Edward L. Keenan – författare

This collection of 15 articles reflects Edward Keenan’s long-standing research interests in the comparative syntax of the languages of the world. It includes two seminal ‘foundation’ articles, Noun Phrase Accessibility and Universal Grammar (with Bernard Comrie) and Towards a Universal Definition of ‘Subject of’. Most of the other articles have appeared in a variety of relatively inaccessible places, and so this book brings together for the first time a large body of work supporting the research directions taken in the foundation articles. In addition, one article of a psycholinguistic sort was specially prepared for this volume.

A volume of studies in natural language semantics which brings together work by philosophers, logicians and linguists. The main topics treated are: quantification and reference in natural language; the relations between formal logic, programming languages and natural language; pragmatics and discourse meaning; surface syntax and logical meaning. The volume derives from a colloquium organised in 1973 by the Kings College Research Centre, Cambridge and the papers have been edited for publication by Professor Keenan. It is hoped that the collection will make available some of the best work in this fast-moving field and will stimulate further progress by juxtaposing the different approaches and interests represented here.

This controversial and groundbreaking book revisits the origins of one of the most beloved works of East Slavic literature, the Slovo o polku Igoreve (The Igorʹ Tale). Edward Keenan delves into the history of the publication of the Tale and produces a meticulous analysis of its language in order to demonstrate that the text is not an authentic twelfth-century document. Rather, Keenan argues that it is a product of the late eighteenth century, created by the Bohemian scholar Josef Dobrovský. Keenan’s thought-provoking insights into the creation and publication of the Tale will spark scholarly debate for many years.

This collection of 15 articles reflects Edward Keenan’s long-standing research interests in the comparative syntax of the languages of the world. It includes two seminal ‘foundation’ articles, Noun Phrase Accessibility and Universal Grammar (with Bernard Comrie) and Towards a Universal Definition of ‘Subject of’. Most of the other articles have appeared in a variety of relatively inaccessible places, and so this book brings together for the first time a large body of work supporting the research directions taken in the foundation articles. In addition, one article of a psycholinguistic sort was specially prepared for this volume.

Mathematical Structures in Languages introduces a number of mathematical concepts that are of interest to the working linguist. The areas covered include basic set theory and logic, formal languages and automata, trees, partial orders, lattices, Boolean structure, generalized quantifier theory, and linguistic invariants, the last drawing on Edward L. Keenan and Edward Stabler's Bare Grammar: A Study of Language Invariants, also published by CSLI Publications. Ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of linguistics, this book contains numerous exercises and will be a valuable resource for courses on mathematical topics in linguistics. The product of many years of teaching, Mathematic Structures in Languages is very much a book to be read and learned from.

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.

This work presents the structure, distribution and semantic interpretation of quantificational expressions in languages from diverse language families and typological profiles. The current volume pays special attention to underrepresented languages of different status and endangerment level. Languages covered include American and Russian Sign Languages, and sixteen spoken languages from Africa, Australia, Papua, the Americas, and different parts of Asia.  The articles respond to a questionnaire the editors constructed to enable detailed crosslinguistic comparison of numerous features. They offer comparable information on semantic classes of quantifiers (generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, partitive), syntactically complex quantifiers (intensive modification, Boolean compounds, exception phrases, etc.), and several more specific issues such as quantifier scope ambiguities, floating quantifiers, and binary (type 2) quantifiers.  The book is intended for semanticists, logicians interested in quantification in natural language, and general linguists as articles are meant to be descriptive and theory independent.  The book continues and expands the coverage of the Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language (2012) by the same editors, and extends the earlier work in Matthewson (2008), Gil et al. (2013) and Bach et al (1995).

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.

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. In attempting to present some of Montague's insights in an elementary way (hopefully avoid­ ing the notation which many find difficult at first), the authors began dis­ cussions aimed towards the construction of a simple model-theoretical semantic apparatus which could be applied directly to a small English-like language and used to illustrate the methods of formal logical interpretation. In these discussions two points impressed themselves on us. First, our task could be simplified by using boolean algebras and boolean homomorphisms in the models; and second, the boolean approach we were developing had much more widespread relevance to the logical structure of English than we first thought. During the summer and fall of 1978 we continued work on the system, proving the more fundamental theorems (including what we have come to call the Justification Theorem) and outlining the way in which an intensional interpretation scheme could be developed which made use of the boolean approach (which was originally strictly extensional). We presented our findings in a monograph (Keenan and Faltz, 1978) which the UCLA Linguistics Department kindly published as part of their series called Occa­ sional Papers in Linguistics; one of the authors also presented the system at a colloquium held at the Winter Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in December 1978.

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. In attempting to present some of Montague's insights in an elementary way (hopefully avoid­ ing the notation which many find difficult at first), the authors began dis­ cussions aimed towards the construction of a simple model-theoretical semantic apparatus which could be applied directly to a small English-like language and used to illustrate the methods of formal logical interpretation. In these discussions two points impressed themselves on us. First, our task could be simplified by using boolean algebras and boolean homomorphisms in the models; and second, the boolean approach we were developing had much more widespread relevance to the logical structure of English than we first thought. During the summer and fall of 1978 we continued work on the system, proving the more fundamental theorems (including what we have come to call the Justification Theorem) and outlining the way in which an intensional interpretation scheme could be developed which made use of the boolean approach (which was originally strictly extensional). We presented our findings in a monograph (Keenan and Faltz, 1978) which the UCLA Linguistics Department kindly published as part of their series called Occa­ sional Papers in Linguistics; one of the authors also presented the system at a colloquium held at the Winter Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in December 1978.

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. In attempting to present some of Montague''s insights in an elementary way (hopefully avoid­ ing the notation which many find difficult at first), the authors began dis­ cussions aimed towards the construction of a simple model-theoretical semantic apparatus which could be applied directly to a small English-like language and used to illustrate the methods of formal logical interpretation. In these discussions two points impressed themselves on us. First, our task could be simplified by using boolean algebras and boolean homomorphisms in the models; and second, the boolean approach we were developing had much more widespread relevance to the logical structure of English than we first thought. During the summer and fall of 1978 we continued work on the system, proving the more fundamental theorems (including what we have come to call the Justification Theorem) and outlining the way in which an intensional interpretation scheme could be developed which made use of the boolean approach (which was originally strictly extensional). We presented our findings in a monograph (Keenan and Faltz, 1978) which the UCLA Linguistics Department kindly published as part of their series called Occa­ sional Papers in Linguistics; one of the authors also presented the system at a colloquium held at the Winter Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in December 1978.

This book synthesizes the author's work (1980s-2015) on the logical expressive power of natural language. It extends the tools and concepts of model theory as used in (higher order) predicate logic to the study of natural language semantics. It focuses on boolean structure, generalized quantification (separated from variable binding), covering some cases of anaphora. Different categories — predicates, adjective, quantifiers — are modeled by non-isomorphic boolean lattices.Of empirical linguistic interest is the expressibility of many natural classes of quantifiers defined in terms of their logical (automorphism invariant) properties. Some of these correlate with classes used syntactically in generative grammar. In other cases we find general (possibly universal) constraints on possible quantifier denotations in natural language.Also of novel logical interest are entailment paradigms that depend on relations between pairs or triples of generalized quantifier denoting expressions, ones that are in some cases inherently vague. In addition we note novel binary quantifiers that lie beyond the "Frege boundary" in that they are provably not identical to any iterated application of unary quantifiers.Of philosophical interest is the existence of models which make the same sentences true as standard models but which lack a universe and hence, seemingly, a notion of "reference". Moreover, these models generalize to ones in which we can represent (some) intensional expressions without the use of novel ontological objects, such as "possible worlds" or "propositions".