Download or read book Studies in Discourse Representation Theory and the Theory of Generalized Quantifiers written by Jeroen Groenendijk and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-03-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "Studies in Discourse Representation Theory and the Theory of Generalized Quantifiers".
Download or read book From Discourse to Logic written by Hans Kamp and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specifically than that, it is about a particular way of dealing with those subjects, known as Discourse Representation Theory, or DRT. DRT is an approach towards natural language semantics which, some thirteen years ago, arose out of attempts to deal with two distinct problems. The first of those was the semantic puzzle that had been brought to contempo rary attention by Geach's notorious "donkey sentences" - sentences like If Pedro owns some donkey, he beats it, in which the anaphoric connection we perceive between the indefinite noun phrase some donkey and the pronoun it may seem to conflict with the existential meaning of the word some. The second problem had to do with tense and aspect. Some languages, for instance French and the other Romance languages, have two morphologically distinct past tenses, a simple past (the French Passe Simple) and a continuous past (the French Imparfait). To articulate precisely what the difference between these tenses is has turned out to be surprisingly difficult.
Download or read book Quantification in Natural Languages written by Emmon W. Bach and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1995-02-28 with total page 774 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This extended collection of papers is the result of putting recent ideas on quantification to work on a wide variety of languages. A central perspective of many of the papers follows the recognition of two broad types of quantificational strategies, one associated with nominal structures and determiners, the other with adverbial and other non-nominal expression (`D-quantifiers' and `A-quantifiers'). The papers demonstrate both the unity and the variety of natural language quantificational forms and meanings. Many of the papers also shed new light on questions of language typology and syntactic and morphological variation. The languages discussed include English, Dutch, Italian, American Sign Language, Hindi, and a number of languages of Australia, Greenland, and the Americas. These comparative studies provide initial data for a typology of quantificational structures in natural languages, with important implications for the study of universal grammar. The book consists of research papers aimed at linguists, philosophers, and psychologists interested in semantics and linguistic form. An introduction presents a sketch of the background of this research and some of the central issues discussed, with pointers toward the included papers.
Download or read book Ways of Scope Taking written by A. Szabolcsi and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1997-03-31 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ways of Scope Taking is concerned with syntactic, semantic and computational aspects of scope. Its starting point is the well-known but often neglected fact that different types of quantifiers interact differently with each other and other operators. The theoretical examination of significant bodies of data, both old and novel, leads to two central claims. (1) Scope is a by-product of a set of distinct Logical Form processes; each quantifier participates in those that suit its particular features. (2) Scope interaction is further constrained by the semantics of the interacting operators. The arguments are developed using Minimalist syntax, Generalized Quantify theory, Discourse Representation Theory, and algebraic semantics. The contributors (Beghelli, Ben-Shalom, Doetjes, Farkas, Gutiérrez Rexach, Honcoop, Stabler, Stowell, Szabolcsi and Zwarts) make tightly related theoretical assumptions and focus on related empirical phenomena, which include the direct and inverse scope of quantifiers, distributivity, negation, modal and intensional contexts, weak islands, event-related readings, interrogatives, wh/quantifier interactions, and Hungarian syntax. An introduction to the formal semantics background is provided. Audience: Linguists, philosophers, computational and psycholinguists; advanced undergraduates, graduate students and researchers in these fields.
Download or read book The Parameter of Aspect written by C.S. Smith and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the period I have been working on this project I have received institutional support of several kinds, for which I am most grateful. I thank the Institute for Advanced Study at Stanford University, and the Spencer Foundation, for a stimulating environment in which the basic idea of this book was developed. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen enabled me to spend several months working on the the manuscript. ANational Science Foundation grant to develop Discourse Representation theory, and a grant from The University Research Institute of the University of Texas, allowed me time to pursue this project. I also thank the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Texas for research support. I thank Helen Aristar-Dry for reading early drafts of the manuscript, Östen Dahl for penetrating remarks on a preliminary version, and my collaborator Gilbert Rappaport for relentIess comments and questions throughout. The individuals with whom I have worked on particular languages are mentioned in the relevant chapters. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the members of my graduate seminar on aspect in the spring of 1990: they raised many questions of importance which made a real difference to the working out of the theory. I have benefitted from presenting parts of this material publicly, including cOlloquia at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice University, the University of Texas, and the University of Tel Aviv.
Download or read book From Discourse to Logic written by Hans Kamp and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-09-27 with total page 717 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specifically than that, it is about a particular way of dealing with those subjects, known as Discourse Representation Theory, or DRT. DRT is an approach towards natural language semantics which, some thirteen years ago, arose out of attempts to deal with two distinct problems. The first of those was the semantic puzzle that had been brought to contempo rary attention by Geach's notorious "donkey sentences" - sentences like If Pedro owns some donkey, he beats it, in which the anaphoric connection we perceive between the indefinite noun phrase some donkey and the pronoun it may seem to conflict with the existential meaning of the word some. The second problem had to do with tense and aspect. Some languages, for instance French and the other Romance languages, have two morphologically distinct past tenses, a simple past (the French Passe Simple) and a continuous past (the French Imparfait). To articulate precisely what the difference between these tenses is has turned out to be surprisingly difficult.
Download or read book Logic Language and Computation written by Peter Bosch and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-03-29 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Computation, TbiLLC 2007, held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in October 2007. The 22 revised full papers included in the book were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous presentations given at the symposium. The focus of the papers is on the following topics: conceptual modeling of spatial relations, pragmatics and game theory, atypical valency phenomena, lexical typology, formal semantics and experimental evidence, exceptional quantifier scope, Georgian focussing particles, polarity and pragmatics, dynamics of belief, learning theory, inquisitive semantics, modal logic, coalgebras, computational linguistics of Georgian, type-logical grammar and cross-serial dependencies, non-monotonic logic, Japanese quantifiers, intuitionistic logic, semantics of negated nominals, word sense disambiguation, semantics of question-embedding predicates, and reciprocals and computational complexity.
Download or read book Quantifier Scope in German written by Jürgen Pafel and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-01-26 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive account of quantifier scope in German. The author investigates scope behavior of ordinary quantifiers and negative, adverbial, interrogative, relative and particle quantifiers. The areas which are dealt with include: relative scope in simple sentences, absolute and relative scope in complex sentences, noun-phrase internal scope, and scope behavior of indefinite noun phrases. A theory of explicit and implicit quantification is proposed and a uniform process of scope determination is sketched which encompasses the scope of explicit as well as implicit quantifiers. Quantifier scope is a challenge to linguistic theory as it is a phenomenon which is determined by the interplay of diverse syntactic and semantic factors, which interact in a weighted and cumulative way. The factors' interplay is part of the syntax/semantics-interface, i.e., the constraints relating syntax and semantics, which are considered to be relatively autonomous, parallel levels connected by an interface of correspondence constraints.
Download or read book From NP to DP The syntax and semantics of noun phrases written by Martine Coene and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first of a two-volume selection of refereed and revised papers, originally presented at the international conference "From NP to DP" at the University of Antwerp. The papers address issues in the syntax and semantics of the noun phrase, in particular the so-called DP-hypothesis which takes noun phrases to be headed by a functional head D(eterminer). The major concerns can be grouped around 3 subthemes: the internal syntax of noun phrases, the syntax and semantics of bare nouns and indefinites and the expression of measurement in noun phrases. The wealth of data coming from over 40 different languages combined with a thorough introduction to the current issues in the field of NPs/DPs and some alternative syntactic and semantic analyses, provide a comprehensive reference work from both a descriptive and a theoretical point of view. The second volume is concerned exclusively with the expression of possession in noun phrases.
Download or read book Questions and Answers in Embedded Contexts written by Utpal Lahiri and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguists have realized for some time that predicates of the "know" and "wonder" classes behave differently in semantic terms with respect to their interrogative complements, but have not so far fully understood how or why. This book seeks to explore and to provide solutions to this and to related problems in explaining the meaning and grammar of embedded interrogatives and the predicates that take interrogative complements (indirect questions and how they are answered).
Download or read book Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language written by Edward Keenan and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-03-28 with total page 973 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering a strikingly diverse range of languages from 12 linguistic families, this handbook is based on responses to a questionnaire constructed by the editors. Focusing on the formation, distribution and semantic interpretation of quantificational expressions, the book explores 17 languages including German, Italian, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Malagasy, Hebrew, Pima, Basque, and more. The language data sets enable detailed crosslinguistic comparison of numerous features. These include semantic classes of quantifiers (generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, partitive), syntactically complex quantifiers (intensive modification, Boolean compounding, exception phrases) and several others such as quantifier scope ambiguities, quantifier float, and binary quantifiers. Its theory-independent content extends earlier work by Matthewson (2008) and Bach et al. (1995), making this handbook suitable for linguists, semanticians, philosophers of language and logicians alike.
Download or read book Structures and Beyond written by Adriana Belletti and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-29 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the third volume in the subset of volumes in the comparative syntax series devoted to the cartography of syntactic structures. Adriana Belletti has collected articles by top linguists that were originally presented at a workshop at the University of Siena in conjunction with a visit by Noam Chomsky. The articles go beyond mapping syntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties, also touching on broader questions, particularly related to the Minimalist Program and other recent theoretical developments. Contributors include Adriana Belletti, Alfonso Caramazza, Gennaro Chierchia, Guglielmo Cinque, Noam Chomsky, Richard Kayne, Jacques Mehler, Marina Nespor, Luigi Rizzi, Kevin Shapiro, and Michael Starke.
Download or read book Descriptions and Beyond written by Marga Reimer and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1905, Bertrand Russell published 'On Denoting' in which he proposed and defended a quantificational account of definite descriptions. Forty-five years later, in 'On Referring', Peter Strawson claimed that Russell was mistaken: definite descriptions do not function as quantifiers but (paradigmatically) as referring expressions. Ever since, scores of theorists have attempted to adjudicate this debate. Others have gone beyond the question of the proper analysis of definite descriptions, focusing instead on the complex relations between definites, indefinites, and pronouns. These relations are often examined with attention to the phenomena of scope and anaphora. This collection assembles nineteen new papers on definite descriptions and related topics. The contributors include both philosophers and linguists, many of whom have been active participants in the various debates concerning descriptions. The volume contains a brief general introduction and is divided into six sections, each of which is accompanied by a detailed introduction of its own. Several of the sections concern issues associated with the Russell/Strawson debate. These include the sections on incomplete descriptions, the referential/attributive distinction, and presupposition and truth value gaps. There is also a section on the representation of definites and indefinites in semantic theory, containing papers that reject certain core assumptions of the Russellian paradigm. Linguists interested in definites have traditionally been concerned with how such expressions interact with other expressions, including pronouns and indefinites. They have explored, and continue to explore, these interactions through the complex phenomena of scope and anaphora. In the section dealing with anaphoric pronouns and descriptions, indefinites and dynamic syntax/semantics, five linguists propose and defend their views on these and related issues. Finally, there is a section that concerns the relation between proper names and descriptions and, more particularly, the idea that some names, those introduced into the language by description, are semantically equivalent to definite descriptions.
Download or read book Context Dependence Perspective and Relativity written by Francois Recanati and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together original papers by linguists and philosophers on the role of context and perspective in language and thought. Several contributions are concerned with the contextualism/relativism debate, which has loomed large in recent philosophical discussions. In a substantial introduction, the editors survey the field and map out the relevant issues and positions.
Download or read book Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2018 written by Andreas Blümel and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2018 offers a selection of articles that were prepared on the basis of talks presented at the conference Formal Description of Slavic Languages (FDSL 13) or at the parallel Workshop on the Semantics of Noun Phrases, which were held on December 5–7, 2018, at the University of Göttingen. The volume covers a wide array of topics, such as situation relativization with adverbial clauses (causation, concession, counterfactuality, condition, and purpose), clause-embedding by means of a correlate, agreeing vs. transitive ‘need’ constructions, clitic doubling, affixation and aspect, evidentiality and mirativity, pragmatics coming with the particle li, uniqueness, definiteness, maximal interpretation (exhaustivity), kinds and subkinds, bare nominals, multiple determination, quantification, demonstratives, possessives, complex measure nouns, and the NP/DP parameter. The set of object languages comprises Russian, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, and Torlak Serbian. The numerous topics addressed demonstrate the importance of Slavic linguistics. The original analyses prove that substantial progress has been made in major fields of research.
Download or read book The Parameter of Aspect written by C.S. Smith and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work presents a unified theory of aspect within Universal Grammar. It provides an unusual combination of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic approaches to a single domain, and gives detailed linguistic analyses of five languages with very different aspectual systems: English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Navajo and Russian. This second edition has been completely revised to include further development of the two-component theory, including new treatments of boundedness, dynamism and a general account of aspectual shifts. It includes syntactic and semantic tests.
Download or read book The Logic of Pronominal Resumption written by Ash Asudeh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-19 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a cross-linguistic investigation of resumptive pronouns and related phenomena. Pronominal resumption is the realization of the base of a syntactic dependency as a bound pronoun. Resumption occurs in unbounded dependencies, such as relative clauses and questions, and in the variety of raising known as copy raising. Processing factors may also give rise to resumption, even in environments where it does not normally occur in a given language. Ash Asudeh proposes a new theory of resumption based on the use of a resource logic for semantic composition and the typologically robust observation that resumptive pronouns are ordinary pronouns in their morphological and lexical properties. The framework for semantic composition is Glue Semantics and the syntactic framework is Lexical-Functional Grammar. The author introduces these frameworks and the concept of resource logics accessibly and compares results and explanations with those offered by a number of contrasting theoretical frameworks. The theory achieves a novel unification of hitherto heterogeneous resumption phenomena. It unifies two kinds of resumptive pronouns that are found in unbounded dependencies - one kind behaves syntactically like a gap, whereas the other kind does not. It also unifies resumptive pronouns in unbounded dependencies with the obligatory pronouns in copy raising. The theory also provides the basis for a new understanding of processing-based resumption, both in production and in parsing and interpretation. This book makes a substantial contribution to the understanding of the syntax-semantics interface, the nature of unbounded dependencies, and linguistic variation. It is clearly written and includes examples from a wide range of languages, such as English, Hebrew, Irish, Swedish, and Vata. It will interest researchers in syntax and semantics and its results are also relevant to computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and the logical analysis of language.
