Quantification as reference: Evidence from Q-verbs

Formal semantics has so far focused on three categories of quantifiers, to wit, Q-determiners (e.g. 'every'), Q-adverbs (e.g. 'always'), and Q-auxiliaries (e.g. 'would'). All three can be analyzed in terms of tripartite logical forms (LF). This paper presents evidence from verbs with distributive affixes (Q-verbs), in Kalaallisut, Polish, and Bininj Gun-wok, which cannot be analyzed in terms of tripartite LFs. It is argued that a Q-verb involves discourse reference to a distributive verbal dependency, i.e. an episode-valued function that sends different semantic objects in a contextually salient plural domain to different episodes

The Anaphoric Parallel between Modality and Tense

In modal subordination, a modal sentence is interpreted relative to a hypothetical scenario introduced in an earlier sentence. In this paper, I argue that this phenomenon reflects the fact that the interpretation of modals is an ANAPHORIC process, precisely analogous to the anaphoric interpretation of tense. Modal morphemes introduce alternative scenarios as entities into the discourse model; their interpretation depends on evoking scenarios for described, reference and speech points, and relating them to one another. Although this account formalizes anaphoric connections using dynamic semantics, it invokes a novel and direct encoding of scenarios as ordinary, static objects (competing analyses take modal referents to be inherently dynamic objects, unlike the referents of pronouns and tenses). The result is a simpler proposal with better empirical coverage

Linguistic Markers of Lexical and Textual Relations in Technical Documents

International audienceThis chapter proposes a number of linguistic " handles " for the description of technical documents, at a lexical level (terminology) and at a textual level (discourse coherence). Examples are given of uses of such insights in document production and management, in particular via document engineering systems. We provide a number of linguistic " handles " for the description of technical documents. Such insights into the " inner workings " of texts may be harnessed in various ways in the production and management of technical documents; we show some applications in document engineering, in systems designed to facilitate access to information. Our focus is on surface markers, i.e. observable text features identified through corpus analysis, signalling the kind of relations between lexical items used in building terminologies (such as generic/specific, see section 1), or relations between text segments involved in discourse coherence (such as theme, or rhetorical relations, see section 2). We insist on the relevance of the notion of genre when working with technical documents, and on the genre-dependent nature of our linguistic markers

CLiFF Notes: Research In Natural Language Processing at the University of Pennsylvania

CLIFF is the Computational Linguists\u27 Feedback Forum. We are a group of students and faculty who gather once a week to hear a presentation and discuss work currently in progress. The \u27feedback\u27 in the group\u27s name is important: we are interested in sharing ideas, in discussing ongoing research, and in bringing together work done by the students and faculty in Computer Science and other departments. However, there are only so many presentations which we can have in a year. We felt that it would be beneficial to have a report which would have, in one place, short descriptions of the work in Natural Language Processing at the University of Pennsylvania. This report then, is a collection of abstracts from both faculty and graduate students, in Computer Science, Psychology and Linguistics. We want to stress the close ties between these groups, as one of the things that we pride ourselves on here at Penn is the communication among different departments and the inter-departmental work. Rather than try to summarize the varied work currently underway at Penn, we suggest reading the abstracts to see how the students and faculty themselves describe their work. The report illustrates the diversity of interests among the researchers here, as well as explaining the areas of common interest. In addition, since it was our intent to put together a document that would be useful both inside and outside of the university, we hope that this report will explain to everyone some of what we are about