829 research outputs found

    Definiteness and determinacy

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    This paper distinguishes between definiteness and determinacy. Definiteness is seen as a morphological category which, in English, marks a (weak) uniqueness presupposition, while determinacy consists in denoting an individual. Definite descriptions are argued to be fundamentally predicative, presupposing uniqueness but not existence, and to acquire existential import through general type-shifting operations that apply not only to definites, but also indefinites and possessives. Through these shifts, argumental definite descriptions may become either determinate (and thus denote an individual) or indeterminate (functioning as an existential quantifier). The latter option is observed in examples like ‘Anna didn’t give the only invited talk at the conference’, which, on its indeterminate reading, implies that there is nothing in the extension of ‘only invited talk at the conference’. The paper also offers a resolution of the issue of whether possessives are inherently indefinite or definite, suggesting that, like indefinites, they do not mark definiteness lexically, but like definites, they typically yield determinate readings due to a general preference for the shifting operation that produces them.We thank Dag Haug, Reinhard Muskens, Luca Crnic, Cleo Condoravdi, Lucas Champollion, Stanley Peters, Roger Levy, Craige Roberts, Bert LeBruyn, Robin Cooper, Hans Kamp, Sebastian Lobner, Francois Recanati, Dan Giberman, Benjamin Schnieder, Rajka Smiljanic, Ede Zimmerman, as well as audiences at SALT 22 in Chicago, IATL 29 in Jerusalem, Going Heim in Connecticut, the Workshop on Bare Nominals and Non-Standard Definites in Utrecht, the University of Cambridge, the University of Gothenburg, the University of Konstanz, New York University, the University of Oxford, Rutgers University, the University of Southern California, Stanford University, and the University of Texas at Austin. Beaver was supported by NSF grants BCS-0952862 and BCS-1452663. Coppock was supported by Swedish Research Council project 2009-1569 and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond's Pro Futura Scientia program, administered through the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. (BCS-0952862 - NSF; BCS-1452663 - NSF; 2009-1569 - Swedish Research Council; Riksbankens Jubileumsfond's Pro Futura Scientia program

    Structural Analysis of the Japanese Language Using Montague Grammar.

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    This thesis applies Montague's theory of grammar to a fragment of ordinary Japanese and aims to provide a foundation for an explicit semantics of Japanese. The typological or transformational studies will be presented first as data and the corresponding Montague grammatical analyses will be proposed. In Chapter 1, Montague's theory of grammar is discussed, comparisons being made with Davidsonian truth conditional semantics and Chomskyan transformational grammar. In Chapter 2, subjects, adjectives and adverbs are analysed, in Chapter 3, complementation, in Chapter 4 reflexives, passives, causatives, and in Chapter 5 negation and factive presupposition. The main theoretical concern is the relation between a logical syntax and linguistic syntax. It is hoped that a new linguistic framework will be developed from this study. The other important theoretical concern is the relation between semantics and pragmatics

    The progressive and verbs of creation

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    Effects of semantic and syntactic complexities and aspectual class on past tense production

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    This paper reports results from a series of experiments that investigated whether semantic and/or syntactic complexity influences young Dutch children’s production of past tense forms. The constructions used in the three experiments were (i) simple sentences (the Simple Sentence Experiment), (ii) complex sentences with CP complements (the Complement Clause Experiment) and (iii) complex sentences with relative clauses (the Relative Clause Experiment). The stimuli involved both atelic and telic predicates. The goal of this paper is to address the following questions. Q1. Does semantic complexity regarding temporal anchoring influence the types of errors that children make in the experiments? For example, do children make certain types of errors when a past tense has to be anchored to the Utterance Time (UT), as compared to when it has to be anchored to the matrix topic time (TT)? Q2. Do different syntactic positions influence children’s performance on past-tense production? Do children perform better in the Simple Sentence Experiment compared to complex sentences involving two finite clauses (the Complement Clause Experiment and the Relative Clause Experiment)? In complex sentence trials, do children perform differently when the CPs are complements vs. when the CPs are adjunct clauses? (Lebeaux 1990, 2000) Q3. Do Dutch children make more errors with certain types of predicate (such as atelic predicates)? Alternatively, do children produce a certain type of error with a certain type of predicates (such as producing a perfect aspect with punctual predicates)? Bronckart and Sinclair (1973), for example, found that until the age of 6, French children showed a tendency to use passé composé with perfective events and simple present with imperfective events; we will investigate whether or not the equivalent of this is observed in Dutch

    The Dual Analysis of Adjuncts/Complements in Categorial Grammar

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    The distinction between COMPLEMENTS and ADJUNCTS has a long tradition in grammatical theory, and it is also included in some way or other in most current formal linguistic theories. But it is a highly vexed distinction, for several reasons, one of which is that no diagnostic criteria have emerged that will reliably distinguish adjuncts from complements in all cases – too many examples seem to "fall into the crack" between the two categories, no matter how theorists wrestle with them. In this paper, I will argue that this empirical diagnostic "problem" is, in fact, precisely what we should expect to find in natural language, when a proper understanding of the adjunct/complement distinction is achieved: the key hypothesis is that a complete grammar should provide a DUAL ANALYSIS of every complement as an adjunct, and potentially, an analysis of any adjunct as a complement. What this means and why it is motivated by linguistic evidence will be discussed in detail

    Counterfactual Attitudes and the Relational Analysis

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    In this paper, I raise a problem for standard precisifications of the Relational Analysis of attitude reports. The problem I raise involves counterfactual attitude verbs. such as ‘wish’. In short, the trouble is this: there are true attitude reports ‘ S wishes that P ’ but there is no suitable referent for the term ‘that P ’. The problematic reports illustrate that the content of a subject’s wish is intimately related to the content of their beliefs. I capture this fact by moving to a framework in which ‘wish’ relates subjects to sets of pairs of worlds, or paired propositions, rather than—as is standardly assumed—sets of worlds. Although other types of counterfactual attitude reports, for example those involving ‘imagine’, may be similarly problematic, at this stage it is unclear whether they can be handled the same way

    A Type-coherent, Expressive Representation as an Initial Step to Language Understanding

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    A growing interest in tasks involving language understanding by the NLP community has led to the need for effective semantic parsing and inference. Modern NLP systems use semantic representations that do not quite fulfill the nuanced needs for language understanding: adequately modeling language semantics, enabling general inferences, and being accurately recoverable. This document describes underspecified logical forms (ULF) for Episodic Logic (EL), which is an initial form for a semantic representation that balances these needs. ULFs fully resolve the semantic type structure while leaving issues such as quantifier scope, word sense, and anaphora unresolved; they provide a starting point for further resolution into EL, and enable certain structural inferences without further resolution. This document also presents preliminary results of creating a hand-annotated corpus of ULFs for the purpose of training a precise ULF parser, showing a three-person pairwise interannotator agreement of 0.88 on confident annotations. We hypothesize that a divide-and-conquer approach to semantic parsing starting with derivation of ULFs will lead to semantic analyses that do justice to subtle aspects of linguistic meaning, and will enable construction of more accurate semantic parsers.Comment: Accepted for publication at The 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2019
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