Approximating the limit: the interaction between 'almost' and some temporal connectives in Italian

International audienceThis paper focuses on the interpretation of the Italian approximative adverb 'almost' by primarily looking at cases in which it modifies temporal connectives, a domain which, to our knowledge, has been largely unexplored thus far. Consideration of this domain supports the need for a scalar account of the semantics of (close in spirit to Hitzeman's semantic analysis of , in: Canakis et al. (eds) Papers from the 28th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 1992). When paired with suitable analyses of temporal connectives, such an account can provide a simple explanation of the patterns of implication that are observed when modifies locational (e.g. 'when'), directional (e.g. 'until' and 'since'), and event-sequencing temporal connectives (e.g. 'before' and 'after'). A challenging empirical phenomenon that is observed is a contrast between the modification of and by , on the one hand, and the modification of and by the same adverb, on the other. While and behave symmetrically, a puzzling asymmetry is observed between and . To explain the asymmetry, we propose an analysis of and on which the former has the meaning of the temporal comparative 'earlier', while the latter is seen as an atomic predicate denoting temporal succession between events (Del Prete, Nat Lang Semantics 16:157-203, 2008). We show that the same pattern of implication observed for is attested when modifies overt comparatives, and propose a pragmatic analysis of this pattern that uniformly applies to both cases, thus providing new evidence for the claim that is underlyingly a comparative. A major point of this paper is a discussion of the notion of scale which is relevant for the semantics of ; in particular, we show that the notion of Horn (entailment-based) scale is not well-suited for handling modification of temporal connectives, and that a more general notion of scale is required in order to provide a uniform analysis of as a cross-categorial modifier

Multi-dimensional graph configuration for natural language processing

We introduce the new abstract notion of multi-dimensional lexicalized graph configuration problems, generalising over many important tasks in computational linguistics such as semantic assembly, surface realization and syntactic analysis, and integrating them. We present Extensible Dependency Grammar (XDG) as one instance of this notion