Download or read book Interrogative Investigations written by Jonathan Ginzburg and published by Stanford Univ Center for the Study. This book was released on 2000 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interrogative constructions are the linguistic forms by which questions are expressed. Their analysis is of great interest to linguists, as well as to computer scientists, human-computer interface designers, and philosophers. Interrogative constructions have played a central role in the development of modern syntactic theory. Nonetheless, to date most syntactic work has taken place quite separately from formal semantic and pragmatic work on interrogatives. Although there has by now been a significant amount of work on interrogatives across a variety of languages, there exist few syntactic and semantic treatments that provide a comprehensive account of a wide range of interrogative constructions and uses in a single language. This book closes the gap in research on this subject. By developing the frameworks of Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Situation Semantics, the authors provide an account that rigorously integrates syntactic, semantic, and contextual dimensions of interrogatives. The challenge of providing exhaustive coverage of the interrogative constructions of English, including various constructions that occur solely in dialogue interaction, leads to new insights about a variety of contentious theoretical issues. These include matters of semantic ontology, the quantificational status of wh-phrases, the semantic effect of wh-fronting, the status of constructions in grammatical theory, the integration of illocutionary information in the grammar, and the nature of ellipsis resolution in dialogue. The account is stated with sufficient rigor to enable fairly direct computational implementation.

Download or read book Theory of Questions written by Anna Brożek and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2015-06-29 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preliminary material /Editors Theory of Questions -- INTRODUCTION /Editors Theory of Questions -- ONTOLOGICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL PRELIMINARIES /Editors Theory of Questions -- SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS /Editors Theory of Questions -- SENTENCES AND PICTURES OF SITUATIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- SEMANTICO-CATEGORIAL ANALYSIS /Editors Theory of Questions -- THE COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTION OF QUESTIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- THE STRUCTURE OF NATURAL-LANGUAGE QUESTIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- SEMANTICO-CATEGORIAL DESCRIPTION OF QUESTIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- COGNITIVE CONTENT AND COGNITIVE CONTEXT OF QUESTIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- ANSWERS /Editors Theory of Questions -- EMBEDDED QUESTIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- THE ANALYSIS OF EROTETIC SITUATION /Editors Theory of Questions -- QUESTIONS IN SCIENCE /Editors Theory of Questions -- EROTETIC REASONING /Editors Theory of Questions -- PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF QUESTIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- QUESTIONS IN SURVEYS /Editors Theory of Questions -- QUESTIONS IN DIDACTIC TESTS /Editors Theory of Questions -- QUESTIONS IN LEGAL PROCEEDINGS /Editors Theory of Questions -- PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- CONCLUSIONS /Editors Theory of Questions -- FROM THE HISTORY OF EROTETICS IN POLAND IN THE 20TH CENTURY144 /Editors Theory of Questions -- REFERENCES /Editors Theory of Questions -- NAME INDEX /Editors Theory of Questions.

Download or read book Sense and Sensitivity written by David I. Beaver and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-01-30 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sense and Sensitivity advances a novel research proposal in the nascent field of formal pragmatics, exploring in detail the semantics and pragmatics of focus in natural language discourse. The authors develop a new account of focus sensitivity, and show that what has hitherto been regarded as a uniform phenomenon in fact results from three different mechanisms. The book Makes a major contribution to ongoing research in the area of focus sensitivity – a field exploring interactions between sound and meaning, specifically the dependency some words have on the effects of focus, such as "she only LIKES me" (i.e. nothing deeper) compared to "she only likes ME" (i.e. nobody else) Discusses the features of the QFC theory (Quasi association, Free association, and Conventional association), a new account of focus implying a tripartite typology of focus-sensitive expressions Presents novel cross-linguistic data on focus and focus sensitivity that will be relevant across a range of linguistic sub-fields: semantics and pragmatics, syntax, and intonational phonology Concludes with a case study of exclusives (like “only”), arguing that the entire existing literature has missed crucial generalizations, and for the first time explaining the focus sensitivity of these expressions in terms of their meaning and discourse function

Download or read book The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory written by Shalom Lappin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 771 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory presents a comprehensive introduction to cutting-edge research in contemporary theoretical and computational semantics. Features completely new content from the first edition of The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory Features contributions by leading semanticists, who introduce core areas of contemporary semantic research, while discussing current research Suitable for graduate students for courses in semantic theory and for advanced researchers as an introduction to current theoretical work

Download or read book The Syntax of Nonsententials written by Ljiljana Progovac and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings the data that many in formal linguistics have dismissed as peripheral straight into the core of syntactic theory. By bringing together experts from syntax, semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, language acquisition, aphasia, and pidgin and creole studies, the volume makes a multidisciplinary case for the existence of nonsententials, which are analyzed in various chapters as root phrases and small clauses (Me; Me First!; Him worry?!; Class in session), and whose distinguishing property is the absence of Tense, and, with it, any syntactic phenomena that rely on Tense, including structural Nominative Case. Arguably, the lack of Tense specification is also responsible for the dearth of indicative interpretations among nonsententials, as well as for their heavy reliance on pragmatic context. So pervasive is nonsentential speech across all groups, including normal adult speech, that a case can be made that continuity of grammar lies in nonsentential, rather than sentential speech.

Download or read book Balkan Syntax and Universal Principles of Grammar written by Iliyana Krapova and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-11-19 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates morpho-syntactic convergences that characterize the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund: Balkan Slavic, Greek, Romanian, Albanian, Balkan Romani. Apart from new data, the volume features contributions within different theoretical frameworks (contact linguistics, functional linguistics, typology, areal linguistics, and generative grammar).

Download or read book Computing Meaning written by Harry Bunt and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-07-03 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an in-depth view of the current issues, problems and approaches in the computation of meaning as expressed in language. Aimed at linguists, computer scientists, and logicians with an interest in the computation of meaning, this book focuses on two main topics in recent research in computational semantics. The first topic is the definition and use of underspecified semantic representations, i.e. formal structures that represent part of the meaning of a linguistic object while leaving other parts unspecified. The second topic discussed is semantic annotation. Annotated corpora have become an indispensable resource both for linguists and for developers of language and speech technology, especially when used in combination with machine learning methods. The annotation in corpora has only marginally addressed semantic information, however, since semantic annotation methodologies are still in their infancy. This book discusses the development and application of such methodologies.

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 Information Structure written by Malte Zimmermann and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-10-29 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book leading scholars provide state-of-the-art overviews of approaches to the formal expression of information structure in natural language and its interaction with general principles of human cognition and communication. They present critical accounts of current understanding of how aspects of grammar, such as prosody, syntax, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics, interact in the packing and unpacking of information in communication. They also look at the psycholinguistics behind the production and perception of information-structural categories. The book reflects the advances in recent research on all central aspects of the subject, including concepts of focus versus background, topic versus comment, and given versus new, and the kinds of inferences required to make sense of different combinations of words, syntax, intonation, and context. The chapters include typological and diachronic perspectives on information structure. Taken as a whole the book demonstrates the productive value of combining theoretical and experimental approaches.

Download or read book New Work on Speech Acts written by Daniel Fogal and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-12 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speech-act theory is the interdisciplinary study of the wide range of things we do with words. Originally stemming from the influential work of twentieth-century philosophers, including J. L. Austin and Paul Grice, recent years have seen a resurgence of work on the topic. On one hand, a new generation of linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists have made impressive progress toward reverse-engineering the psychological underpinnings that allow us to do so much with language. Meanwhile, speech-act theory has been used to enrich our understanding of pressing social issues that include freedom of speech, racial slurs, and the duplicity of political discourse. This volume presents fourteen new essays by many of the philosophers and linguists who have led this resurgence. The topics span a methodological range that includes formal semantics and pragmatics, foundational issues about the nature of linguistic representation, and work on a variety of forms of indirect and/or uncooperative speech that occupies the intersection of the philosophy of language, ethics, and political philosophy. Several of the contributions demonstrate the benefits of integrating the methodologies and perspectives of these literatures. The essays are framed by a comprehensive introductory survey of the contemporary literature written by the editors.

Download or read book Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar written by Stefan Müller and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 1632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism).

Download or read book Self Reflection for the Opaque Mind written by T. Parent and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume attempts to solve a grave problem about critical self-reflection. The worry is that we critical thinkers are all in "epistemic bad faith" in light of what psychology tells us. After all, the research shows not merely that we are bad at detecting "ego-threatening" thoughts à la Freud. It also indicates that we are ignorant of even our ordinary thoughts—e.g., reasons for our moral judgments of others (Haidt 2001), and even mundane reasons for buying one pair of stockings over another! (Nisbett & Wilson 1977) However, reflection on one’s thoughts requires knowing what those thoughts are in the first place. So if ignorance is the norm, why attempt self-reflection? The activity would just display naivety about psychology. Yet while respecting all the data, this book argues that, remarkably, we are sometimes infallible in our self-discerning judgments. Even so, infallibility does not imply indubitability, and there is no Cartesian ambition to provide a "foundation" for empirical knowledge. The point is rather to explain how self-reflection as a rational activity is possible.

Download or read book Propositional Content written by Peter Hanks and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-06-04 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Hanks defends a new theory about the nature of propositional content. According to this theory, the basic bearers of representational properties are particular mental or spoken actions. Propositions are types of these actions, which we use to classify and individuate our attitudes and speech acts. Hanks abandons several key features of the traditional Fregean conception of propositional content, including the idea that propositions are the primary bearers of truth-conditions, the distinction between content and force, and the concept of entertainment. The main difficulty for this traditional conception is the problem of the unity of the proposition, the problem of explaining how propositions have truth conditions and other representational properties. The new theory developed here, in its place,explains the unity of propositions and provides new solutions to a long list of puzzles and problems in philosophy of language.

Download or read book Semantics Foundations History and Methods written by Klaus Heusinger and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Get to grips with the fundamentals of semantics research. Written by a team of world-class experts, this book introduces the subject for a broad audience of linguists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and computer scientists. It explores the core concepts of sentential semantics and includes sections on questions, imperatives, copular clauses, and existential sentences. It also features essential research on sentence types, and explains central concepts in the theory of information structure and discourse structure. Now in paperback for the first time since its original publication, the material in this modern classic is an ideal resource for anyone involved in semantics research.

Download or read book Current and New Directions in Discourse and Dialogue written by Jan C.J. van Kuppevelt and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume covers key topics in the field from a variety of leading researchers. In one volume, readers gain exposure to several perspectives in the areas of corpus annotation and analysis, dialogue system construction, theoretical perspectives on communicative intention, context-based generation, and modeling of discourse structure. Based on the 2nd SIGdial workshop on Discourse and Dialogue held in conjunction with Eurospeech 2001, it is of interest to researchers and practitioners in dialogue and discourse processing.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood written by Jan Nuyts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook offers an in depth and comprehensive state of the art survey of the linguistic domains of modality and mood. An international team of experts in the field examines the full range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the many facets of the phenomena involved. Parts 1 and 2 of the volume present the basic linguistic facts about the systems of modality and mood in the languages of the world, covering the semantics and the expression of different subtypes of modality and mood respectively. The authors also examine the interaction of modality and mood, mutually and with other semantic categories such as aspect, time, negation, and evidentiality. In Part 3, authors discuss the features of the modality and mood systems in five typologically different language groups, while chapters in Part 4 deal with wider perspectives on modality and mood: diachrony, areality, first language acquisition, and sign language. Finally, Part 5 looks at how modality and mood are handled in different theoretical approaches: formal syntax, functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics and construction grammar, and formal semantics.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Theism written by Charles Taliaferro and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are deep and pervasive disagreements today in universities and colleges, and popular culture in general, over the credibility and value of belief in God. This has given rise to an urgent need for a balanced, comprehensive, accessible resource book that can inform the public and scholarly debate over theism. While scholars with as diverse interests as Daniel Dennett, Terry Eagleton, Richard Dawkins, Jrgen Habermas, and Rowan Williams have recently contributed books to this debate, "theism" as a concept remains poorly understood and requires a more thorough and systematic analysis than it has so far received in any single volume. The Routledge Companion to Theism addresses this need by investigating theism's history as well as its relationship to inquiry in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and to its wider cultural contexts. The contents are not confined within the philosophy of religion or even within the more expansive borders of philosophy. Rather, The Routledge Companion to Theism investigates its subject through the lens of a wide variety of disciplines and explores the ramifications of theism considered as a way of life as well as an intellectual conviction. The five parts of the volume indicate its inclusive scope: I. What is Theism?; II. Theism and Inquiry; III. Theism and the Socio-Political Realm; IV. Theism and Culture; V. Theism as a Way of Life. The result is a well ordered and thorough collection that should provide a wide spectrum of readers with a better understanding of a subject that's much discussed, but frequently misunderstood. As the editors note in their Introduction, while stimulating and informing the contemporary debate, a key aim of the volume is to open new avenues of inquiry into theism and thereby to encourage further research into this vital topic. Comprised of 54 essays by leading scholars in philosophy, history, theology, religious studies, political science, education and sociology, The Routledge Companion to Theism promises to be the most useful, comprehensive resource on an emerging subject of interest for students and scholars.