Verbs, times and objects

The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of the influential verb typology developed by Zeno Vendler for recent debates in the philosophy of perception. Section one explains the verb typology and explains how Vendler applies it to different perceptual notions. Section two identifies various questions that arise from observations in Vendler’s paper that suggest that there is a match between the temporal properties of perceptual verb objects and the complex verb phrases of which they are a part. Subsequent discussion focuses on just one of these questions. Section three identifies and rejects a simple proposal about how to answer this question. Section four develops a ‘limited matching’ account. In the visual perception of events and processes there seems to be a match between the temporal duration, order and location of the events and processes which are the objects of perception and the subject’s perceiving them. But this matching is absent in cases of the perception of primary substances; objects which manifestly endure over time. Section five identifies and responds to some criticisms of this matching account. The conclusion notes some consequences of the discussion for contemporary debates about the temporal characteristics of perception

Expressing ‘The Structure of’ in Homotopy Type Theory

As a new foundational language for mathematics with its very different idea as to the status of logic, we should expect homotopy type theory to shed new light on some of the problems of philosophy which have been treated by logic. In this article, definite description, and in particular its employment within mathematics, is formulated within the type theory. Homotopy type theory has been proposed as an inherently structuralist foundational language for mathematics. Using the new formulation of definite descriptions, opportunities to express ‘the structure of’ within homotopy type theory are explored, and it is shown there is little or no need for this expression

Giving the benefit of the doubt

Faced with evidence that what is person said is false, we can nevertheless trust them and so believe what they say ó choosing to give them the benefit of the doubt. This is particularly notable when the person is a friend, or someone we are close to. Towards such persons, we demonstrate a remarkable epistemic partiality. We can trust, and so believe, our friends even when the balance of the evidence suggests that what they tell us is false. And insofar as belief is possible, it is also possible to acquire testimonial knowledge on those occasions when the friends know what they tell us. This paper seeks to explain these psychological and epistemological possibilities

Must we measure what we mean?

This paper excavates a debate concerning the claims of ordinary language philosophers that took place during the middle of the last century. The debate centers on the status of statements about “what we say”. On one side of the debate, critics of ordinary language philosophy argued that statements about “what we say” should be evaluated as empirical observations about how people do in fact speak, on a par with claims made in the language sciences. By that standard, ordinary language philosophers were not entitled to the claims that they made about what we would say about various topics. On the other side of the debate, defenders of the methods of ordinary language philosophy sought to explain how philosophers can be entitled to statements about what we would say without engaging in extensive observations of how people do in fact use language. In this paper I defend the idea that entitlement to claims about what we say can be had in a way that doesn’t require empirical observation, and I argue that ordinary language philosophers are (at least sometimes) engaged in a different project than linguists or empirically minded philosophers of language, which is subject to different conditions of success

Structuring an event ontology for disease outbreak detection

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>This paper describes the design of an event ontology being developed for application in the machine understanding of infectious disease-related events reported in natural language text. This event ontology is designed to support timely detection of disease outbreaks and rapid judgment of their alerting status by 1) bridging a gap between layman's language used in disease outbreak reports and public health experts' deep knowledge, and 2) making multi-lingual information available.</p> <p>Construction and content</p> <p>This event ontology integrates a model of experts' knowledge for disease surveillance, and at the same time sets of linguistic expressions which denote disease-related events, and formal definitions of events. In this ontology, rather general event classes, which are suitable for application to language-oriented tasks such as recognition of event expressions, are placed on the upper-level, and more specific events of the experts' interest are in the lower level. Each class is related to other classes which represent participants of events, and linked with multi-lingual synonym sets and axioms.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We consider that the design of the event ontology and the methodology introduced in this paper are applicable to other domains which require integration of natural language information and machine support for experts to assess them. The first version of the ontology, with about 40 concepts, will be available in March 2008.</p

Grammatical aspect and L2 learners’ on-line processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences in English: A self-paced reading study with German, Dutch and French L2 learners

The results of a self-paced reading study with advanced German, Dutch and French second language (L2) learners of English showed that their online comprehension of early closure (EC) sentences which are initially misanalysed by native English speakers (e.g. While John hunted the frightened rabbit escaped) was affected by whether or not, like English, their first language (L1) encodes aspect grammatically (French) or only via lexical means (German, Dutch). The English and the higher proficiency French participants showed a processing asymmetry in their online reading of the temporarily ambiguous sentences, assumed to be caused by the difference in the aspectual perspective a comprehender takes when initial verbs appear in the past simple vs. the past progressive. In contrast, the German and Dutch learners, irrespective of proficiency, treated both progressive and simple sentences in the same way, despite the fact that all the L2 learners were matched according to their metalinguistic knowledge of English aspectual distinctions. Furthermore, despite patterning with the German learners online, the Dutch L2 learners’ offline judgments were more akin to those of the English native speakers and the French L2 learners, showing an effect of aspect, which could be argued to lend support to the idea that progressive aspect may be becoming grammaticalized in Dutch. Taken together, the results of this study add to our growing understanding of cross-linguistic influences during online L2 sentence processing, and differences between L2 parsing and learners’ metalinguistic L2 performance

On the V-DE Construction in Mandarin Chinese

The paper proposes a novel classification and analysis of the V-DE construction in Mandarin Chinese. On this proposal, the V-DE construction is divided into two types, predicative and non-predicative. The predicative type can be further divided into entity-predicative V-DE constructions and eventuality-predicative V-DE constructions. With respect to the analysis of the V-DE construction, the paper identifies four different structures. It points out that the de-part (i.e. the part after and marked by 得-de) in most V-DE constructions is a clause with or without an overt subject. Moreover, with respect to the cases where the de-part has an overt NP that can be interpreted as the Patient argument of the verb before -de and at the same time is semantically compatible with the VP or AP in the de-part, the paper proposes that the overt NP in such cases is syntactically the subject of the de-clause and syntactically is not the direct object of V-DE or the verb before -de. Finally, when the de-part of an entity-predicative V-DE construction has an overt NP between -de and the predicate of the de-clause, the AP or VP of the de-part generally needs to be predicated of the overt NP in the de-part. This constraint, however, can be occasionally relaxed to allow for a pragmatically-inducted interpretation when both of the following conditions are met: (i) the de-part is a well-formed clause in both form and meaning and (ii) the pragmatically-induced interpretation is pragmatically plausible