Change-of-state Paradigms and the middle in Kinyarwanda

This paper investigates the derivational relationships among members of verbal paradigms in Kinyarwanda (Bantu JD.61; Rwanda) by pursuing two interrelated goals. First, I describe a variety of derivational strategies for marking transitive and intransitive variants in change-of-state verb paradigms. Second, I focus on the detransitivizing morpheme –ik which serves as one possible marking for intransitive members of these paradigms. Ultimately, I argue that this morpheme is a marker of middle voice, and the variety of readings which appear with this form can be subsumed under a single operation of argument suppression. Finally, I provide a discussion of reflexives and the apparent lack of a reflexive reading with –ik by arguing that this reading is blocked by either lexical reflexives or the reflexive prefix i–

Ad-nominal epistemic adverbials at the syntax–semantics interface

This paper provides an analysis of adnominal uses of epistemic adverbials at the syntax–semantics interface. The analysis is couched in Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) and Glue Semantics (GS)

Modification of DPs by epistemic adverbs

We examine two phenomena which, with the exception of Bogal-Allbritten & Weir (2017), have not been systematically studied together but are clearly related: (a) epistemic adverbs in ad-nominal positions modifying a DP outside of coordination and (b) epistemic adverbs modifying a DP within a coordination of DPs (Collins conjunction). Ad-nominal adverbs outside of coordinate structures have been claimed to have a strong reading giving rise to an existential entailment ("John visited maybe England" entails that John visited some place, and that place might have been England) while in Collins conjunctions, a weak reading with no existential implication has been claimed to be available ("John and perhaps Mary went to the store" means that either John went to the store, or John and Mary went to the store). We provide corpus data which show that weak and strong readings are available both inside and outside coordination, and we provide a unified analysis of both phenomena based in event semantics which allows modal adverbs to have sub-sentential scope and still target expressions of propositional type. Our analysis relies on the flexible approach to semantic composition afforded by glue semantics (Dalrymple 1999; Gotham 2018), where a functor can "ignore" unsaturated positions in its arguments

A basic logic for textual inference

This note describes a logical system based on ¡£ ¢ concepts ¤ and contexts, the system for textual inference ¡£ ¢ ¤ logic. The system is the beginnings of a logic that is a kind of “contexted” description logic, designed to support local linguistic inferences. This logic pays attention to the intensionality of linguistic constructs and to the need for tractability of inference in knowledge representation formalisms

Textual inference logic: Take two

Abstract. This note describes a logical system based on concepts and contexts, whose aim is to serve as a representation language for meanings of natural language sentences. The logic is a theoretical description of the output of an evolving implemented system, the system Bridge, which we are developing at parc, as part of the aquaint program. The note concentrates on the results of an experiment which changed the underlying ontology of the representation language from cyc to a version of WordNet/VerbNet.

For a Dynamic Semantics of Necessity Deontic Modals

Traditional approaches in deontic logic have focused on the so-called reportative reading of obligation sentences, by providing truth-functional semantics based on a primitive ideality order between possible worlds. Those approaches, however, do not take into account that, in natural language, obligation sentences primarly carry a prescriptive effect. The paper focuses precisely on that prescriptive character, and shows that the reportative reading can be derived from the prescriptive one. A dynamic, non truth-functional semantics for necessity deontic modals is developed, in which the ideality relations among possible worlds can be updated. Finally, it is proven that the semantics solves several of the classic deontic paradoxes