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 Pre Accident Investigations written by Todd Conklin and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2016-07-06 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pre-Accident Investigations: Better Questions - An Applied Approach to Operational Learning challenges safety and reliability professionals to get better answers by asking better questions. A provocative examination of human performance and safety management, the book delivers a thought-provoking discourse about how we work, and defines a new approach to operational learning. This is not a book about traditional safety. This is a book about creating "real" safety in your organization. In order to predict incidents before they happen, an organization should first understand how their processes can result in failure. Instead of managing the outcomes, they must learn to manage and understand the processes used to create them. Ideal for use in safety, human performance, psychology, cognitive and decision making, systems engineering, and risk assessment areas, this book equips the safety professional with the tools, steps, and models of success needed to create long-term value and change from safety programs.

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 Varieties of Alternatives written by Mingming Liu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book concerns two focus particles (jiu, dou) and wh-expressions (shenme = ‘what’, na geren = ‘which person’) in Mandarin Chinese. These items are systematically ‘ambiguous’ and have played important roles in various aspects of Mandarin grammar. An idea based on alternatives and varieties of alternatives in particular – following Chierchia’s 2013 analysis of the polarity system – is pursued to account for the systematic ambiguities. The unambiguous semantics of jiu, dou and wh-expressions are maintained and ‘ambiguity’ explained through varieties of alternatives interacting with other independently motivated aspects of the structure they occur in. By examining these aspects in detail, the book will help readers gain a better understanding of a broad range of phenomena that involve these items – including exhaustivity, distributivity, questions and conditionals.

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 Questions written by Veneeta Dayal and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book synthesizes and integrates 40 years of research on the semantics of questions, and its interface with pragmatics and syntax, conducted within the formal semantics tradition. A wide range of topics are covered, including weak-strong exhaustiveness, maximality, functional answers, single-multiple-trapped list answers, embedding predicates, quantificational variability, concealed questions, weak islands, polar and alternative questions, negative polarity, and non-canonical questions. The literature on this rich set of topics, theoretically diverse and scattered across multiple venues, is often hard to assimilate. Veneeta Dayal, drawing on her own research, brings them together for the first time in a coherent, concise, and well-structured whole. Each chapter begins with a non-technical introduction to the issues discussed; semantically sophisticated accounts are then presented incrementally, with the major points summarized at the end of each section. Written in an accessible style, this book provides both a guide to one of the most vibrant areas of research in natural language and an account of how this area of study is developing. It will be a unique resource for the novice and expert alike, and seeks to appeal to a variety of readers without compromising depth and breadth of coverage.

Download or read book The Acquisition and Use of Yes no Questions in English written by Ursula Kania and published by Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph offers a comprehensive account of the L1-acquisition and use of yes-no questions in English from a usage-based, construction grammar perspective. On the basis of the BNC and a high-density, longitudinal CHILDES corpus, the book explores two issues which have largely been neglected in previous research: 1. the prevalence of non-canonical questions (such as elliptical and declarative questions) in adult-to-adult as well as child(-directed) speech and the L1-acquisition of these structures. 2. The discourse-functional properties of both canonical and non-canonical yes-no questions, especially with regard to their influence on the acquisition process.

Download or read book Formal Grammar written by Terje Lohndal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-12 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume draws together fourteen previously published papers which explore the nature of mental grammar through a formal, generative approach. The book begins by outlining the development of formal grammar in the last fifty years, with a particular focus on the work of Noam Chomsky, and moves into an examination of a diverse set of phenomena in various languages that shed light on theory and model construction. Many of the papers focus on comparisons between English and Norwegian, highlighting the importance of comparative approaches to the study of language. With a comprehensive collection of papers that demonstrate the richness of formal approaches, this volume is key reading for students and scholars interested in the study of grammar.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics written by Anne Barron and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics provides a state-of-the-art overview of the wide breadth of research in pragmatics. An introductory section outlines a brief history, the main issues and key approaches and perspectives in the field, followed by a thought-provoking introductory chapter on interdisciplinarity by Jacob L. Mey. A further thirty-eight chapters cover both traditional and newer areas of pragmatic research, divided into four sections: Methods and modalities Established fields Pragmatics across disciplines Applications of pragmatic research in today’s world. With accessible, refreshing descriptions and discussions, and with a look towards future directions, this Handbook is an essential resource for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in pragmatics within English language and linguistics and communication studies.

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 Questions and Rhetoric in the Greek New Testament written by Douglas Estes and published by Zondervan Academic. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there are almost 1000 questions in the Greek New Testament, many commentators, pastors, and students skip over the questions for more ‘theological’ verses or worse they convert questions into statements to mine them for what they are saying theologically. However, this is not the way questions in the Greek New Testament work, and it overlooks the rhetorical importance of questions and how they were used in the ancient world. Questions and Rhetoric in the Greek New Testament is a helpful and thorough examination of questions in the Greek New Testament, seen from the standpoint of grammatical, semantic, and linguistic analysis, with special emphasis on their rhetorical effects. It includes charts, tools, and lists that explain and categorize the almost 1000 questions in the Greek New Testament. Thus, the user is able to go to the section in the book dealing with the type of question they are studying and find the exegetical parameters needed to understand that question. Questions and Rhetoric in the Greek New Testament offers vibrant examples of all the major categories of questions to aid the reader in grasping how questions work in the Greek New Testament. Special emphasis is given to the way questions persuade and influence readers of the Greek New Testament.

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.