Download or read book Boolean Semantics for Natural Language written by Edward L. Keenan and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spring of 1978, one of the authors of this book was sitting in on a course in logic for linguists given by the other author. In attempting to present some of Montague's insights in an elementary way (hopefully avoid ing the notation which many find difficult at first), the authors began dis cussions aimed towards the construction of a simple model-theoretical semantic apparatus which could be applied directly to a small English-like language and used to illustrate the methods of formal logical interpretation. In these discussions two points impressed themselves on us. First, our task could be simplified by using boolean algebras and boolean homomorphisms in the models; and second, the boolean approach we were developing had much more widespread relevance to the logical structure of English than we first thought. During the summer and fall of 1978 we continued work on the system, proving the more fundamental theorems (including what we have come to call the Justification Theorem) and outlining the way in which an intensional interpretation scheme could be developed which made use of the boolean approach (which was originally strictly extensional). We presented our findings in a monograph (Keenan and Faltz, 1978) which the UCLA Linguistics Department kindly published as part of their series called Occa sional Papers in Linguistics; one of the authors also presented the system at a colloquium held at the Winter Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in December 1978.

Download or read book Flexibility Principles in Boolean Semantics written by Yoad Winter and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002-02-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of the logical flexibility principles needed for a formal semantic account of coordination, plurality, and scope in natural language. Since the early work of Montague, Boolean semantics and its subfield of generalized quantifier theory have become the model-theoretic foundation for the study of meaning in natural languages. This book uses this framework to develop a new semantic theory of central linguistic phenomena involving coordination, plurality, and scope. The proposed theory makes use of the standard Boolean interpretation of conjunction, a choice-function account of indefinites, and a novel semantics of plurals that is not based on the distributive/collective distinction. The key to unifying these mechanisms is a version of Montagovian semantics that is augmented by flexibility principles: semantic operations that have no counterpart in phonology. This is the first book to cover these areas in a way that is both linguistically comprehensive and formally explicit. On one hand, it addresses questions of primarily linguistic concern: the semantic functions of words like and and or in different languages, the interpretation of indefinites and their scope, and the semantic typology of noun phrases and predicates. On the other hand, it addresses formal questions that are motivated by the treatment of these linguistic problems: the use of Boolean algebras in linguistics, the proper formalization of choice functions within generalized quantifier theory, and the extension of this theory to the domain of plurality. While primarily intended for readers with a background in theoretical linguistics, the book will also be of interest to researchers and advanced students in logic, computational linguistics, philosophy of language, and artificial intelligence.

Download or read book Semantics Generalized quantifiers and scope written by Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2003 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Natural Language Semantics written by Brendan S. Gillon and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 731 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to natural language semantics that offers an overview of the empirical domain and an explanation of the mathematical concepts that underpin the discipline. This textbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the fundamentals of those approaches to natural language semantics that use the insights of logic. Many other texts on the subject focus on presenting a particular theory of natural language semantics. This text instead offers an overview of the empirical domain (drawn largely from standard descriptive grammars of English) as well as the mathematical tools that are applied to it. Readers are shown where the concepts of logic apply, where they fail to apply, and where they might apply, if suitably adjusted. The presentation of logic is completely self-contained, with concepts of logic used in the book presented in all the necessary detail. This includes propositional logic, first order predicate logic, generalized quantifier theory, and the Lambek and Lambda calculi. The chapters on logic are paired with chapters on English grammar. For example, the chapter on propositional logic is paired with a chapter on the grammar of coordination and subordination of English clauses; the chapter on predicate logic is paired with a chapter on the grammar of simple, independent English clauses; and so on. The book includes more than five hundred exercises, not only for the mathematical concepts introduced, but also for their application to the analysis of natural language. The latter exercises include some aimed at helping the reader to understand how to formulate and test hypotheses.

Download or read book Functional Models of Cognition written by A. Carsetti and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our ontology as well as our grammar are, as Quine affirms, ineliminable parts of our conceptual contribution to our theory of the world. It seems impossible to think of enti ties, individuals and events without specifying and constructing, in advance, a specific language that must be used in order to speak about these same entities. We really know only insofar as we regiment our system of the world in a consistent and adequate way. At the level of proper nouns and existence functions we have, for instance, a standard form of a regimented language whose complementary apparatus consists of predicates, variables, quantifiers and truth functions. If, for instance, the discoveries in the field of Quantum Mechanics should oblige us, in the future, to abandon the traditional logic of truth functions, the very notion of existence, as established until now, will be chal lenged. These considerations, as developed by Quine, introduce us to a conceptual perspective like the "internal realist" perspective advocated by Putnam whose principal aim is, for cer tain aspects, to link the philosophical approaches developed respectively by Quine and Wittgenstein. Actually, Putnam conservatively extends the approach to the problem of ref erence outlined by Quine: in his opinion, to talk of "facts" without specifying the language to be used is to talk of nothing.

Download or read book Semantik Semantics written by Arnim von Stechow and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-07-14 with total page 941 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past 20 years the investigation into meaning of natural languages has emerged into one of the most active disciplines in theoretical linguistics. The different traditions of linguistics, philosophy of language and philosophical logic converged in the paradigm of truth conditional semantics, which now plays a central role in the cognitive sciences. From empirical research in particular languages more principal questions arise of how the speaker succeeds in expressing particular types of meaning by use of formal combination of signs. The theories developed to cope with the question assume that for a hearer, the meaning of a complex expression must be "computable", and therefore, modern theoretical semantics uses formal algebraic methods to construct the meaning compositionally in view of syntactic structur. Furthermore, meaning need to be "anchored" in the experience available to hearer. In order to deal with this, theoretical semantics extensivly uses the concept of truth conditions, which roughly explain how a world must be structured in order to be matched by certain linguistic expressions. Semantic analyses are complemented by context theory and the theory of speech acts. Thus, linguistic meaning must be related to human cognitive capacities, and therefore, theoretical semantics is tightly connected with philosophical logic as well as cognitive sciences in general. The aim of this handbook is to represent the body of theoretical knowledge which has evolved in the international research of the last two decades. Some of the theories can now be termed "classical" in that they belong to the commonly accepted base of theoretical semantics. Other theories are still disputed, and there areproblems still to be solved - as normal in a more developed science. The authors, who are leading experts in the field of semantics, try to balance the accepted and the questionable results. It goes without saying that each author hold a particular position in this respect. Some articles are written in English, some in German. Since semantics is considered to be a subfield of linguistics, the articles are arranged due to linguistic points of view. In the first 5 chapters (comprising 15 articles) the common principles of semantics are presented: ontological foundations of semantics, composition of meaning, problems of use (context, speech acts, and lexical base of meaning. The next 5 chapters (comprising 25 articles) are concerned with semantic phenomena, theories and problems which are specific for a particular class of linguistic expressions. These are arranged according to parts of speech: nouns, functional categories, verbs, adjectives and so on.This division does not reflect a theoretical position by itself, however it allows one to recognize problems connected with one another. Some more general questions are discussed in more than one article, in different perspective and vicinity. The Handbook is complemented by a service article on formal methods in semantics, followed by a comprehensive bibliography including about 1700 entries, and both a subject and a name index. This handbook is indispensable for all research in linguistics and neighboring disciplines (philosophy of language, cognitive sciences). Some of the articles can serve as basic literature for classes of advanced students.

Download or read book A Reader s Guide to Classic Papers in Formal Semantics written by Louise McNally and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-08-05 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains 21 new and original contributions to the study of formal semantics, written by distinguished experts in response to landmark papers in the field. The chapters make the target articles more accessible by providing background, modernizing the notation, providing critical commentary, explaining the afterlife of the proposals, and offering a useful bibliography for further study. The chapters were commissioned by the series editors to mark the 100th volume in the book series Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy. The target articles are amongst the most widely read and cited papers up to the end of the 20th century, and cover most of the important subfields of formal semantics. The authors are all prominent researchers in the field, making this volume a valuable addition to the literature for researchers, students, and teachers of formal semantics. Chapter 19 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Download or read book Handbook of Logic and Language written by Johan F.A.K. van Benthem and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2010-12-17 with total page 1169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The logical study of language is becoming more interdisciplinary, playing a role in fields such as computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and game theory. This new edition, written by the leading experts in the field, presents an overview of the latest developments at the interface of logic and linguistics as well as a historical perspective. It is divided into three parts covering Frameworks, General Topics and Descriptive Themes. Completely revised and updated - includes over 25% new material Discusses the interface between logic and language Many of the authors are creators or active developers of the theories

Download or read book Quantifiers in Language and Logic written by Stanley Peters and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-04-27 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quantification is a topic which brings together linguistics, logic, and philosophy. Quantifiers are the essential tools with which, in language or logic, we refer to quantity of things or amount of stuff. In English they include such expressions as no, some, all, both, many. Peters and Westerstahl present the definitive interdisciplinary exploration of how they work - their syntax, semantics, and inferential role.

Download or read book Type Logical Semantics written by Bob Carpenter and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1998-07-24 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on an introductory course on natural-language semantics, this book provides an introduction to type-logical grammar and the range of linguistic phenomena that can be handled in categorial grammar. It also contains a great deal of original work on categorial grammar and its application to natural-language semantics. The author chose the type-logical categorial grammar as his grammatical basis because of its broad syntactic coverage and its strong linkage of syntax and semantics. Although its basic orientation is linguistic, the book should also be of interest to logicians and computer scientists seeking connections between logical systems and natural language. The book, which stepwise develops successively more powerful logical and grammatical systems, covers an unusually broad range of material. Topics covered include higher-order logic, applicative categorial grammar, the Lambek calculus, coordination and unbounded dependencies, quantifiers and scope, plurals, pronouns and dependency, modal logic, intensionality, and tense and aspect. The book contains more mathematical development than is usually found in texts on natural language; an appendix includes the basic mathematical concepts used throughout the book.

Download or read book Quantification in Natural Languages written by Emmon Bach and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 760 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of papers grew out of a research project on "Cross-Linguistic Quantification" originated by Emmon Bach, Angelika Kratzer and Barbara Partee in 1987 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and supported by National Science Foundation Grant BNS 871999. The publication also reflects directly or indirectly several other related activ ities. Bach, Kratzer, and Partee organized a two-evening symposium on cross-linguistic quantification at the 1988 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in New Orleans (held without financial support) in order to bring the project to the attention of the linguistic community and solicit ideas and feedback from colleagues who might share our concern for developing a broader typological basis for research in semantics and a better integration of descriptive and theoretical work in the area of quantification in particular. The same trio organized a six-week workshop and open lecture series and related one-day confer ence on the same topic at the 1989 LSA Linguistic Institute at the University of Arizona in Tucson, supported by a supplementary grant, NSF grant BNS-8811250, and Partee offered a seminar on the same topic as part of the Institute course offerings. Eloise Jelinek, who served as a consultant on the principal grant and was a participant in the LSA symposium and the Arizona workshops, joined the group of editors for this volume in 1989.

Download or read book Semantics Sentence and Information Structure written by Paul Portner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read this book to get a deeper understanding of a wide range of semantics research on complex sentences and meaning in discourse. These in-depth articles from leading names in their fields cover the core concepts of sentential semantics such as tense, modality, conditionality, propositional attitudes, scope, negation, and coordination. The highly cited material, covers questions, imperatives, copular clauses, and existential sentences. It also includes essential research on sentence types, and explains central concepts in the theory of information structure and discourse structure, such as topics, cohesion and coherence, accessibility and discourse particles.

Download or read book Categorial Grammars and Natural Language Structures written by Richard T. Oehrle and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the most part, the papers collected in this volume stern from presentations given at a conference held in Tucson over the weekend of May 31 through June 2, 1985. We wish to record our gratitude to the participants in that conference, as well as to the National Science Foundation (Grant No. BNS-8418916) and the University of Arizona SBS Research Institute for their financial support. The advice we received from Susan Steele on organizational matters proved invaluable and had many felicitous consequences for the success of the con ference. We also would like to thank the staff of the Departments of Linguistics of the University of Arizona and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for their help, as weIl as a number of individuals, including Lin Hall, Kathy Todd, and Jiazhen Hu, Sandra Fulmer, Maria Sandoval, Natsuko Tsujimura, Stuart Davis, Mark Lewis, Robin Schafer, Shi Zhang, Olivia Oehrle-Steele, and Paul Saka. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Martin Scrivener, our editor, for his patience and his encouragement. Vll INTRODUCTION The term 'categorial grammar' was introduced by Bar-Rillel (1964, page 99) as a handy way of grouping together some of his own earlier work (1953) and the work of the Polish logicians and philosophers Lesniewski (1929) and Ajdukiewicz (1935), in contrast to approaches to linguistic analysis based on phrase structure grammars.

Download or read book Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics written by Daisuke Bekki and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics written by Philippe de Groote and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-06-29 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics, LACL 2001, held in Le Croisic, France, in June 2001. The 16 revised full papers presented together with two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected for presentation. Among the topics covered are categorical grammars, dependency grammars, formal language theory, grammatical inference, hyperintensional semantics, minimalism, type-logical semantics, language learning, and natural language processing.

Download or read book Continuations and Natural Language written by Chris Barker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The continuation of an expression is a portion of its surrounding context. This book proposes and defends the continuation hypothesis: that the meaning of a natural language expression can depend on its own continuation (it can denote a function on its surrounding context).

Download or read book Concise Encyclopedia of Semantics written by Keith Allan and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 1102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concise Encyclopedia of Semantics is a comprehensive new reference work aiming to systematically describe all aspects of the study of meaning in language. It synthesizes in one volume the latest scholarly positions on the construction, interpretation, clarification, obscurity, illustration, amplification, simplification, negotiation, contradiction, contraction and paraphrasing of meaning, and the various concepts, analyses, methodologies and technologies that underpin their study. It examines not only semantics but the impact of semantic study on related fields such as morphology, syntax, and typologically oriented studies such as ‘grammatical semantics’, where semantics has made a considerable contribution to our understanding of verbal categories like tense or aspect, nominal categories like case or possession, clausal categories like causatives, comparatives, or conditionals, and discourse phenomena like reference and anaphora. COSE also examines lexical semantics and its relation to syntax, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics; and the study of how ‘logical semantics’ develops and thrives, often in interaction with computational linguistics. As a derivative volume from Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition, it comprises contributions from 150 of the foremost scholars of semantics in their various specializations and draws on 20+ years of development in the parent work in a compact and affordable format. Principally intended for tertiary level inquiry and research, this will be invaluable as a reference work for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics inquiring into the study of meaning and meaning relations within languages. As semantics is a centrally important and inherently cross-cutting area within linguistics it will therefore be relevant not just for semantics specialists, but for most linguistic audiences. The first encyclopedia ever published in this fascinating and diverse field Combines the talents of the world’s leading semantics specialists The latest trends in the field authoritatively reviewed and interpreted in context of related disciplines Drawn from the richest, most authoritative, comprehensive and internationally acclaimed reference resource in the linguistics area Compact and affordable single volume reference format