Some Implications for Ērika: Implicatives in Danish, Finnish and Lithuanian

The article deals with implicative verbs, i.e., verbs that, both in their affirmative and negative forms, carry implications as to the factual status of their propositional complements, e.g. manage, forget, bother etc. Karttunen (1971), who introduced the notion, already pointed out that a verb that is implicative in one language need not necessarily have implicative counterparts in other languages. It is conceivable that some languages have semantic groups of implicatives not represented, or less well represented, in other languages, and this deserves to be investigated. In this article the authors offer just a very preliminary exploration based on three languages, one North Germanic, one Fennic, and one Baltic. They show that even such a small sample may reveal interesting differences. The authors also pause over certain general tendencies in the semantic development of implicatives. While most of the work on implicatives has been done in the tradition of formal semantics, the authors show that a more cognitively oriented approach (invoking mechanisms of subjectification) can yield valuable insights into the polysemy of implicatives

Causal necessity and sufficiency in implicativity

Karttunen's (1971) implicative verbs are notable for generating inferences over their complements. English manage to X, for instance, entails the truth of X: the entailment reverses with matrix negation and seems tied to the elusive presuppositional contribution of the implicative predicate (Coleman 1975).  Building on Baglini & Francez (2015), and drawing on insights provided by implicative data from Finnish, I propose an account of the implicative class which links the lexical presuppositional content of an implicative verb to inferences over the truth-value of its complement via a model of causal necessity and sufficiency between contextually-salient variables (Schulz 2011).  The proposal also provides a natural explanation for the commonalities between manage and weaker one-way implicatives like Finnish jaksaa 'have.strength', which only entail under one matrix polarity

Desemantizacija glagolske konstrukcije fail to x: kontrastivno korpusno istraživanje

The English verbal construction fail to x allows two interpretations: in the first, the verb has the full lexical meaning of not being successful in what you are trying to achieve, whereas in the second, it shows signs of semantic bleaching, and is thus interpreted as a grammaticalized marker of negation. Taking into account the syntactic and semantic properties of the construction fail to x, the present analysis examines its distribution in two types of corpora. General corpora (the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English) are used to examine the distribution of both – the non-bleached and bleached – meanings in English. To further elaborate the findings and contrast them on a cross-linguistic level, the parallel English-Slovenian corpus (European Commission’s DGT Translation Memory) is used to observe the translations of the construction fail to x into Slovenian. The parallel corpus of legislative language demonstrates the impact of register on the use of fail to x, and addresses the claims that the bleached fail is characteristically found in more formal registers.Engleska glagolska konstrukcija fail to x može biti protumačena na dva načina: prema prvom glagol nosi puno leksičko značenje ne uspijevanja u onome što se pokušava učiniti, dok prema drugom pokazuje znakove desemantizacije te se smatra gramatikaliziranim niječnim obilježivačem. Uzimajući u obzir sintaktička i semantička svojstva konstrukcije fail to x, ovo istraživanje ispituje njezinu distribuciju u dvjema vrstama korpusa. Za analizu distribucije obaju tipova u engleskome – s punim leksičkim značenjem i desemantiziranog – korišteni su opći korpusi (Britanski nacionalni korpus ‘BNC’ i Korpus suvremenog američkog engleskog ‘CoCA’). Za daljnju razradu dobivenih rezultata i njihovu usporedbu na međujezičnoj razini korišten je usporedni englesko-slovenski korpus (DGT Prijevodna memorija Europske komisije) kako bi se istražili prijevodi konstrukcije fail to x na slovenski. Usporedni korpus jezika pravne struke pokazuje utjecaj registra na uporabu konstrukcije fail to x te podupire tvrdnje da je desemantizirani glagol fail uobičajeno prisutan u formalnijim registrima

Syn-QG: Syntactic and Shallow Semantic Rules for Question Generation

Question Generation (QG) is fundamentally a simple syntactic transformation; however, many aspects of semantics influence what questions are good to form. We implement this observation by developing Syn-QG, a set of transparent syntactic rules leveraging universal dependencies, shallow semantic parsing, lexical resources, and custom rules which transform declarative sentences into question-answer pairs. We utilize PropBank argument descriptions and VerbNet state predicates to incorporate shallow semantic content, which helps generate questions of a descriptive nature and produce inferential and semantically richer questions than existing systems. In order to improve syntactic fluency and eliminate grammatically incorrect questions, we employ back-translation over the output of these syntactic rules. A set of crowd-sourced evaluations shows that our system can generate a larger number of highly grammatical and relevant questions than previous QG systems and that back-translation drastically improves grammaticality at a slight cost of generating irrelevant questions.Comment: Some of the results in the paper were incorrec

Presupposition: What went wrong?

When the first generation of generative linguists discovered presuppositions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the initial set of examples was quite small. Aspectual verbs like stop were discussed already by Greek philosophers, proper names, Kepler, and definite descriptions, the present king of France, go back to Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell by the turn of the century. Just in the span of a few years my generation of semanticists assembled a veritable zoo of "presupposition triggers" under the assumption that they were all of the same species. Generations of students have learned about presuppositions from Stephen Levinson's 1983 book on Pragmatics that contains a list of 13 types of presupposition triggers, an excerpt of an even longer unpublished list attributed to a certain Lauri Karttunen. My task in this presentation is to come clean and show why the items on Levinson's list should not have been lumped together. In retrospect it is strange that the early writings about presupposition by linguists and even by philosophers like Robert Stalnaker or Scott Soames do not make any reference to the rich palette of semantic relations they could have learned from Frege and later from Paul Grice. If we had known Frege's concepts of Andeutung  – Grice's conventional implicature  – and Nebengedanke, it would have been easy to see that there are types of author commitment that are neither entailments nor presuppositions

Desemantizacija glagolske konstrukcije fail to x: kontrastivno korpusno istraživanje

The English verbal construction fail to x allows two interpretations: in the first, the verb has the full lexical meaning of not being successful in what you are trying to achieve, whereas in the second, it shows signs of semantic bleaching, and is thus interpreted as a grammaticalized marker of negation. Taking into account the syntactic and semantic properties of the construction fail to x, the present analysis examines its distribution in two types of corpora. General corpora (the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English) are used to examine the distribution of both – the non-bleached and bleached – meanings in English. To further elaborate the findings and contrast them on a cross-linguistic level, the parallel English-Slovenian corpus (European Commission’s DGT Translation Memory) is used to observe the translations of the construction fail to x into Slovenian. The parallel corpus of legislative language demonstrates the impact of register on the use of fail to x, and addresses the claims that the bleached fail is characteristically found in more formal registers.Engleska glagolska konstrukcija fail to x može biti protumačena na dva načina: prema prvom glagol nosi puno leksičko značenje ne uspijevanja u onome što se pokušava učiniti, dok prema drugom pokazuje znakove desemantizacije te se smatra gramatikaliziranim niječnim obilježivačem. Uzimajući u obzir sintaktička i semantička svojstva konstrukcije fail to x, ovo istraživanje ispituje njezinu distribuciju u dvjema vrstama korpusa. Za analizu distribucije obaju tipova u engleskome – s punim leksičkim značenjem i desemantiziranog – korišteni su opći korpusi (Britanski nacionalni korpus ‘BNC’ i Korpus suvremenog američkog engleskog ‘CoCA’). Za daljnju razradu dobivenih rezultata i njihovu usporedbu na međujezičnoj razini korišten je usporedni englesko-slovenski korpus (DGT Prijevodna memorija Europske komisije) kako bi se istražili prijevodi konstrukcije fail to x na slovenski. Usporedni korpus jezika pravne struke pokazuje utjecaj registra na uporabu konstrukcije fail to x te podupire tvrdnje da je desemantizirani glagol fail uobičajeno prisutan u formalnijim registrima

Lexicosyntactic Inference in Neural Models

We investigate neural models' ability to capture lexicosyntactic inferences: inferences triggered by the interaction of lexical and syntactic information. We take the task of event factuality prediction as a case study and build a factuality judgment dataset for all English clause-embedding verbs in various syntactic contexts. We use this dataset, which we make publicly available, to probe the behavior of current state-of-the-art neural systems, showing that these systems make certain systematic errors that are clearly visible through the lens of factuality prediction

Subjunctive complements in Serbian/Croatian: Distributional issues

Subjunctive complements in Serbian/Croatian (SC) exhibit unusual distributional patterns because the range of predicates that select them is much wider than in most other languages. The result of this is a great semantic diversity of subjunctives in SC. I explain this diversity by demonstrating that different complements of this type exhibit significant differences in their structural make-up upon reaching the syntax-semantics interface, which produces different semantic inputs. The analysis I propose allows me to put all subjunctive complements in SC on a common semantic mood scale