Download or read book Semantic Underspecification and Its Contextual Resolution in the Domain of Degrees written by Ciyang Qing and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many natural language expressions have context-sensitive interpretations, which can make it difficult to pin down the exact meaning of an expression. To address this challenge, it is common for semanticists to assign context-sensitive expressions underspecified meaning representations, where parts of the meanings need to be resolved in context. This naturally raises two important theoretical issues concerning their semantics/pragmatics interface: (i) How do we represent their conventional, context-invariant meaning (i.e., the semantic question)? (ii) How does context, together with the conventional meaning, determine the interpretation (i.e., the metasemantic question)? In this dissertation, I focus on the domain of degrees and argue for the generality and importance of the distinction between semantic contextual resolution mechanisms and pragmatic ones in addressing these questions. The contrast is in parallel with that between the pronouns "I" (which conventionally refers to the speaker in context) and "they" (whose referent is determined via pragmatic reasoning). Concretely, I use directional modified numerals (e.g., "up to 100") and gradable adjectives (e.g., "tall" and "full") as two case studies to argue that (a) the two contextual resolution mechanisms can be unified by a general principle of informativity-applicability trade-off, which is a quantitative generalization of the interaction between Grice's maxims of Quantity and Quality, and that (b) the way to tease them apart is by examining whether the contextual resolution of an expression is sensitive to the larger linguistic environment in which it appears. If yes, the mechanism is pragmatic, and if no, it is semantic. For directional modified numerals, the opposite inference patterns they trigger when they are unembedded and embedded under deontic modals suggest that they have a pragmatic contextual resolution mechanism. For relative and maximum gradable adjectives, I examine how they are used in definite descriptions in referential contexts and argue that, contrary to some recent proposals, their contextual resolution mechanism is in fact semantic in nature. In addition to providing a more precise and unified semantics for relative (e.g., "tall") and maximum (e.g., "full") gradable adjectives, I further examine the class of minimum gradable adjectives (e.g., "bent") and illustrate that many of them are in fact systematically ambiguous between a relative reading and a > 0 reading, which is based on a meaningful notion of zero rather than the minimum. I argue that this suggests a new taxonomy of positive forms of gradable adjectives. On the one hand, some positive forms are threshold-introducing, which include maximum and relative adjectives, together with minimum adjectives with relative readings. They share a unified semantics and their differences are explained by the different contextual parameters. On the other hand, the > 0 reading of a gradable adjective is derived in a way parallel to comparative constructions, which provides a straightforward explanation of their similarities observed in the literature.
Download or read book Felicitous Underspecification written by Jeffrey C. King and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Felicitous uses of contextually sensitive expressions generally have unique semantic values in context. For example, a felicitous use of the singular pronoun 'she' generally has a single female as its unique semantic value in context. In the present work, I argue that contextually sensitive expressions have felicitous uses where they lack unique semantic values in context. I call such uses instances of felicitous underspecification. In such cases, I say that the underspecified expression is associated with a range of candidate semantic values in context. I provide a rule for updating the Stalnakerian common ground when sentences containing felicitous underspecified expressions are uttered and accepted in a conversation. I also give an account of the mechanism that associates the range of candidate semantic values in context with an underspecified expression. Sentences containing felicitous underspecified expressions can be embedded in various constructions. I consider the result of embedding such sentences under negation and verbs of propositional attitude. I also consider the question of why some uses of underspecified expressions are felicitous and others aren't. This investigations yields the notion of a context being appropriate for a sentence (LF), where a context is appropriate for a sentence containing an underspecified expression if the sentence is felicitous. Finally, I consider some difficulties that arise in virtue of the fact that pronouns and demonstratives have some sorts of implications of uniqueness that clash with their being underspecified"--
Download or read book Inquisitive Semantics written by Ivano Ciardelli and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book presents a new logical framework to capture the meaning of sentences in conversation. The traditional approach equates meaning with truth-conditions: to know the meaning of a sentence is to know under which circumstances it is true. The reason for this is that linguistic and philosophical investigations are usually carried out in a logical framework that was originally designed to characterize valid argumentation. However, argumentation is neither the sole, nor the primary function of language. One task that language more widely and ordinarily fulfils is to enable the exchange of information between conversational participants. In the framework outlined in this volume, inquisitive semantics, information exchange is seen as a process of raising and resolving issues. Inquisitive semantics provides a new formal notion of meaning, which makes it possible to model various concepts that are crucial for the analysis of linguistic information exchange in a more refined and more principled way than has been possible in previous frameworks. Importantly, it also allows an integrated treatment of statements and questions. The first part of the book presents the framework in detail, while the second demonstrates its benefits in the semantic analysis of questions, coordination, modals, conditionals, and intonation. The book will be of interest to researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and logic.
Download or read book Degree Gradation of Verbs written by Jens Fleischhauer-Helfer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gradation is usually considered to be a property of adjectives. Examples like 'The boy loves his mother very much' and 'The boy has grown a lot' reveal that gradation is not limited to adjectives but verbs are gradable too. Verb gradation has received considerably less attention in the literature than gradation of adjectives. The aim of the current volume is to explore the notion of verb gradation in more detail. The book presents a semantic as well as a syntactic analysis of verb gradation and combines three case studies with a general perspective on the phenomenon. Issues addressed in the volume cover, among others, the notion of scalarity in the verbal domain, the interaction of verb gradation with grammatical as well as lexical aspect and verb gradation as a subcompositional phenomenon. These topics are investigated from a cross-linguistic perspective. The languages of investigation include, among others, German, Russian and French.
Download or read book Lexical Meaning in Context written by Nicholas Asher and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the amalgamation of a predicate and argument would produce what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a 'category mistake'. It argues for a theory in which words get assigned both an intension and a type. The book develops a rich system of types and investigates its philosophical and formal implications, for example the abandonment of the classic Church analysis of types that has been used by linguists since Montague. The author integrates fascinating and puzzling observations about lexical meaning into a compositional semantic framework. Adjustments in types are a feature of the compositional process and account for various phenomena including coercion and copredication. This book will be of interest to semanticists, philosophers, logicians and computer scientists alike.
Download or read book Modification written by Marcin Morzycki and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible guide to the linguistic semantics of adjectives, adverbs, gradability, vagueness, comparatives, and modification more generally.
Download or read book Plurality and Quantification written by F. Hamm and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume address central issues in the study of Plurality and Quantification from three different perspectives: • Algebraic approaches to Plurals and Quantification • Distributivity and Collectivity: Theoretical Foundations • Distributivity and Collectivity: Empirical Investigations Algebraic approaches to the semantics of natural languages were in dependently introduced for the study of generalized quantification, pred ication, intensionality, mass terms and plurality. The most prominent modern advocate for an algebraic theory of plurality (and mass terms) is certainly Godehard Link. It is indicative of the Wirkungsgeschichte of Link's work that most of the contributions in this volume take the logic of plurals proposed by Godehard Link (Link 1983, 1987) as their foundation or, at the very least, as their point of reference. Link's own paper in this volume provides a concise summary of many of the central research issues that have engaged semanticists during the last decade. Link's paper also contains an extensive bibliography that provides an excellent resource for scholars interested in the semantics of plurals. Since we can refer readers to Link's paper for an excellent survey of the subject matter of this book, we will limit our attention in this in troduction to summarizing the individual contributions in this volume. The book is organized into three main sections; within each section the papers are ordered alphabetically. However, as in much of linguistic the orizing, there is an exception: for reasons pointed out above, Godehard Link's article appears as Chapter 1.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics written by Keith Allan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 967 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pragmatics is the study of human communication: the choices speakers make to express their intended meaning and the kinds of inferences that hearers draw from an utterance in the context of its use. This Handbook surveys pragmatics from different perspectives, presenting the main theories in pragmatic research, incorporating seminal research as well as cutting-edge solutions. It addresses questions of rational and empirical research methods, what counts as an adequate and successful pragmatic theory, and how to go about answering problems raised in pragmatic theory. In the fast-developing field of pragmatics, this Handbook fills the gap in the market for a one-stop resource to the wide scope of today's research and the intricacy of the many theoretical debates. It is an authoritative guide for graduate students and researchers with its focus on the areas and theories that will mark progress in pragmatic research in the future.
Download or read book Combinatory Linguistics written by Cem Bozsahin and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book examines to what extent the mediating relation between constituents and their semantics can arise from combinatory knowledge of words. It traces the roots of Combinatory Categorial Grammar, and uses the theory to promote a Humean question in linguistics and cognitive science: Why do we see limited constituency and dependency in natural languages, despite their diversity and potential infinity? A potential answer is that constituents and dependencies might have arisen from a single resource: adjacency. The combinatory formulation of adjacency constrains possible grammars.
Download or read book Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology written by James A. Hampton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights. This book is open access under a CC BY license.
Download or read book Relative Truth written by Manuel García-Carpintero and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008-08-14 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relative Truth examines a question which has become the focus of one of the liveliest debates in philosophy: whether truth is relative to standards of taste, values, or subjective informational states. Specially written papers by leading figures, together with a helpful introduction, make this book the starting-point for future work.
Download or read book Plural Pronominal Anaphora in Context written by Rick Willem Frans Nouwen and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Introducing Semantics written by Nick Riemer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the study of meaning in language for undergraduate students.
Download or read book Felicitous Underspecification written by King and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-20 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Felicitous uses of contextually sensitive expressions generally have unique semantic values in context. For example, a felicitous use of the singular pronoun 'she' generally has a single female as its unique semantic value in context. In the present work, Jeffrey C. King argues that contextually sensitive expressions have felicitous uses where they lack unique semantic values in context. He calls such uses instances of felicitous underspecification. In such cases, he says that the underspecified expression is associated with a range of candidate semantic values in context. King provides a rule for updating the Stalnakerian common ground when sentences containing felicitous underspecified expressions are uttered and accepted in a conversation. He also gives an account of the mechanism that associates the range of candidate semantic values in context with an underspecified expression. Sentences containing felicitous underspecified expressions can be embedded in various constructions. King considers the result of embedding such sentences under negation and verbs of propositional attitude. He also considers the question of why some uses of underspecified expressions are felicitous and others aren't. This investigation yields the notion of a context being appropriate for a sentence (LF), where a context is appropriate for a sentence containing an underspecified expression if the sentence is felicitous in that context. Finally, he considers some difficulties that arise in virtue of the fact that pronouns and demonstratives have some sorts of implications of uniqueness that clash with their being underspecified.
Download or read book Relative Interpretations written by Steven Orey and published by . This book was released on 1960 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Understanding Morphology written by Martin Haspelmath and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of Understanding Morphology has been fully revised in line with the latest research. It now includes 'big picture' questions to highlight central themes in morphology, as well as research exercises for each chapter. Understanding Morphology presents an introduction to the study of word structure that starts at the very beginning. Assuming no knowledge of the field of morphology on the part of the reader, the book presents a broad range of morphological phenomena from a wide variety of languages. Starting with the core areas of inflection and derivation, the book presents the interfaces between morphology and syntax and between morphology and phonology. The synchronic study of word structure is covered, as are the phenomena of diachronic change, such as analogy and grammaticalization. Theories are presented clearly in accessible language with the main purpose of shedding light on the data, rather than as a goal in themselves. The authors consistently draw on the best research available, thus utilizing and discussing both functionalist and generative theoretical approaches. Each chapter includes a summary, suggestions for further reading, and exercises. As such this is the ideal book for both beginning students of linguistics, or anyone in a related discipline looking for a first introduction to morphology.
Download or read book The Core Language Engine written by Hiyan Alshawi and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
