Dependent Event Types

International audienceIn the present theory, non-scopal noun phrases are entered into event types. This means that they end up restricting a role in a bare event type, because their scopal meaning is contributed to the meaning of the sentence by applying with generalized application an n-place event type to that scopal meaning

Negation and distributivity in event semantics

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An inquisitive account of wh-questions through event semantics

International audienceQuestion processing is a frequently discussed topic in Natural Language Processing, in particular for chatbots or question and answer systems. However, it is difficult to have a logical representation of questions that can be used in these tasks, let alone automatically produced. We present a compositional method for logically computing the semantic representations of wh-questions. We use compositional Neo-Davidsonian Event Semantics as presented in [10] with thematic roles, joined with Inquisitive Semantics [14]. We implement our encoding using the Abstract Categorial Grammars framework [23]. Our model results in an operationalized view of wh-questions and inquisitive existentials which we illustrate on several examples of wh-questions including who, which and where

Negation in event semantics with actual and nonactual events

International audienceThe goal of this work is to provide a formal account of negation in a Davidsonian framework that (i) makes negative events available for the analysis of various constructions that are otherwise problematic (such as negative naked infinitives or adverbial modification) and (ii) exhibits reasonable logical properties. This is done by first distinguishing between actual and non-actual events and then introducing a Neg function sending any event-predicate P to the not-P event and obeying a single axiom

The interaction of compositional semantics and event semantics

Davidsonian event semantics is often taken to form an unhappy marriage with compositional semantics. For example, it has been claimed to be problematic for semantic accounts of quantification (Beaver and Condoravdi, in: Aloni et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the 16th Amsterdam Colloquium, 2007), for classical accounts of negation (Krifka, in: Bartsch et al. (eds.) Semantics and contextual expression, 1989), and for intersective accounts of verbal coordination (Lasersohn, in Plurality, conjunction and events, 1995). This paper shows that none of this is the case, once we abandon the idea that the event variable is bound at sentence level, and assume instead that verbs denote existential quantifiers over events. Quantificational arguments can then be given a semantic account, negation can be treated classically, and coordination can be modeled as intersection. The framework presented here is a natural choice for researchers and fieldworkers who wish to sketch a semantic analysis of a language without being forced to make commitments about the hierarchical order of arguments, the argument-adjunct distinction, the default scope of quantifiers, or the nature of negation and coordination

Plongement de la sémantique intentionnelle en sémantique inquisitrice

International audienceInquisitive semantics [Ciardelli, Groenedijk and Roelofsen, 2018] is a model of natural language semantics which uniformly represents interrogative and declarative sentences. Clauses are represented by a nonempty downward-closed set of sets of possible worlds, the maximal elements of which are called alternatives. Questions have several alternatives corresponding to their possible answers. In this thesis, we investigate an embedding of (declarative) intentional semantics into inquisitive semantics. We provide a conservative extension [de Groote, 2015] mapping every lexical meaning to an inquisitive meaning.La sémantique inquisitrice [Ciardelli, Groenedijk et Roelofsen, 2018] est un modèle de la sémantique de la langue qui représente uniformément les phrases interrogatives et déclaratives. Les propositions sont représentées par un ensemble d'ensembles de mondes possibles, non vide et clos par le bas, dont les éléments maximaux sont appelés alternatives. Les questions ont plusieurs alternatives, lesquelles correspondent à leurs réponses possibles. Dans ce mémoire, on examine le plongement de la sémantique intentionnelle dans la sémantique inquisitrice. On conçoit une extension conservatrice [de Groote, 2015] qui à toute représentation sémantique lexicale associe un sens inquisiteur. On prouve que cette transformation conserve la conséquence logique (et donc l'équivalence logique) et la composition

Derivational Event Semantics for Pregroup Grammars

The focus of this research project is the development of a derivational system for event semantics over pregroup grammars. More concretely, it is shown how by extending the usual pregroup framework with a semantic layer and by assigning explicit event variables to the basic syntactic types of an expression, one can get semantic extraction from pregroup derivations without too many complications. The resulting meaning is neo-davidsonian and conjunctivist in form, that is, the meaning is analysed in terms of events, and a single logical operator is used for meaning combination: the conjunction ∧. Using conjunctions as sole mean of meaning combination makes it harder at first to analyse certain constructions, but this is a small price to pay for the level of generality and overall derivational simplicity that is obtained in the end by equating syntactic combination — pregroup contractions — with meaning conjunction. The issue of having non-functional types in this work is circumvented by using a unification operation over event and entity variables rather than abstraction/application operations à la λ- calculus, usually used in formal semantics

Event Semantics and Abstract Categorial Grammar

Abstract. Common versions of event semantics do not naturally explain the obligatory narrow scope of existential quantification over events, or the typically event-oriented modification by adverbials. We argue that these linguistic properties reflect a distinction between overt arguments and purely semantic slots like the event argument. The distinction is naturally captured in Abstract Categorial Grammar (ACG) [1, 2, 3, 4], which manipulates pairs of forms and meanings, a.k.a. linguistic signs. The sign’s pheno-type defines syntactic arguments and the sign’s semantic type standardly defines semantic arguments. Both these concrete types are standardly derived by induction on the structure of one abstract type types. We assume that semantic event arguments are only introduced by the (basic) result type of the verb’s abstract type, whose pheno-level type is standardly a string. Consequently semantic event arguments lack a correlate in the verb’s pheno-type. Both narrow-scope existential quantification over events and the orientation of event modifiers follow rigorously from this assumption. Base