Natural Language Semantics and Its Computable Analysis

Part 4: Language CognitionInternational audienceWith an illustrative example of $$5 \times 3 = 5 \times 3$$, the first section explained the major problem in the natural language interpretation process. The second section introduced Frege’s famous idea of ‘sense’. And this paper argues that Frege’s definition is not constructive. The Third section contributes a subtle amendment to the syntax of IL (Intentional Logic). Traditionally, the three basic types e, t and s were not treated as a part of vocabulary of IL, while this paper argues that this treatment has allowed a much explicit way to coding programs in real algorithm. Given this treatment, “an expression $$\alpha$$ of type $$\tau$$” is shortened to “$$\alpha |\tau$$”. In the end of section three, this paper gave a natural language sentence to illustrate the intention and extension operators. And furthermore, there comes the analyses of information preservation ability of these operators

Three Types Of Polarity

There can be no doubt that the phenomenon of polarity, though usually the subject of syntactic and semantic study, is essentially of a purely lexical nature.' This is evident to anyone who is familiar with the distribution of so-called negative polarity items. The fact that expressions such as hoeven and ook maar iets in Dutch, brauchen and auch nur irgendetwas in German, or the English cognates need and anything (at all) require the presence of a negative element somewhere in the sentence, is a property which is intrinsic to the items in question and must therefore be accounted for in the lexicon. If there is any doubt as to the lexical nature of this phenomenon, it is completely eradicated by the distinction between negative polarity items of the weak and those of the strong type. In order to get a clear view of the content of this distinction, one does well to take the following Dutch examples into consideration.