In Search of an Integrated Logic of Conviction and Intention

According to a two-level criterion for combination tests in the field of ordinary language (C-CT), moral 'ought'-sentences may be taken to imply 'I intend'-sentences partly semantically and partly pragmatically. If so, a trenchant linguistic analysis of the concept of moral obligation cannot do without a non-classical logic which allows to model these important kinds of ordinary-language implications by means of purely syntactical derivations. For this purpose, an integrated logic of conviction and intention has been tentatively devised by way of a doxastically, buletically, and pragmatically extended calculus of natural deduction. This system of buletic logic cannot even be launched without one or two derivation rules of deductive closedness. However, these very closedness rules appear to be responsible for buletic paradoxes which are analogous to paradoxes long since known from other, less exotic branches of logic but at first sight look much more virulent. After having scrutinized two potential strategies for coping with the paradoxes of buletic logic, finally we can convince ourselves that these paradoxes, as well as their familiar non-buletic counterparts, are but apparent paradoxes, provided we consistently lean on C-CT and do not let pragmatical considerations intrude into purely logical ones

Efficient Correlated Topic Modeling with Topic Embedding

Correlated topic modeling has been limited to small model and problem sizes due to their high computational cost and poor scaling. In this paper, we propose a new model which learns compact topic embeddings and captures topic correlations through the closeness between the topic vectors. Our method enables efficient inference in the low-dimensional embedding space, reducing previous cubic or quadratic time complexity to linear w.r.t the topic size. We further speedup variational inference with a fast sampler to exploit sparsity of topic occurrence. Extensive experiments show that our approach is capable of handling model and data scales which are several orders of magnitude larger than existing correlation results, without sacrificing modeling quality by providing competitive or superior performance in document classification and retrieval.Comment: KDD 2017 oral. The first two authors contributed equall

Scare-quoting and incorporation

I explain a mechanism I call “incorporation,” that I think is at work in a wide range of cases often put under the heading of “scare-quoting.” Incorporation is flagging some words in one’s own utterance to indicate that they are to be interpreted as if uttered by some other speaker in some other context, while supplying evidence to one’s interpreter enabling them to identify that other speaker and context. This mechanism gives us a way to use others’ vocabularies and contexts, thereby extending our expressive capacities on the fly. Explaining incorporation involves explaining intra-sentential shifts in lexicon and in context. Shifts of the former sort are familiar to linguists under the heading of “code-switching.” Shifts of the latter sort have been less explored; accordingly I explain how to modify Kaplan’s logic of demonstratives to allow for such shifts. I compare the incorporation account of scare-quoting with accounts offered by Brandom, Recanati, Geurts and Maier, Benbaji, Predelli, and Shan. Finally I note a possible implication concerning the speech act of assertion: that you can properly assert a content you do not believe, let alone know, because part of it is expressed with words you do not understand

On the effect of pluralization on the numeralization of nouns in English and Polish : a contrastive corpus-based study

On the basis of corpus-derived data, the present paper examines the collocational patterns of the singular and the plural forms of a pair of etymologically and semantically related quantifying nouns (QNs), namely English heap and its Polish equivalent kupa 'heap'. The primary aim is to determine their respective levels of numeralization, operationalized as the frequency of co-occurrence with animate and abstract N2-collocates in purely quantificational uses, in an attempt to establish whether, and to what extent, the addition of the plurality morpheme bears on the grammaticalization of a nominal of this kind into an indefinite quantifier. Following the observations arrived at by Brems (2003, 2011), the hypothesis is that pluralization should yield a facilitating effect on the numeralization of nouns referring to large quantities by amplifying their inherent scalar implications. The results demonstrate that whereas heaps indeed exhibits a higher percentage of such numeralized uses than heap, kupy ‘heaps’ has turned out to be grammaticalized in the quantifying function to a markedly lesser degree than kupa ‘heap’. It is argued that this apparently aberrant behaviour of kupy ‘heaps’ can nonetheless be elucidated in terms of the specificity of numeralization in Polish, since at its advanced, morphosyntactic stage, the process in question affects solely the singular (accusative) forms of QNs

On the notion “inchoative verb” in KinyaRwanda

This article is published with the permission of Peeters Publishers.Certain verbs in KinyaRwanda—kú-rwáàrà “to be(come) sick” and gú-túùrà “to live/reside,” for example—have been considered by many linguists (cf. Coupez 1980, Overdulve 1976, Kimenyi 1973) to be stative verbs. The present analysis suggests that it would be better to consider them as “inchoative verbs,” of which three sub-classes can be defined according to linguistic evidence proper to KinyaRwanda itself. The significant aspect of the characterization of inchoatives is the punctual nature attributed to the nucleus of the events named by these verbs; a phenomenon which determines to a great extent their observed linguistic behaviour