Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy – serie

In the past few decades, the development of theoretical linguistics has proved to be successful in shedding light on the intricate nature of language and knowledge of grammar, which contributes to a deeper understanding of the human mind. This book discusses various issues in syntax and logical structure of natural language from theoretical perspectives. The primary data on which theoretical claims are made is drawn from Japanese and Japanese-type languages, but it also contains discussion of related phenomena in English which have never been discussed from the same viewpoint in the current literature. Although the book is written in the format of a version of the Extended Standard Theory tradition, informally referred to as the Principles and Parameters Approach or 'Government and Binding (OB) Theory', it should be of interest to a much wider audience. 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.

In the past few decades, the development of theoretical linguistics has proved to be successful in shedding light on the intricate nature of language and knowledge of grammar, which contributes to a deeper understanding of the human mind. This book discusses various issues in syntax and logical structure of natural language from theoretical perspectives. The primary data on which theoretical claims are made is drawn from Japanese and Japanese-type languages, but it also contains discussion of related phenomena in English which have never been discussed from the same viewpoint in the current literature. Although the book is written in the format of a version of the Extended Standard Theory tradition, informally referred to as the Principles and Parameters Approach or 'Government and Binding (OB) Theory', it should be of interest to a much wider audience. 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.

In ordinary discourse we appear to ta1k about many things that have seemed mysterious to philosophers. We say that there has been a hitch in our arrangements or that the solution to the problem required us to examine all the probable outcomes of our action. So it would seem that we speak as if in addition to eloeks, mountains, queens and grains of sand there are hitches, arrangements, solutions, probiems, and probable outcomes. It is not immediately obvious when we must take such ta1k as really assuming that there are such to develop tests for things, and one of the tasks in this book is discerning what has eome to be called ontological commitment, in naturallanguage. Among the entities that natural language appears to make reference to are those connected with temporal and modal discourse, times, possibilities, and so on. Such entities play a crueial role in the kind of semantieal theories that I and others have defended over many years. These theories are based on the idea that an essential part of the meaning of a sentence is constituted by the conditions under whieh that sentenee is true. To know what a sentence says is to know what the world would have to be !ike for that sentence to be true.

In ordinary discourse we appear to ta1k about many things that have seemed mysterious to philosophers. We say that there has been a hitch in our arrangements or that the solution to the problem required us to examine all the probable outcomes of our action. So it would seem that we speak as if in addition to eloeks, mountains, queens and grains of sand there are hitches, arrangements, solutions, probiems, and probable outcomes. It is not immediately obvious when we must take such ta1k as really assuming that there are such to develop tests for things, and one of the tasks in this book is discerning what has eome to be called ontological commitment, in naturallanguage. Among the entities that natural language appears to make reference to are those connected with temporal and modal discourse, times, possibilities, and so on. Such entities play a crueial role in the kind of semantieal theories that I and others have defended over many years. These theories are based on the idea that an essential part of the meaning of a sentence is constituted by the conditions under whieh that sentenee is true. To know what a sentence says is to know what the world would have to be !ike for that sentence to be true.

Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specifically than that, it is about a particular way of dealing with those subjects, known as Discourse Representation Theory, or DRT. DRT is an approach towards natural language semantics which, some thirteen years ago, arose out of attempts to deal with two distinct problems. The first of those was the semantic puzzle that had been brought to contempo­ rary attention by Geach's notorious "donkey sentences" - sentences like If Pedro owns some donkey, he beats it, in which the anaphoric connection we perceive between the indefinite noun phrase some donkey and the pronoun it may seem to conflict with the existential meaning of the word some. The second problem had to do with tense and aspect. Some languages, for instance French and the other Romance languages, have two morphologically distinct past tenses, a simple past (the French Passe Simple) and a continuous past (the French Imparfait). To articulate precisely what the difference between these tenses is has turned out to be surprisingly difficult.

This book presents a unified theory of aspect as a parameter of universal grammar. It provides a combination of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic approaches to a single domain, as well as detailed linguistic analysis of five languages with very different aspectual systems: French, English, Russian, Mandarin Chinese and Navajo. Extensive discussion of the linguistic evidence is complemented by a formal semantic treatment, set in the framework of Discourse Representation Theory. The analysis offers an explicit procedure for arriving at the aspectual meaning of a sentence from its syntactic surface structure. Among the theoretical innovations are a principled account of the interaction between viewpoint (perfective, imperfective) and situation type (state, event); a principled account of aspectual shifts in language; a level of pragmatic analysis at which inferred meanings are stated; a default analysis of sentences that are neither perfective nor imperfective.

Structures for Semantics offers an advanced course in logical and mathematical techniques and structures that are used in semantics, in relation to their semantic applications. The book helps students with a background in semantics to develop their skills of formalization and it makes research in semantics accessible. Workers in other disciplines will use it to discover more about the role of formal modelling in current semantic research, and about semantics itself. Following a chapter on logic and set theory there are three parts of chapters: two pairs of chapters on partial order and equivalence relations in relation to semantic analyses of tense, partial information and vagueness; two chapters on methods for creating ordered structures in relation to intervals, events, and the semantics of change; two chapters on lattices and Boolean algebras in relation to types for noun phrases and verbs, and the semantics of plurals and mass nouns. For upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in semantics: theoretical linguists, logicians, philosophers of language, computer scientists interested in natural language semantics.

Formalization plays an important role in semantics. Doing semantics and following the literature requires considerable technical sophistica­ tion and acquaintance with quite advanced mathematical techniques and structures. But semantics isn't mathematics. These techniques and structures are tools that help us build semantic theories. Our real aim is to understand semantic phenomena and we need the technique to make our understanding of these phenomena precise. The problems in semantics are most often too hard and slippery, to completely trust our informal understanding of them. This should not be taken as an attack on informal reasoning in semantics. On the contrary, in my view, very often the essential insight in a diagnosis of what is going on in a certain semantic phenomenon takes place at the informal level. It is very easy, however, to be misled into thinking that a certain informal insight provides a satisfying analysis of a certain problem; it will often turn out that there is a fundamental unclarity about what the informal insight actually is. Formalization helps to sharpen those insights and put them to the test.

This book examines some of the more important theories to be found in classical Indian philosophy that bear directly on current concerns in philosophy of language. The issues discussed are three: the problem of sentential unity, the sense-reference distinction, and our talk about the non-existent. In each case the author presents the views of selected Indian philosophers on the issue -- views that differ in significant ways from those that are usually considered in contemporary debates in philosophy of language. The intention throughout is to add the voices of classical Indian theorists to these contemporary debates. Thus Indian approaches to such issues as the relation of word meaning to sentence meaning and the problem of negative existentials are not only explicated but also assessed for their adequacy relative to the approaches of classical and contemporary analytic philosophers of language. No background knowledge of Indian philosophy is presupposed; the book should thus prove of interest to specialists in philosophy of language, semantics, as well as to those working in Indian and comparative philosophy.

The purpose clause is a common kind of adverbial modifier in English. In this book, the standard unbounded-dependency theory of constructions like purpose clauses, outlined within Noam Chomsky's Government and Binding theory (GB), is contrasted with an alternative theoretical characterization of them, worked out within Edwin Williams GB-related theory of thematic roles and argument structure. The central proposal of the alternative theory is that purpose clauses are essentially nonclausal in contrast to the standard fully-clausal analysis. The abundant special properties of purpose clauses, extensively presented and described here, sharply illuminate many of the fundamental assumptions, and limitations of several GB-sub-theories. Among the topics considered are the argument adjunct distinction, the generality of syntactic movement, locality restrictions on filler-gap dependencies, tough-movement, the semantic content of thematic roles, and the quantificational nature and semantics of Control.

The papers in this volume are contributions to a comparative semantics, understood in the context of the theory of Logical Form as a branch of comparative syntax. In contrastively exploring a wide range of languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Navajo, Spanish and Toba Batak, the authors provide new insights into our understanding of the nature of quantificational, WH and anaphoric phenomena, and into the form of constraints, including subjacency and ECP, on the structure of binding at Logical Form.

The grammatical phenomenon of "control" subsumes a variety of cases where an understood argument of a complement or adjunct clause is related to an explicit element occurring elsewhere in the sentence. The control phenomenon, though familiar from many languages, and widely discussed, has remained a persistent and controversial topic in grammatical analysis. This volume presents nine new, theoretical studies of control. The authors explore the subject matter across a range of languages and constructions, in several different frameworks, and from a variety of perspectives, including syntax, semantics, psycholinguistics and historical lingustics. The articles in this collection offer a stimulating introduction to the spectrum of issues in control theory and their bearing on technical linguistics today.

This study integrates the research being carried out in the field of lexical semantics in linguistics with the work on knowledge representation and lexicon design in computational linguistics. Rarely do these two camps meet and discuss the demands and concerns of each other's fields. Therefore, the book is interesting in that it provides a stimulating and unique discussion between the computational perspective of lexical meaning and the concerns of the linguist for the semantic description of lexical items in the context of syntactic descriptions. The volume is divided into three sections. Part 1 deals with the fundamentals of lexical structure and what constitutes a lexical semantic representation for a grammatical theory. Part 2 deals with the specific mappings that are necessary from a lexical semantic representation to the syntax. Finally, part 3 addresses the possibility of modelling lexical knowledge with computational uses in mind.The unifying assumption behind all these works is that methodologies in computational linguistics and theoretical linguistics have converged, and that the goals of both fields are the same: to investigate the phenomenon of language in a rigorous and analytic way, for the purpose of establishing how it fits into the larger domain of intelligent human behaviour.

"Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse" presents a novel framework and analysis of the ways we refer to abstract objects in natural language discourse. The book begins with a typology of abstract objects and related entities like eventualities. After an introduction to "bottom up, compositional" discourse representation theory (DRT) and to previous work on abstract objects in DRT (notably work on the semantics of the attitudes), the book turns to a semantic analysis of eventuality and abstract object denoting nominals in English. The book then revises and extends the dynamic semantic framework of DRT to develop an analysis of anaphoric reference to abstract objects and eventualities that exploits discourse structure and the discourse relations that obtain between elements of the structure. A dynamic, semantically based theory of discourse structure (SDRT) is proposed, along with many illustrative examples. Two further chapters then provide the analysis of anaphoric reference to propositions VP ellipsis. The abstract entity anaphoric antecedents are elements of the discourse structures that SDRT develops.The final chapter discusses some logical and philosophical difficulties for a semantic analysis of reference to abstract objects. The work should be of interest to semanticists, philosophers of language, computer scientists interested in natural language applications and discourse, philosophical logicians, and graduate students in linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and artificial intelligence.

The goal of this book is to integrate the research being carried out in the field of lexical semantics in linguistics with the work on knowledge representation and lexicon design in computational linguistics. Rarely do these two camps meet and discuss the demands and concerns of each other's fields. Therefore, this book is interesting in that it provides a stimulating and unique discussion between the computational perspective of lexical meaning and the concerns of the linguist for the semantic description of lexical items in the context of syntactic descriptions. This book grew out of the papers presented at a workshop held at Brandeis University in April, 1988, funded by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. The entire workshop as well as the discussion periods accom­ panying each talk were recorded. Once complete copies of each paper were available, they were distributed to participants, who were asked to provide written comments on the texts for review purposes. VII JAMES PUSTEJOVSKY 1. INTRODUCTION There is currently a growing interest in the content of lexical entries from a theoretical perspective as well as a growing need to understand the organization of the lexicon from a computational view. This volume attempts to define the directions that need to be taken in order to achieve the goal of a coherent theory of lexical organization.

Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specifically than that, it is about a particular way of dealing with those subjects, known as Discourse Representation Theory, or DRT. DRT is an approach towards natural language semantics which, some thirteen years ago, arose out of attempts to deal with two distinct problems. The first of those was the semantic puzzle that had been brought to contempo­ rary attention by Geach's notorious "donkey sentences" - sentences like If Pedro owns some donkey, he beats it, in which the anaphoric connection we perceive between the indefinite noun phrase some donkey and the pronoun it may seem to conflict with the existential meaning of the word some. The second problem had to do with tense and aspect. Some languages, for instance French and the other Romance languages, have two morphologically distinct past tenses, a simple past (the French Passe Simple) and a continuous past (the French Imparfait). To articulate precisely what the difference between these tenses is has turned out to be surprisingly difficult.

"The Language of Propositions and Events" offers a comprehensive theory of the relation between noun meaning and verb meaning. Two main theses are defended in this book. The first thesis is that an adequate account of the interpretation and distribution of nominals calls for a distinction between three types of entities in the domain of discourse: events, propositions and states of affairs. It is argued that different types of nominals differ in their ability to denote entities of these types and that predicates differ in their ability to select for them. The second main thesis is that an adequate characterization of the relation between noun meaning and verb meaning can be given by taking account of the fact that situations may stand in the "part of" relation. Kratzer's semantics of situations is the basis for this analysis of nominalization. Moreover, the book addresses the issue of the argument structure of nominals and offers an analysis of the puzzling distribution of "infinito sostantivato" in Italian. This book is intended for graduate students in semantics and syntax, theoretical linguists, philosophers of language and students of Romance linguistics.

This book presents a theory of the interface between lexical semantics and syntax, in which aspect plays a central role. The aspectual properties that figure in the linking between syntax and semantics are expressed through "aspectual roles", assigned by a verb to its arguments. A number of lexical semantic phenomena can be expressed as operations over aspectual roles, and syntactic phenomena can be classified according to whether or not they are sensitive to the presence of aspectual roles. The theory is independent of any particular model of syntax (such as GB or LFG). This theory proposes a modular relationship between aspectual role information, and conceptual or thematic representations of lexical semantic information. Language-specific generalizations about linking are argued to be expressed in thematic or conceptual representations, while universal linking generalizations are expressed in aspectual representations. Consequently, this theory has implications for language acquisition.

This book presents a theory of the interface between lexical semantics and syntax, in which aspect plays a central role. The aspectual properties that figure in the linking between syntax and semantics are expressed through "aspectual roles", assigned by a verb to its arguments. A number of lexical semantic phenomena can be expressed as operations over aspectual roles, and syntactic phenomena can be classified according to whether or not they are sensitive to the presence of aspectual roles. The theory is independent of any particular model of syntax (such as GB or LFG). This theory proposes a modular relationship between aspectual role information, and conceptual or thematic representations of lexical semantic information. Language-specific generalizations about linking are argued to be expressed in thematic or conceptual representations, while universal linking generalizations are expressed in aspectual representations. Consequently, this theory has implications for language acquisition.

Part I of this book presents a theory of modal metaphysics in the possible-worlds tradition. "Worlds" themselves are understood as structured sets of properties; this "Ersatzist" view is defended against its most vigorous competitors, Meinongianism and David Lewis' theory of existent concrete worlds. Related issues of essentialism and linguistic reference are explored. Part II takes up the question of lexical meaning in the context of possible-world semantics. There are sceptical analyses of analyticity and the notion of a logical constant; and an "infinite polysemy" thesis is defended. The book will be of particular interest to metaphysicians, possible-world semanticists, philosophers of language and linguists concerned with lexical semantics.

Part I of this book presents a theory of modal metaphysics in the possible-worlds tradition. `Worlds' themselves are understood as structured sets of properties; this `Ersatzist' view is defended against its most vigorous competitors, Meinongianism and David Lewis' theory of existent concrete worlds. Related issues of essentialism and linguistic reference are explored. Part II takes up the question of lexical meaning in the context of possible-world semantics. There are skeptical analyses of analyticity and the notion of a logical constant; and an `infinite polysemy' thesis is defended. The book will be of particular interest to metaphysicians, possible-world semanticists, philosophers of language, and linguists concerned with lexical semantics.

This collection of papers is the result of putting ideas on quantification to work on a wide variety of languages. A central perspective of many of the papers follows the recognition of two broad types of quantificational strategies, one associated with nominal structures and determiners, the other with adverbial and other non-nominal expression ("D-quantifiers" and "A-quantifiers"). The papers demonstrate both the unity and the variety of natural language quantificational forms and meanings. Many of the papers also shed new light on questions of language typology and syntactic and morphological variation. The languages discussed include English, Dutch, Italian, American Sign Language, Hindi, and a number of languages of Australia, Greenland, and the Americas. These comparative studies provide initial data for a typology of quantificational structures in natural languages, with important implications for the study of universal grammar. The book consists of research papers aimed at linguists, philosophers, and psychologists interested in semantics and linguistic form.An introduction presents a sketch of the background of this research and some of the central issues discussed, with pointers toward the included papers.

Plurality, Conjunction and Events presents a novel theory of plural and conjoined phrases, in an event-based semantic framework. It begins by reviewing options for treating the alternation between 'collective' and 'distributive' readings of sentences containing plural or conjoined noun phrases, including analyses from both the modern and the premodern literature. It is argued that plural and conjoined noun phrases are unambiguously group-denoting, and that the collective/distributive distinction therefore must be located in the predicates with which these noun phrases combine. More specifically, predicates must have a hidden argument place for events; the collective/distributive distinction may then be represented in the part/whole structure of these events. This allows a natural treatment of 'collectivizing' adverbial expressions, and of 'pluractional' affixes; it also allows a unified semantics for conjunction, in which conjoined sentences and predicates denote groups of events, much like conjoined noun phrases denote groups of individuals.

This extended collection of papers is the result of putting recent ideas on quantification to work on a wide variety of languages. A central perspective of many of the papers follows the recognition of two broad types of quantificational strategies, one associated with nominal structures and determiners, the other with adverbial and other non-nominal expression ('D-quantifiers' and 'A-quantifiers'). The papers demonstrate both the unity and the variety of natural language quantificational forms and meanings. Many of the papers also shed new light on questions of language typology and syntactic and morphological variation. The languages discussed include English, Dutch, Italian, American Sign Language, Hindi, and a number of languages of Australia, Greenland, and the Americas. These comparative studies provide initial data for a typology of quantificational structures in natural languages, with important implications for the study of universal grammar. The book consists of research papers aimed at linguists, philosophers, and psychologists interested in semantics and linguistic form.An introduction presents a sketch of the background of this research and some of the central issues discussed, with pointers toward the included papers.

Semantic underspecification is an essential and pervasive property of natural language, and this monograph provides a detailed survey of the various phenomena in the field of ambiguity and vagueness. It discusses the major theories of semantic indefiniteness, which have been proposed in linguistics, philosophy and computer science; argues for a view of indefiniteness as the potential for further contextual specification; and proposes a unified logical treatment of indefiniteness on this basis. The inherent inconsistency of natural language induced by irreducible imprecision is investigated, and treated in terms of a dynamic extension of the proposed logic. The book is an extended edition of a German monograph and is addressed to advanced students and researchers in theoretical and computational linguistics, logic, philosophy of language, and NL-oriented AI. Although it makes extensive use of logical formalisms, it requires only some basic familiarity with standard predicate logic concepts, since all technical terms are carefully explained.

This text deals with the history of temporal logic as well as the crucial systematic questions within the field. The book studies the contributions from ancient and medieval philosophy up to the downfall of temporal logic in the Renaissance. The modern rediscovery of the subject, which is especially due to the work of A.N. Prior, is described, leading into a thorough discussion of the use of temporal logic in computer science and the understanding of natural language. The book thus aims to interweave linguistic, philosophical and computational aspects into an informative whole.

This volume is a model-theoretic inquiry into the semantics of tense in natural language. It presents the view that the semantic contribution of tense is made in relation to structurally higher expressions (so-called relative tense) and argues against the view that tenses are all indexicals. This idea is formally encoded as a "de se" analysis of attitudes, originally proposed by Lewis, coupled with a sequence-of-tense rule posited for English. An auxiliary proposal is made to account for some exceptional cases (such as so-called double-access sentences) which invoke "de re" attitudes about temporal entities (states or intervals). Since the proposed account assumes that the interpretation of tense is structure-dependent, it also correctly predicts scope interactions between tenses and NPs. This book is intended for scholars and graduate students in formal semantics, syntax-semantics interface, philosophy of language and Japanese linguistics.