Mixed comparatives and the count-to-mass mapping

Previous works used comparative sentences like Sue has more gold/ diamonds than Dan to study the mass/count distinction, observing that mass nouns like gold trigger non-discrete comparative measurement, while count nouns like diamonds trigger counting. These works have not studied comparatives like Sue has more gold than diamonds, which combine a mass noun and a count noun. We show that naturally appearing examples of such ‘mixed comparatives’ usually invoke non-discrete measurement. We analyze the semantics of this effect and other coercisons of count nouns into mass-like meanings: pseudo-partitives (20kg of books), degree interpretations of counting-based denominal adjectives (more bilingual), ‘grinding’ contexts (bicycle all over the place) and number unspecified determiners (most, a lot of ). Based of this analysis we propose a revised system of Rothstein’s context-driven counting. In the proposed account, ‘impure’ semantic atoms replace the role of contextual indices in Rothstein’s account. The effacing/grinding ambiguity in Rothstein’s system is replaced by one general count-to-mass mapping. The common rock-like mass/count polysemy is used as emblematic for this countto-mass mapping instead of the rather rare carpet/ing alternation in Rothstein’s proposal. We show advantages of this revised system in treating count-to-mass phenomena, including the unacceptability of mixed comparatives like #more rock than rocks

Rhythm-Speech Correlations in a Corpus of Senegalese Drum Language

In some African cultures, drumming is used for expressing linguistic meanings. Our research focuses on Senegalese musical traditions of encoding linguistic messages on the sabar drums. Senegalese drummers have the practice of playing drums in correlation to speech. We consider rhythms and their linguistic correlates as being part of a Sabar drum language. The long-term goal of this investigation is to establish the linguistic properties of the Sabar drum language. To this end, this work relies on two kinds of research materials collected from Senegalese drummers: bàkks (classical sabar phrases, not improvised on the spot) and sabar improvisations including their translation to Wolof. We study the regularities between Wolof units and sabar rhythms in the collected data. We tested the hypothesis of a syllable-level correspondence between Sabar and Wolof, assuming that each sabar stroke represents a syllable or a number of syllables in Wolof, where the nature of the correspondence depends on the phonetic or phonological properties of a vowel in a syllable. The analysis has shown that different drum strokes are more commonly associated with different types of vowels (front, central or back; open, mid-open/mid-closed or closed vowels)

Presupposition Projection and Repair Strategies in Trivalent Semantics

In binary propositional constructions S1 con S2, the Strong Kleene connectives explain filtering of S1’s and S2’s presuppositions depending on their logical relations with their non-presuppositional content. However, the presuppositions derived by the Strong Kleene connectives are weak conditional presuppositions, which raise the “proviso problem” in cases where no filtering is motivated. Weak Kleene connectives do not face this problem, but only because their presuppositions are often too strong, and hence do not account for filtering phenomena altogether. While various mechanisms have been proposed to allow filtering without the proviso problem, their relations with the standard trivalent Kleene systems have remained unclear. This paper shows that by sacrificing truth-functionality, we uncover a rich domain of possibilities in trivalent semantics in between the Weak Kleene and Strong Kleene connectives. These systems derive presupposition filtering while avoiding the proviso problem. The Kleene-style operators studied are generalized to arbitrary binary functions, which further clarifies the connection between their different “repair” strategies and presupposition projection

Senegalese Sabar – is it a drum language?

Current research focuses on the Senegalese drum language – Sabar. Sabar rhythms are derived from speech in Wolof and therefore represent verbal utterances. This paper reports a study that is meant to uncover regularities between Wolof units and Sabar strokes given a dataset collected in Senegal. Research materials include drum and speech recordings collected during field trips to Senegal. This data is analysed, and the first analysis is presented in the article

Karttunen logic for presupposition projection

Presuppositions of complex sentences are empirically distinguished from the propo-sitional contexts that render a sentence coherent. This distinction is at the heart of theprovisoproblemfor presupposition projection. Here we show that Karttunen’sinference-basedap-proach in his proposals from the early 1970s can be used to directly avoid the proviso problem.Inference-based projection is different from trivalent accounts or satisfaction-based methods indistinguishing presuppositions from admittance conditions on contexts. This distinction is usedwithin a new propositional fragment, whose rules for updating local contexts and satisfying pre-suppositions are explained using the same Incrementality principle of previous accounts, butwithout any of the additional assumptions that have been used to tackle the proviso problem

On Presupposition Projection with Trivalent Connectives

A basic puzzle about presuppositions concerns their projection from propositional constructions. This problem has regained much attention in the last decade since many of its prominent accounts, including variants of the trivalent Strong Kleene connectives, suffer from the so-called proviso problem. This paper argues that basic insights of the Strong Kleene system can be used without invoking the proviso problem. It is shown that the notion of determinant value that underlies the definition of the Strong Kleene connectives leads to a natural generalization of the filtering conditions proposed in Karttunen’s article “Presuppositions of compound sentences” (LI, 1973). Incorporating this generalized condition into an incremental projection algorithm avoids the proviso problem as well as the derivation of conditional presuppositions. It is argued that the same effects that were previously modelled using conditional presuppositions may be viewed as effects of presupposition suspension and contextual inference on presupposition projection

DRS at MRP 2020: Dressing up Discourse Representation Structures as Graphs

Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) is a formal account for representing the meaning of natural language discourse. Meaning in DRT is modeled via a Discourse Representation Structure (DRS), a meaning representation with a model-theoretic interpretation, which is usually depicted as nested boxes. In contrast, a directed labeled graph is a common data structure used to encode semantics of natural language texts. The paper describes the procedure of dressing up DRSs as directed labeled graphs to include DRT as a new framework in the 2020 shared task on Cross-Framework and Cross-Lingual Meaning Representation Parsing. Since one of the goals of the shared task is to encourage unified models for several semantic graph frameworks, the conversion procedure was biased towards making the DRT graph framework somewhat similar to other graph-based meaning representation frameworks

On the grammar of a Senegalese Drum Language

Senegalese drummers often recite improvised texts while playing, considering the texts to reflect the rhythms’ meanings. Unlike in other African traditions, drums are rarely used as a speech surrogate. It is shown here that Senegalese rhythms involve language-like grammar rules, which are partly independent of the grammar of the players’ spoken language. The rhythms do not acoustically mimic speech, and the speech-drum matching is based on a lexicon of rhythms and their meanings. Players use this lexicon to produce an unlimited number of meaningful rhythms. The analysis of complex rhythms shows nonlinear alignments with spoken sentences containing plurals, definites, and negation. It is concluded that rhythms are generated by drum-specific grammatical rules. The musical functions of the drum grammar make it especially relevant to current work on language and music, and to ongoing debates between functionalist and formalist approaches to grammar.

Solving Textual Entailment with the Theorem Prover for Natural Language

We present a theorem prover for natural language and show how it processes various types of textual entailment problems. The prover itself is based on a tableau system for natural logic that employs logical forms similar to linguistic expressions. With respect to the problems drawn from textual entailment datasets, a wide-range of the judgments of the prover are discussed, including both correct and incorrect ones. The analysis shows that the false proofs, which are extremely rare, are mainly due to the wrong lexical senses or the noisy gold labels of the dataset. Knowledge sparsity is identified as the main reason for the failure in proof search