36,385 research outputs found
Deep Lexical Semantics: The Ontological Ascent
PACLIC 21 / Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea / November 1-3, 200
The Grail theorem prover: Type theory for syntax and semantics
As the name suggests, type-logical grammars are a grammar formalism based on
logic and type theory. From the prespective of grammar design, type-logical
grammars develop the syntactic and semantic aspects of linguistic phenomena
hand-in-hand, letting the desired semantics of an expression inform the
syntactic type and vice versa. Prototypical examples of the successful
application of type-logical grammars to the syntax-semantics interface include
coordination, quantifier scope and extraction.This chapter describes the Grail
theorem prover, a series of tools for designing and testing grammars in various
modern type-logical grammars which functions as a tool . All tools described in
this chapter are freely available
Generative grammar
Generative Grammar is the label of the most influential research program in linguistics and related fields in the second half of the 20. century. Initiated by a short book, Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957), it became one of the driving forces among the disciplines jointly called the cognitive sciences. The term generative grammar refers to an explicit, formal characterization of the (largely implicit) knowledge determining the formal aspect of all kinds of language behavior. The program had a strong mentalist orientation right from the beginning, documented e.g. in a fundamental critique of Skinner's Verbal behavior (1957) by Chomsky (1959), arguing that behaviorist stimulus-response-theories could in no way account for the complexities of ordinary language use. The "Generative Enterprise", as the program was called in 1982, went through a number of stages, each of which was accompanied by discussions of specific problems and consequences within the narrower domain of linguistics as well as the wider range of related fields, such as ontogenetic development, psychology of language use, or biological evolution. Four stages of the Generative Enterprise can be marked off for expository purposes
Is there a semantic system for abstract words?
Two views on the semantics of concrete words are that their core mental representations are feature-based or are reconstructions of sensory experience. We argue that neither of these approaches is capable of representing the semantics of abstract words, which involve the representation of possibly hypothetical physical and mental states, the binding of entities within a structure, and the possible use of embedding (or recursion) in such structures. Brain based evidence in the form of dissociations between deficits related to concrete and abstract semantics corroborates the hypothesis. Neuroimaging evidence suggests that left lateral inferior frontal cortex supports those processes responsible for the representation of abstract words
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