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  1. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 9.Emar Maier, Corien Bary & Janneke Huitink (eds.) - 2005 - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics.
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  • Plural Predication and the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis.Yoad Winter - 2001 - Journal of Semantics 18 (4):333-365.
    The Strongest Meaning Hypothesis of Dalrymple et al (1994,1998), which was originally proposed as a principle for the interpretation of reciprocals, is extended in this paper into a general principle of plural predication. This principle applies to complex predicates that are composed of lexical predicates that hold of atomic entities, and determines the pluralities in the extension of the predicate. The meaning of such a complex predicate is claimed to be the truth-conditionally strongest meaning that does not contradict lexical properties (...)
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  • Quantification in English is Inherently Sortal.Edward L. Keenan - 1999 - History and Philosophy of Logic 20 (3-4):251-265.
    Within Linguistics the semantic analysis of natural languages (English, Swahili, for example) has drawn extensively on semantical concepts first formulated and studied within classical logic, principally first order logic. Nowhere has this contribution been more substantive than in the domain of quantification and variable binding. As studies of these notions in natural language have developed they have taken on a life of their own, resulting in refinements and generalizations of the classical quantifiers as well as the discovery of new types (...)
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  • Situations in natural language semantics.Angelika Kratzer - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Situation semantics was developed as an alternative to possible worlds semantics. In situation semantics, linguistic expressions are evaluated with respect to partial, rather than complete, worlds. There is no consensus about what situations are, just as there is no consensus about what possible worlds or events are. According to some, situations are structured entities consisting of relations and individuals standing in those relations. According to others, situations are particulars. In spite of unresolved foundational issues, the partiality provided by situation semantics (...)
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  • The emergence of syntactic structure.Marcus Kracht - 2007 - Linguistics and Philosophy 30 (1):47 - 95.
    The present paper is the result of a long struggle to understand how the notion of compositionality can be used to motivate the structure of a sentence. While everyone seems to have intuitions about which proposals are compositional and which ones are not, these intuitions generally have no formal basis. What is needed to make such arguments work is a proper understanding of what meanings are and how they can be manipulated. In particular, we need a definition of meaning that (...)
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  • Semantics and property theory.Gennaro Chierchia & Raymond Turner - 1988 - Linguistics and Philosophy 11 (3):261 - 302.
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  • The Use of the Binding Argument in the Debate about Location.Dan Zeman - 2017 - In Sarah-Jane Conrad & Klaus Petrus (eds.), Meaning, Context, and Methodology. Berlin: De Gruyter. pp. 191-212.
    In this paper I inquire into the methodological status of one of the arguments that have figured prominently in contemporary debates about the semantics of a variety of expressions, the so-called “Binding Argument”. My inquiry is limited to the case of meteorological sentences like “It is raining”, but my conclusion can be extended to other types of sentences as well. Following Jason Stanley, I distinguish between three interpretations of the argument. My focus is on the third, weakest interpretation, according to (...)
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  • Relativism and Bound Predicates of Personal Taste: An Answer to Schaffer's Argument from Binding.Dan Zeman - 2015 - Dialectica 69 (2):155-183.
    In this paper I put forward and substantiate a possible defensive move on behalf of the relativist about predicates of personal taste that can be used to block a recent contextualist argument raised against the view: the ‘argument from binding’ proposed in Schaffer (). The move consists in adopting Recanati's “variadic functions” apparatus and applying it to predicates of personal taste like ‘tasty’ and experiencer phrases like ‘for John’. I substantiate the account in a basic relativistic framework and reply to (...)
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  • Quantifier Words and Their Multifunctional(?) Parts.Anna Szabolcsi, James Doh Whang & Vera Zu - 2014 - Language and Linguistics 15 (1).
    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 (...)
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  • What do quantifier particles do?Anna Szabolcsi - 2015 - Linguistics and Philosophy 38 (2):159-204.
    In many languages, the same particles that form quantifier words also serve as connectives, additive and scalar particles, question markers, roots of existential verbs, and so on. Do these have a unified semantics, or do they merely bear a family resemblance? Are they aided by silent operators in their varied roles―if yes, what operators? I dub the particles “quantifier particles” and refer to them generically with capitalized versions of the Japanese morphemes. I argue that both MO and KA can be (...)
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  • Inverse linking via function composition.Gregory M. Kobele - 2010 - Natural Language Semantics 18 (2):183-196.
    The phenomenon of inverse linking, where a noun phrase embedded within another behaves with respect to binding as though it were structurally independent, has proven challenging for theories of the syntax–semantics interface. In this paper I show that, using an LF-movement style approach to the syntax–semantics interface, we can derive all and only the appropriate meanings for such constructions using no semantic operations other than function application and composition. The solution relies neither on a proliferation of lexical ambiguity nor on (...)
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  • Quantifying into Question Acts.Manfred Krifka - 2001 - Natural Language Semantics 9 (1):1-40.
    Quantified NPs in questions may lead to an interpretation in which the NP quantifies into the question. Which dish did every guest bring? can be understood as: 'For every guest x: which dish did x bring?'. After a review of previous approaches that tried to capture this quantification formally or to explain it away, it is argued that such readings involve quantification into speech acts. As the algebra of speech acts is more limited than a Boolean algebra – it only (...)
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  • Parasitic scope.Chris Barker - 2007 - Linguistics and Philosophy 30 (4):407-444.
    I propose the first strictly compositional semantic account of same. New data, including especially NP-internal uses such as two men with the same name, suggests that same in its basic use is a quantificational element taking scope over nominals. Given type-lifting as a generally available mechanism, I show that this follows naturally from the fact that same is an adjective. Independently-motivated assumptions extend the analysis to standard examples such as Anna and Bill read the same book via a mechanism I (...)
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  • A Revised Projectivity Calculus for Inclusion and Exclusion Reasoning.Ka-fat Chow - 2020 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 29 (2):163-195.
    We present a Revised Projectivity Calculus that extends the scope of inclusion and exclusion inferences derivable under the Projectivity Calculus developed by Icard :705–725, 2012). After pointing out the inadequacies of C, we introduce four opposition properties which have been studied by Chow Proceedings of the 18th Amsterdam Colloquium, Springer, Berlin, 2012; Beziau, Georgiorgakis New dimensions of the square of opposition, Philosophia Verlag GmbH, München, 2017) and are more appropriate for the study of exclusion reasoning. Together with the monotonicity properties, (...)
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  • Semantic bootstrapping of type-logical grammar.Sean A. Fulop - 2004 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 14 (1):49-86.
    A two-stage procedure is described which induces type-logical grammar lexicons from sentences annotated with skeletal terms of the simply typed lambda calculus. First, a generalized formulae-as-types correspondence is exploited to obtain all the type-logical proofs of the sample sentences from their lambda terms. The resulting lexicons are then optimally unified. The first stage constitutes the semantic bootstrapping (Pinker, Language Learnability and Language Development, Harvard University Press, 1984), while the unification procedure of Buszkowski and Penn represents a first attempt at structure-dependent (...)
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  • A Delineation solution to the puzzles of absolute adjectives.Heather Burnett - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (1):1-39.
    The paper presents both new data and a new analysis of the semantic and pragmatic properties of the class of absolute scalar adjectives within an extension of a well-known logical framework for the analysis of gradable predicates: the delineation semantics framework . It has been long observed that the context-sensitivity, vagueness and gradability features of absolute scalar predicates give rise to certain puzzles for their analysis within most, if not all, modern formal semantic frameworks. While there exist proposals for solving (...)
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  • Metalinguistic comparison in an alternative semantics for imprecision.Marcin Morzycki - 2011 - Natural Language Semantics 19 (1):39-86.
    This paper offers an analysis of metalinguistic comparatives such as more dumb than crazy in which they differ from ordinary comparatives in the scale on which they compare: ordinary comparatives use scales lexically determined by particular adjectives, but metalinguistic ones use a generally-available scale of imprecision or ‘pragmatic slack’. To implement this idea, I propose a novel compositional implementation of the Lasersohnian pragmatic-halos account of imprecision—one that represents clusters of similar meanings as Hamblin alternatives. In the theory that results, existential (...)
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  • Friends and colleagues: Plurality, coordination, and the structure of DP.Caroline Heycock & Roberto Zamparelli - 2005 - Natural Language Semantics 13 (3):201-270.
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  • Prepositional aspect and the algebra of paths.Joost Zwarts - 2005 - Linguistics and Philosophy 28 (6):739 - 779.
    The semantics of directional prepositions is investigated from the perspective of aspect. What distinguishes telic PPs (like to the house) from atelic PPs (like towards the house), taken as denoting sets of paths, is their algebraic structure: atelic PPs are cumulative, closed under the operation of concatenation, telic PPs are not. Not only does this allow for a natural and compositional account of how PPs contribute to the aspect of a sentence, but it also guides our understanding of the lexical (...)
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  • Symmetric and contrapositional quantifiers.R. Zuber - 2006 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 16 (1):1-13.
    The article studies two related issues. First, it introduces the notion of the contraposition of quantifiers which is a “dual” notion of symmetry and has similar relations to co-intersectivity as symmetry has to intersectivity. Second, it shows how symmetry and contraposition can be generalised to higher order type quantifiers, while preserving their relations with other notions from generalized quantifiers theory.
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  • Monotonicity properties of comparative determiners.Hans Smessaert - 1996 - Linguistics and Philosophy 19 (3):295 - 336.
    This paper presents a generalization of the standard notions of left monotonicity (on the nominal argument of a determiner) and right monotonicity (on the VP argument of a determiner). Determiners such as “more than/at least as many as” or “fewer than/at most as many as”, which occur in so-called propositional comparison, are shown to be monotone with respect to two nominal arguments and two VP-arguments. In addition, it is argued that the standard Generalized Quantifier analysis of numerical determiners such as (...)
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  • What Do Words Do for Us?Ronnie Cann & Ruth Kempson - 2017 - Dialectica 71 (3):425-460.
    In this paper we adopt the hypothesis that languages are mechanisms for interaction, and that grammars encode the means by which such interaction may take place, by use of procedures that construct representations of meaning from strings of words uttered in context, and conversely strings of words are built up from representations of content in interaction with context. In a review of the systemic use of ellipsis in dialogue and associated split-utterance phenomena, we show how, in Dynamic Syntax, words give (...)
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  • Yoad Winter’s Elements of Formal Semantics, 2016, Edinburgh Advanced Textbooks in Linguistics : Paperback, pp. 258. ISBN 978 0 7486 4043 0.Edward L. Keenan - 2018 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 27 (2):175-192.
    Elements of Formal Semantics has already been reviewed twice :42, 2016; Erlewine in Comput Linguist 42:837–839, 2017). As well, the website for the work is accompanied by evaluative quotes by noted scholars. All are very positive concerning its clarity and its utility as an introduction to formal semantics for natural language. As I agree with these evaluations my interest in reiterating them in slightly different words is limited. So my reviews of the content chapters will be accompanied by a Reflections (...)
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  • Compositionality as an empirical problem.David Dowty - 2007 - In Chris Barker & Pauline I. Jacobson (eds.), Direct compositionality. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 14--23.
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  • A semantic characterization of natural language determiners.Edward L. Keenan & Jonathan Stavi - 1986 - Linguistics and Philosophy 9 (3):253 - 326.
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  • Situation economy.Ezra Keshet - 2010 - Natural Language Semantics 18 (4):385-434.
    Researchers often assume that possible worlds and times are represented in the syntax of natural languages. However, it has been noted that such a system can overgenerate. This paper proposes a constraint on systems where worlds and times are represented as situation pronouns. The Intersective Predicate Generalization, based on and extending work by R. Musan, states that two items composed via Predicate Modification, such as a noun and an intersective modifier, must be evaluated in the same world and time. To (...)
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  • A unified semantic treatment of singular NP coordination.Yoad Winter - 1996 - Linguistics and Philosophy 19 (4):337 - 391.
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  • Innocent exclusion in an Alternative Semantics.Luis Alonso-Ovalle - 2008 - Natural Language Semantics 16 (2):115-128.
    The exclusive component of unembedded disjunctions is standardly derived as a conversational implicature by assuming that or forms a lexical scale with and. It is well known, however, that this assumption does not suffice to determine the required scalar competitors of disjunctions with more than two atomic disjuncts (McCawley, Everything that linguists have always wanted to know about logic* (But were ashamed to ask). Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1993, p. 324; Simons, “Or”: Issues in the semantics and pragmatics of disjunction. (...)
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  • The conjunction fallacy and the many meanings of and.Ralph Hertwig, Björn Benz & Stefan Krauss - 2008 - Cognition 108 (3):740-753.
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  • Plans and Semantics in Human Processing of Language.Henry Hamburger & Stephen Crain - 1987 - Cognitive Science 11 (1):101-136.
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  • Constraints on the lexicalization of logical operators.Roni Katzir & Raj Singh - 2013 - Linguistics and Philosophy 36 (1):1-29.
    We revisit a typological puzzle due to Horn (Doctoral Dissertation, UCLA, 1972) regarding the lexicalization of logical operators: in instantiations of the traditional square of opposition across categories and languages, the O corner, corresponding to ‘nand’ (= not and), ‘nevery’ (= not every), etc., is never lexicalized. We discuss Horn’s proposal, which involves the interaction of two economy conditions, one that relies on scalar implicatures and one that relies on markedness. We observe that in order to express markedness and to (...)
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  • From compositional to systematic semantics.Wlodek Zadrozny - 1994 - Linguistics and Philosophy 17 (4):329 - 342.
    We prove a theorem stating that any semantics can be encoded as a compositional semanties, which means that, essentially, the standard definition of compositionality is formally vacuous. We then show that when compositional semantics is required to be systematic (that is, the meaning function cannot be arbitrary, but must belong to some class), it is possible to distinguish between compositional and noncompositional semantics. As a result, we believe that the paper clarifies the concept of compositionality and opens the possibility of (...)
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  • Composing alternatives.Ivano Ciardelli, Floris Roelofsen & Nadine Theiler - 2017 - Linguistics and Philosophy 40 (1):1-36.
    There is a prominent line of work in natural language semantics, rooted in the work of Hamblin, in which the meaning of a sentence is not taken to be a single proposition, but rather a set of propositions—a set of alternatives. This allows for a more fine-grained view on meaning, which has led to improved analyses of a wide range of linguistic phenomena. However, this approach also faces a number of problems. We focus here on two of these, in our (...)
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  • Generalized Quantifiers and Number Sense.Robin Clark - 2011 - Philosophy Compass 6 (9):611-621.
    Generalized quantifiers are functions from pairs of properties to truth-values; these functions can be used to interpret natural language quantifiers. The space of such functions is vast and a great deal of research has sought to find natural constraints on the functions that interpret determiners and create quantifiers. These constraints have demonstrated that quantifiers rest on number and number sense. In the first part of the paper, we turn to developing this argument. In the remainder, we report on work in (...)
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  • A 'natural logic' inference system using the Lambek calculus.Anna Zamansky, Nissim Francez & Yoad Winter - 2006 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 15 (3):273-295.
    This paper develops an inference system for natural language within the ‘Natural Logic’ paradigm as advocated by van Benthem, Sánchez and others. The system that we propose is based on the Lambek calculus and works directly on the Curry-Howard counterparts for syntactic representations of natural language, with no intermediate translation to logical formulae. The Lambek -based system we propose extends the system by Fyodorov et~al., which is based on the Ajdukiewicz/Bar-Hillel calculus Bar Hillel,. This enables the system to deal with (...)
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  • Anaphora and dynamic binding.Gennaro Chierchia - 1992 - Linguistics and Philosophy 15 (2):111--183.
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  • Second-order abstract categorial grammars as hyperedge replacement grammars.Makoto Kanazawa - 2010 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 19 (2):137-161.
    Second-order abstract categorial grammars (de Groote in Association for computational linguistics, 39th annual meeting and 10th conference of the European chapter, proceedings of the conference, pp. 148–155, 2001) and hyperedge replacement grammars (Bauderon and Courcelle in Math Syst Theory 20:83–127, 1987; Habel and Kreowski in STACS 87: 4th Annual symposium on theoretical aspects of computer science. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 247, Springer, Berlin, pp 207–219, 1987) are two natural ways of generalizing “context-free” grammar formalisms for string and tree (...)
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  • Standard quantification theory in the analysis of English.Stephen Donaho - 2002 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 31 (6):499-526.
    Standard first-order logic plus quantifiers of all finite orders ("SFOLω") faces four well-known difficulties when used to characterize the behavior of certain English quantifier phrases. All four difficulties seem to stem from the typed structure of SFOLω models. The typed structure of SFOLω models is in turn a product of an asymmetry between the meaning of names and the meaning of predicates, the element-set asymmetry. In this paper we examine a class of models in which this asymmetry of meaning is (...)
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  • Categorial grammars determined from linguistic data by unification.Wojciech BuszKowski & Gerald Penn - 1990 - Studia Logica 49 (4):431 - 454.
    We provide an algorithm for determining a categorial grammar from linguistic data that essentially uses unification of type-schemes assigned to atoms. The algorithm presented here extends an earlier one restricted to rigid categorial grammars, introduced in [4] and [5], by admitting non-rigid outputs. The key innovation is the notion of an optimal unifier, a natural generalization of that of a most general unifier.
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  • Adjectives really do modify nouns: the incremental and restricted nature of early adjective acquisition.T. Mintz - 2002 - Cognition 84 (3):267-293.
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  • A semantic constraint on binary determiners.R. Zuber - 2009 - Linguistics and Philosophy 32 (1):95-114.
    A type quantifier F is symmetric iff F ( X, X )( Y ) = F ( Y, Y )( X ). It is shown that quantifiers denoted by irreducible binary determiners in natural languages are both conservative and symmetric and not only conservative.
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  • Split intensionality: a new scope theory of de re and de dicto.Ezra Keshet - 2010 - Linguistics and Philosophy 33 (4):251-283.
    The traditional scope theory of intensionality (STI) (see Russell 1905; Montague 1973; Ladusaw 1977; Ogihara 1992, 1996; Stowell 1993) is simple, elegant, and, for the most part, empirically adequate. However, a few quite troubling counterexamples to this theory have lead researchers to propose alternatives, such as positing null situation pronouns (Percus 2000) or actuality operators (Kamp 1971; Cresswell 1990) in the syntax of natural language. These innovative theories do correct the undergeneration of the original scope theory, but at a cost: (...)
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  • Intensionality and context change.Gennaro Chierchia - 1994 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 3 (2):141-168.
    It is arguably desirable to have a theory of meaning that (i) does not identify propositions with sets of worlds, (ii) enables to capture the dynamic character of semantic interpretation and (iii) provides the basis for a semantic program that incorporates and extends the achievements of Montague semantics. A theory of properties and propositions that meets these desiderata is developed and several applications to the semantic analysis of natural languages are explored.
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  • (1 other version)Against compositionality: The case of adjectives.Ran Lahav - 1989 - Philosophical Studies 57 (3):261 - 279.
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