Secondary predication in Russian

The paper makes two contributions to semantic typology of secondary predicates. It provides an explanation of the fact that Russian has no resultative secondary predicates, relating this explanation to the interpretation of secondary predicates in English. And it relates depictive secondary predicates in Russian, which usually occur in the instrumental case, to other uses of the instrumental case in Russian, establishing here, too, a difference to English concerning the scope of the secondary predication phenomenon

Measure instrumental in russian

We will argue that some seemingly adverbial free DPs in the instrumental in Russian which are traditionally termed measure instrumental are best understood as secondary predicates. We present the relevant syntactic assumptions and propose a semantics of this use of DPs in the instrumental. This proposal hears on the distinction between adjunct modification and secondary predication

Abductive speech act recognition, corporate agents and the COSMA system

This chapter presents an overview of the DISCO project\u27s solutions to several problems in natural language pragmatics. Its central focus is on relating utterances to intentions through speech act recognition. Subproblems include the incorporation of linguistic cues into the speech act recognition process, precise and efficient multiagent belief attribution models (Corporate Agents), and speech act representation and processing using Corporate Agents. These ideas are being tested within the COSMA appointment scheduling system, one application of the DISCO natural language interface. Abductive speech act processing in this environment is not far from realizing its potential for fully bidirectional implementation

(Non)culmination by abduction

Recent literature has aimed to explain (non-)culminating accomplishment inferences, which often involve the perfective aspect, but can also involve the imperfective. The goal of our paper is to explore how these inferences come about with the Hindi perfective and the Russian imperfective. We propose that abduction, that is, inference to the best explanation, is ideally suited for this task. We show how the occurrence of a (non-)culminated event is abduced in the relevant cases based on a semantic analysis which adopts the distinction between culminated and maximal events, as well as a set of non-defeasible rules encoding general mereological principles. We also show how our abductive framework can take into account facts about the conversation. This, among other things, allows us to make more nuanced predictions about what speakers will infer and when, thereby addressing possible worries of overgeneralization that an abductive framework inevitably faces. We end the paper with two outstanding issues warranting further research. First, we raise questions about the nature of (non-)culminating accomplishment inferences, which have previously been taken to be conversational implicatures. Second, we take some preliminary steps towards extending our analysis to defeasible causatives in Germanic and Romance languages

A procedure for mediation of queries to sources in disparate contexts

Includes bibliographical references (p. 17-19).S. Bressan ... [et al.]