Bøger i Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy serien

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.

At the same time, Edit added, it would be nice if, rather than just presupposing or presenting a neo-Davidsonian framework to develop my analysis of plurality, I could provide a more general setting of the problems by discussing in some depth the archi tecture of event arguments and thematic roles.

Plurality, Conjunction and Events presents a novel theory of plural and conjoined phrases, in an event-based semantic framework.

Temporal Logic: From Ancient Ideas to Artificial Intelligence deals with the history of temporal logic as well as the crucial systematic questions within the field.

In this book we hope to acquaint the reader with the fundamentals of truth conditional model-theoretic semantics, and in particular with a version of this developed by Richard Montague in a series of papers published during the 1960's and early 1970's.

Recent work in computational semantics suggests, alternatively, to represent linguistic semantic information in formal structures with underspecification, and to apply context information in inference processes that result in further specification of these representations.

Based on an earlier edition published in 1992 in Bulgarian, this book offers a specific approach to one of the most controversial problems in linguistics.

This book is a collection of papers written by outstanding researchers in the newly emerging field of computational semantics. It is aimed at those linguists, computer scientists, and logicians who want to know more about the algorithmic realization of meaning in natural language and about what is happening in this field of research.

This book is a collection of original research articles on the representation and in terpretation of indefinite and definite noun phrases, anaphoric pronouns, and closely related issues such as reference, scope and quantifier movement.

This volume covers a broad spectrum of research into the role of events in grammar. It addresses event arguments and thematic argument structure, the role of events in verbal aspectual distinctions, events and the distinction between stage and individual level predicates, and the role of events in the analysis of plurality and scope relations.

Searle, containing Searle's own latest views - including his seminal ideas on Rationality in Action. The collection provides a good basis for advanced seminar debates in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy, and will also stimulate some further research on all of the three main topics.

Ever since Chomsky laid the framework for a mathematically formal theory of syntax, two classes of formal models have held wide appeal. This situation led many researchers to reasses the claim that natural languages are included in the class of transformational grammar languages.

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.

Part I of this book presents a theory of modal metaphysics in the possible-worlds tradition. The book will be of particular interest to metaphysicians, possible-world semanticists, philosophers of language, and linguists concerned with lexical semantics.

The work collected in this book represents the results of some intensive recent work on the syntax of natural languages. The authors' differing viewpoints have in common the program of revising current conceptions of syntactic representation so that the role of transformational derivations is reduced or eliminated. The fact that the papers cross-refer to each other a good deal, and that authors assuming quite different fram{:works are aware of each other's results and address themselves to shared problems, is partly the result of a conference on the nature of syntactic representation that was held at Brown University in May 1979 with the express purpose of bringing together different lines of research in syntax. The papers in this volume mostly arise out of work that was presented in preliminary form at that conference, though much rewriting and further research has been done in the interim period. Two papers are included because although they were not given even in preliminary form at the conference, it has become clear since then that they interrelate with the work of the conference so much that they cannot reasonably be left out: Gerald Gazdar's statement of his program for phrase structure description of natural language forms the theoretical basis that is assumed by Maling and Zaenen and by Sag, and David Dowty's paper represents a bridge between the relational grammar exemplified here in the papers by Perlmutter and Postal on the one hand and the Montague­

Over a longer period than I sometimes care to contemplate I have worked on possible-worlds semantics. The earliest work was in modal logic, to which I keep returning, but a sabbatical in 1970 took me to UCLA, there to discover the work of Richard Montague in applying possible-worlds semantics to natural lan guage.

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.