Bücher der Reihe Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy

The essays in this book deal with a number of problems in the analysis of intensional language - more especially with the analysis of the personal modalities in natural language.

This second edition has been completely revised to include further development of the two-component theory, including new treatments of boundedness, dynamism and a general account of aspectual shifts.

In the spring of 1978, one of the authors of this book was sitting in on a course in logic for linguists given by the other author.

SECTION I In 1972, Donald Davison and Gilbert Hannan wrote in the introduction to the volume Semantics of Natural Language: "The success of linguistics in treating natural languages as formal ~yntactic systems has aroused the interest of a number of linguists in a parallel or related development of semantics.

The essays in this collection are the outgrowth of a workshop, held in June 1976, on formal approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages.

Furthermore, the analysis of these temporal aspectual verbs leads to a description of their complement structures in terms of 'events', a semantic category found to appropriately characterize the quality of most of these structures.

This essay constitutes yet another approach to the fields of inquiry variously known as discourse analysis, discourse grammar, text grammar, functional 1 syntax, or text linguistics.

To Ken Hale lowe a particular debt of gratitude - for two years of encour agement and suggestions, and particularly for a set of detailed comments on an earlier version of the book which led to many changes for the better.

The essays in this book deal with a number of problems in the analysis of intensional language - more especially with the analysis of the personal modalities in natural language.

MASS TERMS, COUNT TERMS, AND SORTAL TERMS Central examples of mass terms are easy to come by. Semantically, philo sophers have characterized count terms as denoting (classes of?) indi vidual objects, whereas what mass terms denote are cumulative and dissective.

Audience: Researchers and students in theoretical computer science (formal language theory and automata theory), computational linguistics, mathematical methods in linguistics, and linguists interested in formal models of syntax.

Generalization of both of these analyses leads to operator grammar, in which each sentence is derived in a uniform way as a partial ordering of the originally simple words which enter into it: Each step (least upper bound) of the partial ordering (of a word requiring another) forms a sentence which is a component of the sentence being analyzed.

In actual context the anaphoric definite article will be resolved both for a question and for an indicative sentence. A philosopher may try to paraphrase a question as an indicative sentence, for instance as a statement of ignorance, or as a statement of the desire to know.

In the case of b the first two features get the value +, the third (nasal) gets the value -. bilabial: + voiced: + I nasal: - [Feature matrix for b.] In syntax features are used, for example, to distinguish different noun classes. Besides a matrix representation one frequently fmds a graph representation for feature value pairs.

Communication is one of the most challenging human phenomena, and the same is true of its paradigmatic verbal realization as a dialogue.

This work presents the structure, distribution and semantic interpretation of quantificational expressions in languages from diverse language families and typological profiles. Languages covered include American and Russian Sign Languages, and sixteen spoken languages from Africa, Australia, Papua, the Americas, and different parts of Asia.

The final chapter (Chapter VII) was written especially for this volume and investigates the question of how the 'situation semantics' recently devised by Jon Barwise and John Perry, as a rival to possible-worlds semantics, might deal with adverbs.

Vendler not only began to straighten out the distinctions, but pursued more specific and more interesting questions such as that of what entities the causality relation relates (events? Peterson's ontology features just facts, proposition, and events, carefully distinguished from each other.

This book provides an in-depth view of the current issues, problems and approaches in the computation of meaning as expressed in language. The annotation in corpora has only marginally addressed semantic information, however, since semantic annotation methodologies are still in their infancy.

The reader interested in other theoretical frameworks will find the discussion in this book easily translatable in the framework of his or her choice - in fact, I would like to claim that the problems posed by this book are inevitable in any theory of syntax and semantics of natural language.

Locality in WH Quantification argues that Logical Form, the level that mediates between syntax and semantics, is derived from S-structure by local movement. Among other issues addressed is the switch from uniqueness/maximality effects in single wh constructions to list readings in multiple wh constructions.

Addresses three central issues in the study of plurality and quantification in natural languages. This collection sheds light on the question of how many readings have to be assigned to plural sentences and on the respective consequences for the architecture of the syntax-semantics interface.

For upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in theoretical linguistics, computer-science students with interests in computational linguistics, logic programming and artificial intelligence, mathematicians and logicians with interests in linguistics and the semantics of natural language.

The organizers of the workshop gratefully acknowledge support from the Department of Linguistics, the Department of Philosophy and the Faculty of Humanities at Lund University, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (through the Wallenberg Foundation), the Swedish Institute, and the Letterstedt Foundation.

In other words, if a formal semantic analysis of a text yields a certain set of semantic proptrties which the text possesses, then the text is recognized as a joke.

These are, of course, issues of great inherent interest to anyone concerned with the formal syntax and semantics of natural language, with the philosophy of language, or with language processing.

These include semantic classes of quantifiers (generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, partitive), syntactically complex quantifiers (intensive modification, Boolean compounding, exception phrases) and several others such as quantifier scope ambiguities, quantifier float, and binary quantifiers.

The format of this book is unusual, especially for a book about linguistics.