2,233 research outputs found
On the system F as a glue language for natural-language compositional-semantics
In order to model in compositional framework some phenomena of lexical
pragmatics and in particular the ones studied by Nicholas Asher several
contributions developed in our team did use the system F of Jean-Yves Girard to
construct logical formulae expressing the meaning of sentences --- while other
authors prefer to use Per Martin-L\"of's type theory In this note we explain
the motivations supporting our preference for system F.Comment: (24/08/2011
Intonation and discourse : biased questions
This paper surveys a range of constructions in which prosody affects discourse function and discourse structure.We discuss English tag questions, negative polar questions, and what we call “focus” questions. We postulate that these question types are complex speech acts and outline an analysis in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) to account for the interactions between prosody and discourse
Linear Logic for Meaning Assembly
Semantic theories of natural language associate meanings with utterances by
providing meanings for lexical items and rules for determining the meaning of
larger units given the meanings of their parts. Meanings are often assumed to
combine via function application, which works well when constituent structure
trees are used to guide semantic composition. However, we believe that the
functional structure of Lexical-Functional Grammar is best used to provide the
syntactic information necessary for constraining derivations of meaning in a
cross-linguistically uniform format. It has been difficult, however, to
reconcile this approach with the combination of meanings by function
application. In contrast to compositional approaches, we present a deductive
approach to assembling meanings, based on reasoning with constraints, which
meshes well with the unordered nature of information in the functional
structure. Our use of linear logic as a `glue' for assembling meanings allows
for a coherent treatment of the LFG requirements of completeness and coherence
as well as of modification and quantification.Comment: 19 pages, uses lingmacros.sty, fullname.sty, tree-dvips.sty,
latexsym.sty, requires the new version of Late
Ro[u:]ting the interpretation of words
Word formation in Distributed Morphology (see Arad 2005, Marantz 2001, Embick 2008): 1. Language has atomic, non-decomposable, elements = roots. 2. Roots combine with the functional vocabulary and build larger elements. 3. Roots are category neutral. They are then categorized by combining with category defining functional heads
Plurals: individuals and sets in a richly typed semantics
We developed a type-theoretical framework for natural lan- guage semantics
that, in addition to the usual Montagovian treatment of compositional
semantics, includes a treatment of some phenomena of lex- ical semantic:
coercions, meaning, transfers, (in)felicitous co-predication. In this setting
we see how the various readings of plurals (collective, dis- tributive,
coverings,...) can be modelled
Context Update for Lambdas and Vectors
Vector models of language are based on the contextual aspects of words
and how they co-occur in text. Truth conditional models focus on the
logical aspects of language, the denotations of phrases, and their
compositional properties. In the latter approach the denotation of a
sentence determines its truth conditions and can be taken to be a
truth value, a set of possible worlds, a context change
potential, or similar. In this short paper, we develop a vector
semantics for language based on the simply typed lambda calculus. Our
semantics uses techniques familiar from the truth conditional tradition
and is based on a form of dynamic interpretation inspired by
Heim's context updates
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