Presupposition projection as proof construction

Even though Van der Sandt's presuppositions as anaphora approach is empirically successful, it fails to give a formal account of the interaction between world-knowledge and presuppositions. In this paper, an algorithm is sketched which is based on the idea of presuppositions as anaphora. It improves on this approach by employing a deductive system, Constructive Type Theory (CTT), to get a formal handle on the way world-knowledge influences presupposition projection. In CTT, proofs for expressions are explicitly represented as objects. These objects can be seen as a generalization of DRT's discourse markers. They are useful in dealing with presuppositional phenomena which require world-knowledge, such as Clark's bridging examples and Beaver's conditional presuppositions

Perspectives on Bayesian Natural Language Semantics and Pragmatics

Bayesian interpretation is a technique in signal processing and its application to natural language semantics and pragmatics (BNLSP from here on and BNLI if there is no particular emphasis on semantics and pragmatics) is basically an engineering decision. It is a cognitive science hypothesis that humans emulate BNLSP. That hypothesis offers a new perspective on the logic of interpretation and the recognition of other people’s intentions in inter-human communication. The hypothesis also has the potential of changing linguistic theory, because the mapping from meaning to form becomes the central one to capture in accounts of phonology, morphology and syntax. Semantics is essentially read off from this mapping and pragmatics is essentially reduced to probability maximation within Grice’s intention recognition. Finally, the stochastic models used can be causal, thus incorporating new ideas on the analysis of causality using Bayesian nets. The paper explores and connects these different ways of being committed to BNLSP

The production and interpretation of anaphora and ellipsis

The paper tries to apply a psychological theory of language production and interpretation to the linguistic description of pronouns. The claim is that this is possible and helpful and that a full theory of the use and interpretation of pronouns is possible from this perspective, i.e.one that can both predict when pronouns are used and what is their antecedent. In particular, the theory should be able to explain the properties of pronoun resolution, pronoun selection in natural language generation and the grammaticalisation processes that lead to pronouns. The psychological theory proposed is motivated as an account of parity: the probable identity between the speaker intention and the hearer interpretation. It has four components: a minimal account of legal forms for a given input, speaker self-monitoring for a prioritised set of features, cue-based understanding and filtering by production. A good form for an intention is legal and marks the most prioritised features best, a good interpretation meets the production filter and is most strongly cued by the signal. Descriptively, the main component of self-monitoring for pronouns is an extension of the referential hierarchy (Gundel et al., 1993). Recency, frequency and relevance are effects of cue-based interpretation and central to pronoun resolution. The role of syntax is limited to the agreement features and subclassification of pronouns. The aim of the paper is not to contribute to pronoun resolution or generation but to explore the descriptive potential of a psychologically inspired account of parity in linguistic communication, with of course the hope that the understanding of pronouns benefits from this exercise