Syntax

It is commonly assumed that images, whether in the world or in the head, do not have a privileged analysis into constituent parts. They are thought to lack the sort of syntactic structure necessary for representing complex contents and entering into sophisticated patterns of inference. I reject this assumption. “Image grammars” are models in computer vision that articulate systematic principles governing the form and content of images. These models are empirically credible and can be construed as literal grammars for images. (...) Images can have rich syntactic structure, though of a markedly different form than sentences in language. (shrink)

Perception involves the processing of content or information about the world. In what form is this content represented? I argue that perception is widely compositional. The perceptual system represents many stimulus features (including shape, orientation, and motion) in terms of combinations of other features (such as shape parts, slant and tilt, common and residual motion vectors). But compositionality can take a variety of forms. The ways in which perceptual representations compose are markedly different from the ways in which sentences or (...) thoughts are thought to be composed. I suggest that the thesis that perception is compositional is not itself a concrete hypothesis with specific predictions; rather it affords a productive framework for developing and evaluating specific empirical hypotheses about the form and content of perceptual representations. The question is not just whether perception is compositional, but how. Answering this latter question can provide fundamental insights into perception. (shrink)

The need for the definite article to express a singular kind ("the cat") in the Germanic languages is predicted by Borer's (2005) structural approach to the mass-count distinction. Chierchia's (1998) "down" operator can apply to nPs to derive mass kinds ("rice") and to DivPs to derive plural kinds ("cats"), but there is no determinerless structure that exclusively denotes properties of atomic individuals to which this same operator can apply to derive singular kinds. The only alternative is the process that Chierchia (...) proposes for plural kinds in Romance, where the definite article returns a maximal individual that can be intensionalized into a kind. In articleless languages like Mandarin, this account allows for a universal property-denoting denotation of nP and simultaneously captures the fact that singular kinds have the same distribution as mass kinds. (shrink)

Attitude verbs like ‘believe’ and ‘want’ exhibit neg-raising: an ascription of the form a doesn’t believe that p tends to convey that a disbelieves—i.e., believes the negation of—p. In ‘Belief is Weak’, Hawthore et al. observe that neg-raising does not occur with verbs like ‘know’ or ‘need’. According to them, an ascription of the form a believes that p is true just in case a is in a belief state that makes p more likely than not, and so—excepting cases of (...) complete indifference—a will either believe p or disbelieve p. I expand and revise this explanation: so-called ‘weak’ attitude verbs are used in ascriptions of an opinion about some subject matter S—a kind of selection from among the elements of S—and these ascriptions are themselves responsive to conversational topics that presuppose that the subject of the ascription has an opinion about S. ‘Strong’ attitude verbs denote more direct relationships between subject and world. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine some basic linguistic abilities in a small sample of adults with minimal receptive vocabulary, whose receptive mental verbal age ranges from 1;2 to 3;10. In particular, we examine whether the participants in our study understand noun phrases consisting of a noun modified by an adjective. We use stimuli that they can recognise by name. Except for one participant, we find that, while all of them understand the noun and adjective in isolation, none seems to understand (...) these noun phrases, which means that they seem to not do linguistic composition. In order to test whether the difficulty is linguistic or conceptual, we ran two other studies, one on concept composition, and the other on iconic symbolic composition (composition of pictograms). Results suggest that linguistic composition is particularly difficult in this population, and that vocabulary breadth may not predict compositional abilities. (shrink)

Academic discussions of the count/mass distinction in Chinese feature three general problems, upon which this essay critically reflects: 1) Most studies focus either on modern or on classical Chinese thus representing parallel discussions that never intersect; 2) studies on count/mass grammar are often detached from reflections on count/mass semantics, which results in serious theoretical and terminological flaws; 3) approaches to Chinese often crucially depend on observations of English grammar and semantics, as, e.g., many/much vs. few/little patterns, the use of plural (...) inflections, etc., which is seldom justified. The article investigates the relevant discourse on the count/mass issue in classical and modern Chinese and concludes with exploring two distinct areas related to countability: the semantics of singular in contexts in which objects are introduced as referential-indefinite and the semantics of number and countability as revealed in diangu. (shrink)

In this chapter, Nonsense is approached as a category that reveals a close relation both to order and disorder, rationality and illogicality, conventionality and arbitrariness, reality and dream. Among its various illustrations, quite a prominent role is assigned to the Duchess’ sentence, which, in spite of being universally acknowledged as one of the best pieces of Nonsense, is rarely discussed in detail in philosophical and literary investigations: ‘Be what you would seem to be’ - or, if you’d like it put (...) more simply – ‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’. (shrink)

Este manuscrito es una fiel transcripción de la entrevista que se realizó al doctor Gilberto Sánchez Cabezas, miembro de la Academia Chilena de la Lengua. La información que brindó el académico en este intercambio de preguntas fue esencial para tener un panorama de cómo fluctúa una investigación medular de las lenguas originarias o aborígenes de su país. Asimismo, hizo algunas precisiones en función de las traducciones de escritores canónicos que existen en lenguas proteiformes y cómo estas son plasmadas con modificaciones (...) que podrían alterar en demasía el contenido. Para ello, el académico usa con frecuencia algunos ejemplos de palabras quechuas, aimaras o castellanas con sus respectivos significados, además de citar fragmentos de autores como Paul Verlaine, Attila József, García Lorca, Goethe y Homero, con la volición de que se corrobore la traslación semántica y fonológica. (shrink)

Victoria Espinosa Santos es miembro de la Academia Chilena de la Lengua desde 2017 y forma parte de la Comisión de Lexicografía. Esta entrevista, realizada de forma virtual el 6 de julio de 2021, se concentra en los siguientes temas: las variaciones del español de América, el rol de las lenguas indígenas en el español de Chile, el trabajo de las academias de la Lengua Española, el rol de las academias en relación con la lingüística y la literatura.

Many philosophers suppose that sometimes we think we are saying or thinking something meaningful when in fact we’re not saying or thinking anything at all: we are producing nonsense. But what is nonsense? An account of nonsense must, I argue, meet two constraints. The first constraint requires that nonsense can be rationally engaged with, not just mentioned. In particular, we can reason with nonsense and use it within that-clauses. An account which fails to meet this constraint cannot explain why nonsense (...) appears meaningful. The second constraint requires that nonsense does not express thoughts. An account which fails to meet this constraint undercuts the critical force of the concept of nonsense. I offer an account which meets both constraints. The central idea is that to be under the illusion that some nonsense makes sense is to enter a pretence that the nonsense is meaningful. (shrink)

The logicality of language is the hypothesis that the language system has access to a ‘natural’ logic that can identify and filter out as unacceptable expressions that have trivial meanings—that is, that are true/false in all possible worlds or situations in which they are defined. This hypothesis helps explain otherwise puzzling patterns concerning the distribution of various functional terms and phrases. Despite its promise, logicality vastly over-generates unacceptability assignments. Most solutions to this problem rest on specific stipulations about the properties (...) of logical form—roughly, the level of linguistic representation which feeds into the interpretation procedures—and have substantial implications for traditional philosophical disputes about the nature of language. Specifically, contextualism and semantic minimalism, construed as competing hypotheses about the nature and degree of context-sensitivity at the level of logical form, suggest different approaches to the over-generation problem. In this paper, I explore the implications of pairing logicality with various forms of contextualism and semantic minimalism. I argue that to adequately solve the over-generation problem, logicality should be implemented in a constrained contextualist framework. (shrink)

María José Rincón González nació en Sevilla (España) y reside en República Dominicana desde 1992. Es miembro de número de la Academia Dominicana de la Lengua (ADL) desde el 2011 y directora del Instituto Guzmán Ariza de Lexicografía. Asimismo, es miembro correspondiente de la Real Academia Española (RAE) y miembro del consejo asesor de Fundéu Guzmán Ariza. Con respecto a su formación superior, es doctora en Filología por la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) y máster en Lexicografía por (...) la Universidad de Sevilla y la UNED. Ha participado en congresos internacionales y ha contribuido en las ediciones de diccionarios del idioma español. Entre sus publicaciones de artículos, se encuentran las que pertenecen al Diario Libre y el Boletín de la Academia Dominicana de la Lengua, entre otros textos, tales como “La antroponimia femenina dominicana (1945-1995)” (2002), “El Diccionario de la lengua” (2013), “Presentación del Diccionario de americanismos de la ASALE” (2013), “Variantes dialectales del léxico dominicano en el Diccionario de americanismos” (2016), “La lematización de variantes gráficas en el Diccionario del español dominicano” (2017) y “El Diccionario de criollismos, primer diccionario dominicano” (2020). De igual modo, ha publicado en libros y capítulos de libros. Entre ellos se encuentran el Diccionario del español dominicano (2013), “El nacimiento de un nuevo diccionario: el Diccionario del español dominicano” (2017) y De la eñe a la zeta (2019). (shrink)

Recent discoveries of semantic compositionality in Japanese tits have enlivened the discussions on the presence of this phenomenon in wild animal communication. Data on semantic compositionality in wild apes are lacking, even though language experiments with captive apes have demonstrated they are capable of semantic compositionality. In this paper, I revisit the study by Boesch (Hum. Evol. 6:81–89, 1991) who investigated drumming sequences by an alpha male in a chimpanzee (_Pan troglodytes_) community in the Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire. A (...) reanalysis of the data reveals that the alpha male produced semantically compositional combined messages of travel direction change and resting period initiation. Unlike the Japanese tits, the elements of the compositional expression were not simply juxtaposed but displayed structural reduction, while one of the two elements in the expression coded the meanings of both elements. These processes show relative resemblance to blending and fusion in human languages. Also unlike the tits, the elements of the compositional expression did not have a fixed order, although there was a fixed distribution of drumming events across the trees used for drumming. Because the elements of the expression appear to carry verb-like meanings, the compositional expression also resembles simple verb-verb constructions and short paratactic combinations of two clauses found across languages. In conclusion, the reanalysis suggests that semantic compositionality and phenomena resembling paratactic combinations of two clauses might have been present in the communication of the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, not necessarily in the vocal modality. (shrink)

A *qualation* does not contain merely references to qualia, but contains actual qualia. There are many differences to equations. Qualations are irreducibly 1st-person and are required for the statement of a hard problem.

We investigate the morphosyntax of qualitative binominal constructions (QBCs) in a Southern Italo-Romance language from the Apulian town of San Marco in Lamis. QBCs are complex noun phrases like ‘a jewelN1 of a villageN2’, appearing here prepositionally (with the preposition də, ‘of’, allowing definites, indefinites, and demonstratives) and non-prepositionally (only allowing definites with definite articles and not proper names). We propose that in the latter, a categorial match in the determiner layer, which we call ‘match D’, relates N1 and N2. (...) N1 is embedded as a noun, allowing for: 1) the recursive DP strategy of non-prepositional genitives, and 2) the extension of this mechanism to QBCs. This leads to the impossibility of syntactic extraction, which we connect to the concept of phase. With non-denominal N1s, N1’s article is treated as a head-agreeing adjectival linker, forming a constituent with the modifier but agreeing with the head. A phrase is interpreted as a QBC if N1 and N2 share the same number features and if the features of N1 do not allow for it to be interpreted as the possessum of N2 . We also discuss external agreement with the construction, presenting data supporting the relevance of the [+HUMAN] feature for agreement relations. (forthcoming, Italian Journal of Linguistics). (shrink)

En esta entrevista se resolvieron las interrogantes formuladas y orientadas a la preservación de la lengua castellana en Hispanoamérica. En principio, se abordaron tres temas fundamentales derivados de esta propuesta: la escritura, la investigación y la publicidad. Con el primer tópico, se discernió la función de las normativas, los diccionarios y los manuales elaborados por la Real Academia Española. Su intervención es enjundiosa, ya que direcciona al lector y académico al perfeccionamiento de su lenguaje, con la finalidad de que no (...) reincida en errores gramaticales. El segundo rubro abarca la investigación. Esta fue destacada porque facilita la interacción de los hablantes de la lengua castellana con las metodologías que se instauran para configurar un lenguaje totémico. Además, se asume que la única manera de difundir y contribuir a ese conocimiento sería por medio de las publicaciones científicas. La tercera variante consiste en cómo se inserta esta inquietud en torno a la lengua castellana en los ámbitos publicitarios. Esto es neurálgico por su audiencia limitada y el desinterés de respaldo por los Gobiernos. Frente a ello, consideré que el Dr. Ignacio Bosque Muñoz era la persona idónea para confrontar esta realidad sobre el castellano. Su rol importante en la RAE y la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (ASALE) lo amerita, así como sus publicaciones orientadas al estudio del idioma con enfoques gramaticales. Con su interacción, la volición de este trabajo se evidenciará con la explicación del panorama vigente de la lengua y su preservación, como cuando uno desea comprender el Quijote, entender las contribuciones gramaticales y lexicales de la RAE y la ASALE o cuestionar la proliferación del idioma desde los medios de comunicación. La auscultación de esas oscilaciones será el aporte de esta entrevista. (shrink)

There are two dominant approaches to quantification: the Fregean and the Tarskian. While the Tarskian approach is standard and familiar, deep conceptual objections have been pressed against its employment of variables as genuine syntactic and semantic units. Because they do not explicitly rely on variables, Fregean approaches are held to avoid these worries. The apparent result is that the Fregean can deliver something that the Tarskian is unable to, namely a compositional semantic treatment of quantification centered on truth and reference. (...) We argue that the Fregean approach faces the same choice: abandon compositionality or abandon the centrality of truth and reference to semantic theory. Indeed, we argue that developing a fully compositional semantics in the tradition of Frege leads to a typographic variant of the most radical of Tarskian views: variabilism, the view that names should be modeled as Tarskian variables. We conclude with the consequences of this result for Frege's distinction between sense and reference. (shrink)

English is spoken all around the world as it is chosen as the second language to speak within most of the countries. However, from the ancient history of the British to come into this South Asian region, the entrance of English as a speaking language happened. Though, after some centuries, the British went out of the mainland of India, it remains the second-largest spoken language there. Here comes another fact; many words in Standard English changed its form. So, this made (...) the dialects as much as changed that many ones refer to English in India as Indian English. In this present time, though, there are hundreds of languages chosen to speak Indian English that differ in many ways. The characters playing English roles also have a dialect changing of English in somewhat ways. Though the grammars and principal terms of English are still the same for Indian English, deviations came across the spoken language in many attributes. This paper identifies the entrance of English in India, the deviation of dialect change in Indian English with examples of characters still making way to English (Both British and Hollywood) movies with the dialects of Indian English many ways. The paper studies those ways and deviations of words in English in India that they use and call it Indian English. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es caracterizar la fuente de Sucesos en una de las ciudades más peligrosas del mundo. Para ello, se aplicará una metodología de análisis y de sistematización gramatical crítico-descriptivo de la redacción, a la luz de la gramática, de las normas ortográficas y de criterios de lingüistas clásicos, contemporáneos y de periodistas- lingüistas. Estas subcategorías pueden emplearse en otra fuente periodística de cualquier otro medio de comunicación hispanoparlante y también arrojarán un diagnóstico lingüístico sobre la redacción. (...) Aunque se recurre a la lingüística aplicada, el enfoque será periodístico y gramatical. El corpus está compuesto por 149 notas de Sucesos, de las cuales se tomaron en cuenta títulos y cuerpos de las notas. Esta investigación reflejará las implicaciones éticas de, por ejemplo, el uso de la voz pasiva y del gerundio o de la omisión de las comillas. (shrink)

View more Abstract If logical truth is necessitated by sheer syntax, mathematics is categorially unlike logic even if all mathematics derives from definitions and logical principles. This contrast gets obscured by the plausibility of the Synonym Substitution Principle implicit in conceptions of analyticity: synonym substitution cannot alter sentence sense. The Principle obviously fails with intercepting: nonuniform term substitution in logical sentences. ‘Televisions are televisions’ and ‘TVs are televisions’ neither sound alike nor are used interchangeably. Interception synonymy gets assumed because logical (...) sentences and their synomic interceptions have identical factual content, which seems to exhaust semantic content. However, intercepting alters syntax by eliminating term recurrence, the sole strictly syntactic means of ensuring necessary term coextension, and thereby syntactically securing necessary truth. Interceptional necessity is lexical, a notational artifact. The denial of interception nonsynonymy and the disregard of term recurrence in logic link with many misconceptions about propositions, logical form, conventions, and metalanguages. Mathematics is distinct from logic: its truth is not syntactic; it is transmitted by synonym substitution; term recurrence has no essential role. The ‘=’ of mathematics is an objectual relation between numbers; the ‘=’ of logic marks a syntactic relation of coreferring terms. -/- . (shrink)

Ysabel Ydelsa Delgado Del Águila nació el 23 de diciembre de 1990 en Lima (Perú). Estudió la carrera de Traducción e Interpretación en el Instituto de Educación Superior Tecnológico Privado Cibertec, donde se especializó en el aprendizaje de las lenguas del inglés y el portugués y se graduó con una tesis dedicada al escritor portugués José Saramago. Actualmente, trabaja como traductora freelance y es gerente de operaciones en la filial Recife (Brasil) de VFS Global para la misión de Canadá y (...) Reino Unido. Esta organización se encarga del trámite de documentos administrativos y de cobranza para la adquisición de una visa o un permiso temporal en esos países en condición de turista. Durante el tiempo de capacitación de sus empleados, la entidad les brinda la oportunidad de establecer vínculos educativos con las universidades de la India. Ha estudiado el idioma francés en la Alianza Francesa y el italiano en el Instituto Italiano de Cultura. Además, continúa sus estudios de Administración en la Universidad Cruzeiro do Sul (São Paulo, Brasil). (shrink)

With reference to Polish logical-philosophical tradition two formal theories of language syntax have been sketched and then compared with each other. The first theory is based on the assumption that the basic linguistic stratum is constituted by object-tokens (concrete objects perceived through the senses) and that the types of such objects (ideal objects) are derivative constructs. The other is founded on an opposite philosophical orientation. The two theories are equivalent. The main conclusion is that in syntactic researches it is redundant (...) to postulate the existence of abstract linguistic entities. Earlier, in a slightly different form, the idea was presented in paper "Logiczne podstawy ontologii składni języka" (1988). (shrink)

Higginbotham argued that certain linguistic items of English, when used in indirect discourse, necessarily trigger first-personal interpretations. They are: the emphatic reflexive pronoun and the controlled understood subject, represented as PRO. PRO is special, in this respect, due to its imposing obligatory control effects between the main clause and its subordinates ). Folescu & Higginbotham, in addition, argued that in Romanian, a language whose grammar doesn’t assign a prominent role to PRO, de se triggers are correlated with the subjunctive mood (...) of certain verbs. That paper, however, didn’t account for the grammatical diversity of the reports that display immunity to error through misidentification in Romanian: some of these reports are expressed by using de se triggers; others are not. Their IEM, moreover, is not systematically lexically controlled by the verbs, via their theta-roles; it is, rather, determined by the meaning of the verbs in question. Given the data from Romanian, I will argue, the phenomenon of IEM cannot be fully explained starting either from the syntactical or the lexical structure of a language. (shrink)

The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways, the topic remains under-researched, though, across languages and with respect to particular (...) phenomena within a given language, with respect to its connection to cognition, and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns.The mass-count distinction is a morpho-syntactic distinction among nouns that is generally taken to have semantic content. This content is generally taken to reflect a conceptual, cognitive, or ontological distinction and relates to philosophical and cognitive notions of unity, identity, and counting. The mass-count distinction is certainly one of the most interesting and puzzling topics in syntax and semantics that bears on ontology and cognitive science. In many ways, the topic remains under-researched, though, across languages and with respect to particular phenomena within a given language, with respect to its connection to cognition, and with respect to the way it may be understood ontologically. This volume aims to contribute to some of the gaps in the research on the topic, in particular the relation between the syntactic mass-count distinction and semantic and cognitive distinctions, diagnostics for mass and count, the distribution and role of numeral classifiers, abstract mass nouns, and object mass nouns. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is Charles Morris’ semiotic theory that has as one of its major projects the unification of all sciences of signs. However, since the above project has proven to be unsuccessful, we will try to examine here the reasons that led to this. Accordingly, we will argue that to transcend the particularities of individual disciplines that he wanted to unify, Morris had to make certain ontological assumptions, instead of theoretical and methodological ones, that they could share. (...) However, because the 'sign' as an ontological category could in our view only be established if we follow the principles of the pragmatic philosophical tradition, we will try to show that the reasons for this failure should be primarily sought in different effects that consistent application of the pragmatic principles has in each of them (primarily in linguistics and the philosophy of language). On the other hand, this should enable us to draw several important conclusions regarding Morris’ project: namely, that his failure does not have to mean giving up semiotics as a potentially key discipline in approaching some fundamental philosophical problems, but also that it would demand return to the original semiotics developed in Peirce’s works. (shrink)

I present a novel, collaborative, methodology for linguistics: what I call the ‘explanatory economy’. According to this picture, multiple models/theories are evaluated based on the extent to which they complement one another with respect to data coverage. I show how this model can resolve a long-standing worry about the methodology of generative linguistics: that by creating too much distance between data and theory, the empirical credentials of this research program are tarnished. I provide justifications of such methodologically central distinctions as (...) the competence/performance and core/periphery distinction, and then show how we can understand the push for simplicity in the history of generative grammar in this light. (shrink)

Целью данного исследования является описание нового метода изучения доречевого языка. Предлагаемый подход позволяет соотнести эпистемологию лингвистики с общефилософскими мировоззренческими традициями других научных дисциплин. Метод построен на соответствии трёх лингвистических категорий – существительных, глаголов и междометий, по своим моторным и выразительным качествам, трём основным видам искусства – графике (изобразительному искусству), движению (танцу) и звукам (музыке), и рассматривает подобное соотношение как обусловленное природой рецепторной системы человека. Объясняя фундаментальное единство семиотической природы языка и феноменов искусства и эстетики, метод позволяет провести хронологизацию важных культурных (...) процессов. (shrink)

In this paper, a formal theory is presented that describes syntactic and semantic mechanisms of philosophical discourses. They are treated as peculiar language systems possessing deep derivational structures called architectonic forms of philosophical systems, encoded in philosophical mind. Architectonic forms are constituents of more complex structures called architectonic spaces of philosophy. They are understood as formal and algorithmic representations of various philosophical traditions. The formal derivational machinery of a given space determines its class of all possible architectonic forms. Some of (...) them stand under factual historical philosophical systems and they organize processes of doing philosophy within these systems. Many architectonic forms have never been realized in the history of philosophy. The presented theory may be interpreted as falling under Hegel’s paradigm of comprehending cultural texts. This paradigm is enriched and inspired with Propp’s formal, morphological view on texts. The peculiarity of this modification of the Hegel-Propp paradigm consists of the use of algebraic and algorithmic tools of modeling processes of cultural development. To speak metaphorically, the theory is an attempt at the mathematical and logical history of philosophy inspired by the Internet metaphor. And that is why it belongs to the tradition of doing metaphilosophy in The Lvov-Warsaw School, which is continued today mainly by Woleński, Pelc, Perzanowski, and Jadacki. (shrink)

Concordance of the poetic works of Giorgos Seferis which presents all the principal “words” of the texts in an alphabetical list, stating how often each word occurs, giving a precise location and a relevant piece of text for each occurrence. We found ca. 9500 different Greek words in 39000 different occurrences, so our concordance has 50.000 lines of text. The technical procedure required four main steps: text entry and tagging, production of the concordance, correction of the contexts, formatting for print.

Corcoran, J. 2007. Syntactics, American Philosophy: an Encyclopedia. 2007. Eds. John Lachs and Robert Talisse. New York: Routledge. pp.745-6. -/- Syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics are the three levels of investigation into semiotics, or the comprehensive study of systems of communication, as described in 1938 by the American philosopher Charles Morris (1903-1979). Syntactics studies signs themselves and their interrelations in abstraction from their meanings and from their uses and users. Semantics studies signs in relation to their meanings, but still in abstraction (...) from their uses and users. Pragmatics studies signs as meaningful entities used in various ways by humans. Taking current written English as the system of communication under investigation, it is a matter of syntactics that the two four-character strings ‘tact’ and ‘tics’ both occur in the ten-character string ‘syntactics’. It is a matter of semantics that the ten-character string ‘syntactics’ has only one sense and, in that sense, it denotes a branch of semiotics. It is a matter of pragmatics that the ten-character string ‘syntactics’ was not used as an English word before 1937 and that it is sometimes confused with the much older six-character string ‘syntax’. Syntactics is the simplest and most abstract branch of semiotics. At the same time, it is the most basic. Pragmatics presupposes semantics and syntactics; semantics presupposes syntactics. The basic terms of syntactics include the following: ‘character’ as alphabetic letters, numeric digits, and punctuation marks; ‘string’ as sign composed of a concatenation of characters; ‘occur’ as ‘t’ and ‘c’ both occur twice in ‘syntactics’. However, perhaps the most basic terms of syntactics are ‘type’ and ‘token’ in the senses introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), America’s greatest logician, who could be considered the grandfather of syntactics, if not the father. These are explained below. (shrink)

The paper concentrates on the problem of adequate reflection of fragments of reality via expressions of language and inter-subjective knowledge about these fragments, called here, in brief, language adequacy. This problem is formulated in several aspects, the most being: the compatibility of language syntax with its bi-level semantics: intensional and extensional. In this paper, various aspects of language adequacy find their logical explication on the ground of the formal-logical theory T of any categorial language L generated by the so-called classical (...) categorial grammar, and also on the ground of its extension to the bi-level, intensional and extensional semantic-pragmatic theory ST for L. In T, according to the token-type distinction of Ch.S. Peirce, L is characterized first as a language of well-formed expression-tokens (wfe-tokens) - material, concrete objects - and then as a language of wfe-types - abstract objects, classes of wfe-tokens. In ST the semantic-pragmatic notions of meaning and interpretation for wfe-types of L of intensional semantics and the notion of denotation of extensional semanics for wfe-types and constituents of knowledge are formalized. These notions allow formulating a postulate (an axiom of categorial adequacy) from which follow all the most important conditions of the language adequacy, including the above, and a structural one connected with three principles of compositionality. (shrink)

This paper seeks to illustrate the advantages of not treating phonological words as distinguished building blocks in compositional semantics. Following Bobaljik 2012, we derive the relative readings of amount superlatives in two steps, [[[d-many] comparative] superlative]. The existence of two comparative constructions is revealed, involving more vs. the more. Each builds a different superlative construction, explaining the conflicting intuitions about superlatives in the literature, as well as puzzles relating to the definite article in superlatives.

Formal semantic analyses often take words to be minimal building blocks for the purposes of compositionality. But various recent theories of morphology and syntax have converged on the view that there is no demarcation line corresponding to the word level. The same conclusion has emerged from the compositional semantics of superlatives. In the spirit of extending compositionality below the word level, this paper explores how a small set of particles (Japanese KA and MO, Chinese DOU, and Hungarian VALA/VAGY, MIND, and (...) IS) form quantifier words and serve as connectives, additive and scalar particles, question markers, and existential verbs. The main question is whether the meanings of these particles across the varied environments are highly regular, or they are lexicalized with a variety of different meanings that bear a family resemblance. This paper does not reach definitive conclusions, but it raises analytical possibilities using Boolean semantics and the semantics of alternatives. It also draws attention to systematic similarities and some differences between MO and DOU that have not been studied in the literature. (shrink)

The two-fold ontological character of linguistic objects revealed due to the distinction between “type” and “token” introduced by Ch. S. Peirce can be a base of the two-fold, both theoretical and axiomatic, approach to the language. Referring to some ideas included in A. A. Markov’s work [1954] (in Russian) on Theory of Algorithms and in some earlier papers of the author, the problem of formalization of the concrete and abstract words theories raised by J. Słupecki was solved. The construction of (...) the theories presented here has two levels. The axiomatic theory of label-tokens: material, physical linguistic objects, constitutes the first one. Label-types, according to the literature of the subject, are defined on the other level as equivalence classes of equiform label-tokens. Assuming the opposite point of view, one can accept that theory of label-types: abstract labels, formalized on the first level, in which it is possible to define the notion of label-token as well as the derivative notions on the second level, should become the basis of formalization of the theory of linguistic expressions and the theory of language in general. The axioms and definitions of both theories of labels: T k and T p representing the other approach to the ontology of language are included in the sequel of the abstract. The foundations of the theory of labels T k in which the primary assumption as to the label-types existence is superfluous have been referred on the basis of the author's monography "Teorie Języków Syntaktycznie Kategorialnych" ( "The Theories of Syntactically Categorial Languages"), PWN, Warszawa-Wrocław 1985. The basis of the theory of labels T p which takes into account the other position has to be presented here for the first time. Some extended ideas of the paper will also be presented in author's paper "Logiczne podstawy ontologii składni Języka" ("Logical foundations of language syntax ontology), Studia Filozoficzne 6-7 (271-272), (1988), pp. 263-284. (shrink)

By logical foundations of language syntax ontology we understand here the construction of formalized linguistic theories based on widely conceived mathematical logic and dependent on two trends in language ontology. The formalization includes exclusively the syntactic aspect of logical analysis of language characterized categorially according to Ajdukiewicz's approach [1935, 1960]. Any categorial language L is characterized formally on two levels: on one of them it concerns the language of expression-tokens, on the other one - that of expression-types. Accepting the view (...) that expression-concretes, that is expression-tokens - thus, physical objects are fundamental language layer, whereas the secondary layer for L are expression-abstracts, that is expression-types - thus, ideal objects, it is the nominalistic, concretistic philosophical view on the ontological nature of language entities that is adhered to. Supporting the view that expression-types are the basic language layer, while expression-concretes are the secondary one, we take the opposite standpoint - platonizing one. We prove that the two dual approaches towards the two-level syntax theory of language are logically eqivalent. In the scope of language syntax, both conceptions deriving from two different existential assumption are equivalent. This statement is philosophical significance, since it proves that in syntactical studies on language the assumption of the existence of abstract language beings (interpreted as classes equiform tokens) can be neglected. The idea was signalized by author in ealier paper "On the type-token relationships'' [1986) and than, in a slighly diffrent form in English "On the eliminatibility of ideal linguistic entities, Studia Logica 48,no 4 (1989), pp. 587-615. (shrink)

Peter Ludlow presents the first book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, including both Chomsky's government and binding theory and his minimalist ...

Bertrand Russell, in the second of his 1914 Lowell lectures, Our Knowledge of the External World, asserted famously that ‘every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and purification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical’ (Russell 1993, p. 42). He went on to characterize that portion of logic that concerned the study of forms of propositions, or, as he (...) called them, ‘logical forms’. This portion of logic he called ‘philosophical logic’. Russell asserted that ... some kind of knowledge of logical forms, though with most people it is not explicit, is involved in all understanding of discourse. It is the business of philosophical logic to extract this knowledge from its concrete integuments, and to render it explicit and pure. (p. 53) Perhaps no one still endorses quite this grand a view of the role of logic and the investigation of logical form in philosophy. But talk of logical form retains a central role in analytic philosophy. Given its widespread use in philosophy and linguistics, it is rather surprising that the concept of logical form has not received more attention by philosophers than it has. The concern of this paper is to say something about what talk of logical form comes to, in a tradition that stretches back to (and arguably beyond) Russell’s use of that expression. This will not be exactly Russell’s conception. For we do not endorse Russell’s view that propositions are the bearers of logical form, or that appeal to propositions adds anything to our understanding of what talk of logical form comes to. But we will be concerned to provide an account responsive to the interests expressed by Russell in the above quotations, though one clarified of extraneous elements, and expressed precisely. For this purpose, it is important to note that the concern expressed by Russell in the above passages, as the surrounding text makes clear, is a concern not just with logic conceived narrowly as the study of logical terms, but with propositional form more generally, which includes, e.g., such features as those that correspond to the number of argument places in a propositional function, and the categories of objects which propositional.... (shrink)

In this paper we discuss a new perspective on the syntax-semantics interface. Semantics, in this new set-up, is not ‘read off’ from Logical Forms as in mainstream approaches to generative grammar. Nor is it assigned to syntactic proofs using a Curry-Howard correspondence as in versions of the Lambek Calculus, or read off from f-structures using Linear Logic as in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG, Kaplan & Bresnan [9]). All such approaches are based on the idea that syntactic objects (trees, proofs, fstructures) are (...) somehow prior and that semantics must be parasitic on those syntactic objects. We challenge this idea and develop a grammar in which syntax and semantics are treated in a strictly parallel fashion. The grammar will have many ideas in common with the (converging) frameworks of categorial grammar and LFG, but its treatment of the syntax-semantics interface is radically different. Also, although the meaning component of the grammar is a version of Montague semantics and although there are obvious affinities between Montague’s conception of grammar and the work presented here, the grammar is not compositional, in the sense that composition of meaning need not follow surface structure. (shrink)

Right-node raising of anaphors and bound pronouns out of coordinations, as in "Every student likes, and every professor hates, himself / his neighbors" is judged more acceptable in German and Dutch than in English. Using combinatory categorial grammar, this paper ties the cross-linguistic difference to the fact that German and Dutch are V-2 languages, and V-2 necessitates a lifted category for verbs that automatically caters to the right-node raised duplicator. The same lifted category is optionally available in English, but it (...) is not needed for independent syntactic purposes. (shrink)

In the study of syntactic variation, genre has been an unstable term: fluctuating in the level of generality at which it is applied; intuiting rather than ascertaining the social situations it suggests. In contrast, rhetorical studies of genre have fixed genre at a low level of generality, in local socio-historical scenes, and claimed priority for situation over form. This chapter reviews the debates which led to genres rhetorical definition as "social action" (Miller 1984), and the benefit and also the cost (...) in disavowing form as definitive of genre. Rhetorical and variation studies of genre can seem fundamentally incompatible in their perspectives on form, yet there may be fertile meeting ground for them. Both invoke function for form, but each in ways incomplete for the study of genre: While rhetorical studies insist on the functionality of form in situation, they do not inquire into form itself; syntactic-variation studies also assume function for form, but define function at such a high level of generality as to fail to capture the social motives in genre's domain. By revisiting function as acutely sensitive to situation—responding to local exigencies and also indicating them—rhetorical and variation studies can meet on the common ground of form, each contributing to the others discoveries of genre as a site of social differentiation. (shrink)

A distinctive and widely recognized feature of proper names is that, unlike other words, names can be used across languages without modification. Yet, this feature of names—the prevalence and acceptability of their ‘cross‐linguistic’ uses—has been mostly overlooked within philosophy. This article highlights the theoretical importance of the cross‐linguistic uses of names in the debate concerning their syntax and semantics. It identifies an anomalous phonological feature of names in their cross‐linguistic uses and argues that the source of the anomaly is the (...) widespread view that proper names are syntactically simple. It also argues that such uses provide evidence for the syntactic view that the phonological articulation of a name is mentioned and not used in the syntax—a view that is consistent with some but not all semantic views of names. By examining the hitherto overlooked cross‐linguistic uses of names, this article provides new evidence in favour of a certain variety of metalinguistic views concerning the syntax and semantics of names. (shrink)

Human language, hominin tool production modes, and multimodal communications systems of primates and other animals are currently well-studied for how they display compositionality or combinatoriality. In all cases, the former is defined as a kind of hierarchical nesting and the latter as a lack thereof. In this article, I extend research on combinatoriality and compositionality further to investigations of everyday primate skills. Daily locomotion modes as well as behaviors associated with subsistence practices, hygiene, or body modification rely on the hierarchical (...) nesting of different behavioral and cognitive actions into complex skills. I introduce a scheme which uses hierarchical organization to differentiate combinatorial from compositional skills. Combinatorial skills are defined either as aggregational or linearly hierarchical depending on whether the skill occurs momentarily in space or unfolds sequentially over time. Compositional skills are defined either as nested or interactionally hierarchical depending on whether the skill results in new constructs or in new interactions between existing constructs. The methodology I propose combines epistemological hierarchy theory with data from primatological field research and experimental and comparative psychological research and provides a means to integrate current constructionist and extended views on cognition and action with older research on behavioral logics in psychology and operational chain thinking in anthropology. The approach furthermore synchronizes with ongoing research on teleonomy, intentionality, and creativity. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper, we will motivate the application of specific rules of inference from the propositional calculus to natural language sentences. Specifically, we will analyse De Morgan’s laws, which pertain to the interaction of two central topics in syntactic research: negation and coordination. We will argue that the applicability of De Morgan’s laws to natural language structures can be derived from independently motivated operations of grammar and principles restricting the application of these operations. This has direct empirical consequences for the (...) hypothesised relations between natural language and logic. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is an analysis of agreement in relation to genitival constructions. It proposes that the Apulian non-prepositional enitives of San Marco in Lamis can be described as regulated by a definiteness agreement mechanism manifesting itself in the necessity of articled heads (excluding vocatives) and genitival nouns, coupled with an adjacency requirement which limits the realization of post-nominal modifiers of the head in a post-genitival position, where they might only refer to the genitive noun. This work thus (...) proposes that such agreement for definiteness is the same holding in Romanian non-al genitives which result in the linker construction when agreement is disrupted. In chapter 1 we thus introduce Kartvelian genitives by Suffixaufnahme which notoriously represent a genitive-head noun morphological agreement phenomenon. Plank (1995) also shows that in a series of genitives, Suffixaufnahme shows up only on the last one, demonstrating that when it comes to agreement in genitives, local dynamics of sorts are often at stake (as it happens with the Costruct State). In 2 we move to linkers; linkers have been connected to agreement in Suffixaufnahme genitives at least since Plank (1995) and later works such as Larson and Yamakido (2006), Manzini et al (2016), and Manzini (2018), according to which linkers can be assimilated to agreement. In fact, in synthetic systems such as Romanian and Aromanian, Albanian and Arbëresh, and Kurdish varieties, linkers agree for φ with either the head or the genitive noun. Giurgea and Dobrovie-Sorin (2013: 126) further show that in Romanian non-linker constructions possessives agree for case with the head noun. In linker constructions, agreement for case is not present: it’s the linker itself which agrees with the head noun, this time for φ. Chapter 3 deals with genitival modification in Hebrew and a number of Arabic varieties. It proposes that the pseudoprepositions found in Arabic varieties are nouns in the Construct State. This was previously proposed for Palestinian Arabic in Mohammad (1999), which also shows that such elements agree for φ with the modified noun. 3.2 takes into account the Semitic preposition l-, dealing with the question of whether this lement can be characterized as possessive and locative as it happens for Romance a. 4 analyzes Apulian non-prepositional genitives and proposes as anticipated that the necessity of articled nouns in the construction is to be linked to an agreement relation taking place via D. Lastly, 5 subsumes the conclusions of this work. (shrink)

Syntacticians have proposed three-dimensional syntactic structures to account for the peculiarities of coordination. This paper proposes a way of interpreting such structures and gives an account of sentences of the sort 'John bought and Mary sold a total of ten cars' based on a notion of 'implicit' coordination.

With the aid of some results from current linguistic theory I examine a recent anti-Fregean line with respect to hybrid talk of numbers and ordinary things, such as ‘the number of moons of Jupiter is four’. I conclude that the anti-Fregean line with respect to these sentences is indefensible.