The Compositionality Principle
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Semantics and Pragmatics
Semantics and Pragmatics Christopher Gauker Semantics deals with the literal meaning of sentences. Pragmatics deals with what speakers mean by their utterances of sentences over and above what those sentences literally mean. However, it is not always clear where to draw the line. Natural languages contain many expressions that may be thought of both as contributing to literal meaning and as devices by which speakers signal what they mean. After characterizing the aims of semantics and pragmatics, this chapter will set out the issues concerning such devices and will propose a way of dividing the labor between semantics and pragmatics. Disagreements about the purview of semantics and pragmatics often concern expressions of which we may say that their interpretation somehow depends on the context in which they are used. Thus: • The interpretation of a sentence containing a demonstrative, as in “This is nice”, depends on a contextually-determined reference of the demonstrative. • The interpretation of a quantified sentence, such as “Everyone is present”, depends on a contextually-determined domain of discourse. • The interpretation of a sentence containing a gradable adjective, as in “Dumbo is small”, depends on a contextually-determined standard (Kennedy 2007). • The interpretation of a sentence containing an incomplete predicate, as in “Tipper is ready”, may depend on a contextually-determined completion. Semantics and Pragmatics 8/4/10 Page 2 • The interpretation of a sentence containing a discourse particle such as “too”, as in “Dennis is having dinner in London tonight too”, may depend on a contextually determined set of background propositions (Gauker 2008a). • The interpretation of a sentence employing metonymy, such as “The ham sandwich wants his check”, depends on a contextually-determined relation of reference-shifting. -
Logophoricity in Finnish
Open Linguistics 2018; 4: 630–656 Research Article Elsi Kaiser* Effects of perspective-taking on pronominal reference to humans and animals: Logophoricity in Finnish https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2018-0031 Received December 19, 2017; accepted August 28, 2018 Abstract: This paper investigates the logophoric pronoun system of Finnish, with a focus on reference to animals, to further our understanding of the linguistic representation of non-human animals, how perspective-taking is signaled linguistically, and how this relates to features such as [+/-HUMAN]. In contexts where animals are grammatically [-HUMAN] but conceptualized as the perspectival center (whose thoughts, speech or mental state is being reported), can they be referred to with logophoric pronouns? Colloquial Finnish is claimed to have a logophoric pronoun which has the same form as the human-referring pronoun of standard Finnish, hän (she/he). This allows us to test whether a pronoun that may at first blush seem featurally specified to seek [+HUMAN] referents can be used for [-HUMAN] referents when they are logophoric. I used corpus data to compare the claim that hän is logophoric in both standard and colloquial Finnish vs. the claim that the two registers have different logophoric systems. I argue for a unified system where hän is logophoric in both registers, and moreover can be used for logophoric [-HUMAN] referents in both colloquial and standard Finnish. Thus, on its logophoric use, hän does not require its referent to be [+HUMAN]. Keywords: Finnish, logophoric pronouns, logophoricity, anti-logophoricity, animacy, non-human animals, perspective-taking, corpus 1 Introduction A key aspect of being human is our ability to think and reason about our own mental states as well as those of others, and to recognize that others’ perspectives, knowledge or mental states are distinct from our own, an ability known as Theory of Mind (term due to Premack & Woodruff 1978). -
Reference and Sense
REFERENCE AND SENSE y two distinct ways of talking about the meaning of words y tlkitalking of SENSE=deali ng with relationshippggs inside language y talking of REFERENCE=dealing with reltilations hips bbtetween l. and the world y by means of reference a speaker indicates which things (including persons) are being talked about ege.g. My son is in the beech tree. II identifies persons identifies things y REFERENCE-relationship between the Enggplish expression ‘this p pgage’ and the thing you can hold between your finger and thumb (part of the world) y your left ear is the REFERENT of the phrase ‘your left ear’ while REFERENCE is the relationship between parts of a l. and things outside the l. y The same expression can be used to refer to different things- there are as many potential referents for the phrase ‘your left ear’ as there are pppeople in the world with left ears Many expressions can have VARIABLE REFERENCE y There are cases of expressions which in normal everyday conversation never refer to different things, i.e. which in most everyday situations that one can envisage have CONSTANT REFERENCE. y However, there is very little constancy of reference in l. Almost all of the fixing of reference comes from the context in which expressions are used. y Two different expressions can have the same referent class ica l example: ‘the MiMorning St’Star’ and ‘the Evening Star’ to refer to the planet Venus y SENSE of an expression is its place in a system of semantic relati onshi ps wit h other expressions in the l. -
The Meaning of Language
01:615:201 Introduction to Linguistic Theory Adam Szczegielniak The Meaning of Language Copyright in part: Cengage learning The Meaning of Language • When you know a language you know: • When a word is meaningful or meaningless, when a word has two meanings, when two words have the same meaning, and what words refer to (in the real world or imagination) • When a sentence is meaningful or meaningless, when a sentence has two meanings, when two sentences have the same meaning, and whether a sentence is true or false (the truth conditions of the sentence) • Semantics is the study of the meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences – Lexical semantics: the meaning of words and the relationships among words – Phrasal or sentential semantics: the meaning of syntactic units larger than one word Truth • Compositional semantics: formulating semantic rules that build the meaning of a sentence based on the meaning of the words and how they combine – Also known as truth-conditional semantics because the speaker’ s knowledge of truth conditions is central Truth • If you know the meaning of a sentence, you can determine under what conditions it is true or false – You don’ t need to know whether or not a sentence is true or false to understand it, so knowing the meaning of a sentence means knowing under what circumstances it would be true or false • Most sentences are true or false depending on the situation – But some sentences are always true (tautologies) – And some are always false (contradictions) Entailment and Related Notions • Entailment: one sentence entails another if whenever the first sentence is true the second one must be true also Jack swims beautifully. -
Two-Dimensionalism: Semantics and Metasemantics
Two-Dimensionalism: Semantics and Metasemantics YEUNG, \y,ang -C-hun ...:' . '",~ ... ~ .. A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Philosophy In Philosophy The Chinese University of Hong Kong January 2010 Abstract of thesis entitled: Two-Dimensionalism: Semantics and Metasemantics Submitted by YEUNG, Wang Chun for the degree of Master of Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in July 2009 This ,thesis investigates problems surrounding the lively debate about how Kripke's examples of necessary a posteriori truths and contingent a priori truths should be explained. Two-dimensionalism is a recent development that offers a non-reductive analysis of such truths. The semantic interpretation of two-dimensionalism, proposed by Jackson and Chalmers, has certain 'descriptive' elements, which can be articulated in terms of the following three claims: (a) names and natural kind terms are reference-fixed by some associated properties, (b) these properties are known a priori by every competent speaker, and (c) these properties reflect the cognitive significance of sentences containing such terms. In this thesis, I argue against two arguments directed at such 'descriptive' elements, namely, The Argument from Ignorance and Error ('AlE'), and The Argument from Variability ('AV'). I thereby suggest that reference-fixing properties belong to the semantics of names and natural kind terms, and not to their metasemantics. Chapter 1 is a survey of some central notions related to the debate between descriptivism and direct reference theory, e.g. sense, reference, and rigidity. Chapter 2 outlines the two-dimensional approach and introduces the va~ieties of interpretations 11 of the two-dimensional framework. -
Context Pragmatics Definition of Pragmatics
Pragmatics • to ask a question: Maybe Sandy’s reassuring you that Kim’ll get home okay, even though she’s walking home late at night. Sandy: She’s got more than lipstick and Kleenex in that purse of hers. • What is Pragmatics? You: Kim’s got a knife? • Context and Why It’s Important • Speech Acts – Direct Speech Acts – Indirect Speech Acts • How To Make Sense of Conversations – Cooperative Principle – Conversational Maxims Linguistics 201, Detmar Meurers Handout 3 (April 9, 2004) 1 3 Definition of Pragmatics Context Pragmatics is the study of how language is used and how language is integrated in context. What exactly are the factors which are relevant for an account of how people use language? What is linguistic context? Why must we consider context? We distinguish several types of contextual information: (1) Kim’s got a knife 1. Physical context – this encompasses what is physically present around the speakers/hearers at the time of communication. What objects are visible, where Sentence (1) can be used to accomplish different things in different contexts: the communication is taking place, what is going on around, etc. • to make an assertion: You’re sitting on a beach, thinking about how to open a coconut, when someone (2) a. Iwantthat book. observes “Kim’s got a knife”. (accompanied by pointing) b. Be here at 9:00 tonight. • to give a warning: (place/time reference) Kim’s trying to bully you and Sandy into giving her your lunch money, and Sandy just turns around and starts to walk away. She doesn’t see Kim bring out the butcher knife, and hears you yell behind her, “Kim’s got a knife!” 2 4 2. -
Scope Ambiguity in Syntax and Semantics
Scope Ambiguity in Syntax and Semantics Ling324 Reading: Meaning and Grammar, pg. 142-157 Is Scope Ambiguity Semantically Real? (1) Everyone loves someone. a. Wide scope reading of universal quantifier: ∀x[person(x) →∃y[person(y) ∧ love(x,y)]] b. Wide scope reading of existential quantifier: ∃y[person(y) ∧∀x[person(x) → love(x,y)]] 1 Could one semantic representation handle both the readings? • ∃y∀x reading entails ∀x∃y reading. ∀x∃y describes a more general situation where everyone has someone who s/he loves, and ∃y∀x describes a more specific situation where everyone loves the same person. • Then, couldn’t we say that Everyone loves someone is associated with the semantic representation that describes the more general reading, and the more specific reading obtains under an appropriate context? That is, couldn’t we say that Everyone loves someone is not semantically ambiguous, and its only semantic representation is the following? ∀x[person(x) →∃y[person(y) ∧ love(x,y)]] • After all, this semantic representation reflects the syntax: In syntax, everyone c-commands someone. In semantics, everyone scopes over someone. 2 Arguments for Real Scope Ambiguity • The semantic representation with the scope of quantifiers reflecting the order in which quantifiers occur in a sentence does not always represent the most general reading. (2) a. There was a name tag near every plate. b. A guard is standing in front of every gate. c. A student guide took every visitor to two museums. • Could we stipulate that when interpreting a sentence, no matter which order the quantifiers occur, always assign wide scope to every and narrow scope to some, two, etc.? 3 Arguments for Real Scope Ambiguity (cont.) • But in a negative sentence, ¬∀x∃y reading entails ¬∃y∀x reading. -
Arxiv:2106.08037V1 [Cs.CL] 15 Jun 2021 Alternative Ways the World Could Be
The Possible, the Plausible, and the Desirable: Event-Based Modality Detection for Language Processing Valentina Pyatkin∗ Shoval Sadde∗ Aynat Rubinstein Bar Ilan University Bar Ilan University Hebrew University of Jerusalem [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Paul Portner Reut Tsarfaty Georgetown University Bar Ilan University [email protected] [email protected] Abstract (1) a. We presented a paper at ACL’19. Modality is the linguistic ability to describe b. We did not present a paper at ACL’20. events with added information such as how de- sirable, plausible, or feasible they are. Modal- The propositional content p =“present a paper at ity is important for many NLP downstream ACL’X” can be easily verified for sentences (1a)- tasks such as the detection of hedging, uncer- (1b) by looking up the proceedings of the confer- tainty, speculation, and more. Previous studies ence to (dis)prove the existence of the relevant pub- that address modality detection in NLP often p restrict modal expressions to a closed syntac- lication. The same proposition is still referred to tic class, and the modal sense labels are vastly in sentences (2a)–(2d), but now in each one, p is different across different studies, lacking an ac- described from a different perspective: cepted standard. Furthermore, these senses are often analyzed independently of the events that (2) a. We aim to present a paper at ACL’21. they modify. This work builds on the theoreti- b. We want to present a paper at ACL’21. cal foundations of the Georgetown Gradable Modal Expressions (GME) work by Rubin- c. -
Semantics and Context-Dependence: Towards a Strawsonian Account∗
Semantics and Context-Dependence: Towards a Strawsonian Account∗ Richard G Heck, Jr Brown University Some time in the mid-1990s, I began to encounter variations on the following argument, which was popular with certain of my colleagues and with students who had fallen under their influence. (i) Semantics is about truth-conditions. (ii) Only utterances have truth-conditions. (iii) Hence, a semantic theory must assign truth-conditions to utterances. (iv) Only a theory that incorporated a complete theory of human rationality could assign truth-conditions to utterances. (v) So there is no such thing as a semantic theory (in anything like the usual sense). The argument need not be formulated in terms of truth-conditions. The first premise could equally be stated as: Semantics is about the expression of propositions. The rest of the argument then adapts smoothly. So (i) is meant to be obvious and uncontroversial. With regard to the second premise, it is important to appreciate the force of the word “only”: (ii) asserts that (perhaps with a very few exceptions, such as statements of pure mathematics) sentences never have truth-conditions; only utterances do. So what underwrites (ii) is not just the existence of context-dependence but, rather, its ubiquity. As has become clear over the last few decades, it is not just the obvious expressions—like “I”, “here”, “this”, and the like—whose meaning seems to vary with the circumstances of utterance. All of the following sentences seem as if they could express different propositions on different occasions, due to context-dependence connected with the italicized expressions: • No-one passed the test. -
The Etienne Gilson Series 21
The Etienne Gilson Series 21 Remapping Scholasticism by MARCIA L. COLISH 3 March 2000 Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies This lecture and its publication was made possible through the generous bequest of the late Charles J. Sullivan (1914-1999) Note: the author may be contacted at: Department of History Oberlin College Oberlin OH USA 44074 ISSN 0-708-319X ISBN 0-88844-721-3 © 2000 by Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies 59 Queen’s Park Crescent East Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 2C4 Printed in Canada nce upon a time there were two competing story-lines for medieval intellectual history, each writing a major role for scholasticism into its script. Although these story-lines were O created independently and reflected different concerns, they sometimes overlapped and gave each other aid and comfort. Both exerted considerable influence on the way historians of medieval speculative thought conceptualized their subject in the first half of the twentieth cen- tury. Both versions of the map drawn by these two sets of cartographers illustrated what Wallace K. Ferguson later described as “the revolt of the medievalists.”1 One was confined largely to the academy and appealed to a wide variety of medievalists, while the other had a somewhat narrower draw and reflected political and confessional, as well as academic, concerns. The first was the anti-Burckhardtian effort to push Renaissance humanism, understood as combining a knowledge and love of the classics with “the discovery of the world and of man,” back into the Middle Ages. The second was inspired by the neo-Thomist revival launched by Pope Leo XIII, and was inhabited almost exclusively by Roman Catholic scholars. -
Lexical Semantics Ling571 Deep Processing Techniques for NLP February 23, 2015 What Is a Plant?
Lexical Semantics Ling571 Deep Processing Techniques for NLP February 23, 2015 What is a plant? There are more kinds of plants and animals in the rainforests than anywhere else on Earth. Over half of the millions of known species of plants and animals live in the rainforest. Many are found nowhere else. There are even plants and animals in the rainforest that we have not yet discovered. The Paulus company was founded in 1938. Since those days the product range has been the subject of constant expansions and is brought up continuously to correspond with the state of the art. We’re engineering, manufacturing, and commissioning world-wide ready-to-run plants packed with our comprehensive know-how. Lexical Semantics So far, word meanings discrete Constants, predicates, functions Lexical Semantics So far, word meanings discrete Constants, predicates, functions Focus on word meanings: Relations of meaning among words Similarities & differences of meaning in sim context Lexical Semantics So far, word meanings discrete Constants, predicates, functions Focus on word meanings: Relations of meaning among words Similarities & differences of meaning in sim context Internal meaning structure of words Basic internal units combine for meaning Terminology Lexeme: Form: Orthographic/phonological + meaning Terminology Lexeme: Form: Orthographic/phonological + meaning Represented by lemma Lemma: citation form; infinitive in inflection Sing: sing, sings, sang, sung,… Terminology Lexeme: Form: Orthographic/phonological + meaning Represented by lemma Lemma: citation form; infinitive in inflection Sing: sing, sings, sang, sung,… Lexicon: finite list of lexemes Sources of Confusion Homonymy: Words have same form but different meanings Generally same POS, but unrelated meaning Sources of Confusion Homonymy: Words have same form but different meanings Generally same POS, but unrelated meaning E.g. -
Person, Context and Perspective
To appear in Rivista di Linguistica – Italian Journal of Linguistics in 2005. Person, Context and Perspective Ken Safir, Rutgers University ABSTRACT: It is argued that the indexicality of first person pronouns is arises from a restriction on the pronouns themselves, as opposed to any operator that binds them. The nature of this restriction is an asyntactic constant function that picks out individuals to the context of utterance (following Kaplan, 1989)). Constant function pronouns do not require an antecedent, neither an operator nor an argument, although this does not prevent them from participating in bound readings if an appropriate antecedent is introduced. The notion that agents of contexts and agents of propositional attitudes are versions of the same operator-variable relation is thus rejected, along with certain less fine-grained versions of the nature of de se interpretation. Consequently, indexical pronouns such as first person ones contrast with logophoric pronouns, which are necessarily operator-bound by perspectival operators introduced by propositional attitude verbs. Scope-sensitive properties of operator-binding and the perspectival interpretations that are imposed on logophoricity distinguish the latter from constant function phenomena, which are sensitive neither to scope, as it is usually treated, nor perspectival shifts. Constant function phenomena are also detectable as restrictions on third person forms, and two such examples are lightly explored: the English generic pronoun one and the proximate/obviative distinction in languages like Fox. 1.0 Introduction In this essay I defend the thesis that the indexicality of first person pronouns is a restriction on the pronouns themselves, as opposed to any operator that binds them.