Adverbial clauses with -ig and the “until -puzzle”

This paper is devoted to untangling some of the cross-linguistic puzzles that are associated with temporal adverbial clauses in general, and until-clauses in particular. After a brief introduction to the issues raised by the construction in Hungarian, the paper presents an overview of the complexities of until-clauses and prior attempts at analyzing these. Then, an account that was first proposed in MacDonald & Ürögdi (2009a;b; 2011) for English is presented, and it is argued that until-constructions do not require any of the special machinery that has been proposed to explain their behavior. The analysis outlined accounts for the properties of temporal adverbials formed withuntil andfor without reference to auxiliary concepts like “expletive negation” and “stativizing negation”. After this detour into English, we return to Hungarian, where until-clauses present a more complex picture than they do in Germanic, and we see how even these data can be accounted for without special stipulations. Finally, the results are tied into the general picture of temporal and event relativization (cf. Haegeman & Ürögdi 2010a;b), providing support for an analysis of a well-defined class of subordinate clauses involving operator movement

Gentzen-Prawitz Natural Deduction as a Teaching Tool

We report a four-years experiment in teaching reasoning to undergraduate students, ranging from weak to gifted, using Gentzen-Prawitz's style natural deduction. We argue that this pedagogical approach is a good alternative to the use of Boolean algebra for teaching reasoning, especially for computer scientists and formal methods practionners

A feature-based syntax/semantics interface

Syntax/Semantics interfaces using unification-based or feature-based formalisms are increasingly common in the existing computational linguistics literature. The primary reason for attempting to specify a syntax/semantics interface in feature structures is that it harmonizes so well with the way in which syntax is now normally described; this close harmony means that syntactic and semantic processing (and indeed other processing, see below) can be as tightly coupled as one wishes - indeed, there need not be any fundamental distinction between them at all. In this paper, we first point out several advantages of the unification-based view of the syntax/semantics interface over standard views. These include (i) a more flexible relation to nonsyntactic constraints on semantics; (ii) a characterization of semantic ambiguity, which in turn provides a framework in which to describe disambiguation, and (iii) the opportunity to underspecify meanings in a way difficult to reconcile with other views. The last point is illustrated with an application to the notorious scope ambiguity problem

Number-neutral bare plurals and the multiplicity implicature

Bare plurals (dogs) behave in ways that quantified plurals (some dogs) do not. For instance, while the sentence John owns dogs implies that John owns more than one dog, its negation John does not own dogs does not mean "John does not own more than one dog", but rather "John does not own a dog". A second puzzling behavior is known as the dependent plural reading; when in the scope of another plural, the 'more than one' meaning of the plural is not distributed over, but the existential force of the plural is. For example, My friends attend good schools requires that each of my friends attend one good school, not more, while at the same time being inappropriate if all my friends attend the same school. This paper shows that both these phenomena, and others, arise from the same cause. Namely, the plural noun itself does not assert 'more than one', but rather the plural denotes a predicate that is number neutral (unspecified for cardinality). The 'more than one' meaning arises as an scalar implicature, relying on the scalar relationship between the bare plural and its singular alternative, and calculated in a sub-sentential domain; namely, before existential closure of the event variable. Finally, implications of this analysis will be discussed for the analysis of the quantified noun phrases that interact with bare plurals, such as indefinite numeral DPs (three boys), and singular universals (every boy)

Constraint-based semantics

Montague\u27s famous characterization of the homomorphic relation between syntax and semantics naturally gives way in computational applications to CONSTRAINT-BASED formulations. This was originally motivated by the close harmony it provides with syntax, which is universally processed in a constraint-based fashion. Employing the same processing discipline in syntax and semantics allows that their processing (and indeed other processing) can be as tightly coupled as one wishes - indeed, there needn\u27t be any fundamental distinction between them at all. In this paper, we point out several advantages of the constraint-based view of semantics processing over standard views. These include (i) the opportunity to incorporate nonsyntactic constraints on semantics, such as those arising from phonology and context; (ii) the opportunity to formulate principles which generalize over syntax and semantics, such as those found in HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR; (iii) a characterization of semantic ambiguity, which in turn provides a framework in which to describe disambiguation, and (iv) the opportunity to underspecify meanings in a way difficult to reconcile with other views. The last point is illustrated with an application to scope ambiguity in which a scheme is developed which underspecifies scope but eschews auxiliary levels of logical form