s11225-012-9424-9
7. “In Defense of Axiom­atic Seman­tics”. Chris Fox and Raymond Turner. In Philo­sophical and Formal Approaches to Linguis­tic Analy­sis. Ontos Verlag. 2012. pp145–160.
8. “Obliga­tions and Permis­sions”. Language and Linguis­tics Compass. Volume 6. Issue 9. 2012. Wiley-Black­well. pp593–610. DOI: 10.1002/lnc3.352
9. “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.
10. “The Good Samaritan and the Hygienic Cook”. In Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, Volume I: The formal turn. Ontos Verlag. 2010. pp103–118.
11. “Computa­tional Semantics”. In Handbook of Natural Language Process­ing and Computa­tional Linguis­tics. Edited by Alex Clark, Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin. Wiley-Black­well. 2010.
12. “Obliga­tions, Permis­sions and Trans­gres­sions: an altern­at­ive approach to deontic reason­ing”. Pro­ceed­ings of the Tenth Sympo­s­ium on Logic and Lang­uage. 2009. pp81–88.
13. “Under­speci­fied Inter­preta­tions in a Curry-Typed Repre­senta­tion Language”. Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin. Journal of Logic and Comp­uta­tion 15(2). 2005. pp131–143.
14. “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.
15. “Plurals and Mass Terms in Property Theory”. In Plural­ity and Quant­ifica­tion. Edited by F. Hamm and E. Hinrichs. Kluwer. 1998. pp113–175.
16. “Exist­ence Pre­sup­posi­tions and Categ­ory Mistakes”. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 42. 1994. pp325–339.
17. “Individ­uals and Their Guises: a Property-theoretic Analy­sis”. Pro­ceed­ings of the Ninth Amster­dam Col­loquium II. 1993. pp301–312.