Quantificational Topics

Quantificational Topics PDF Author: Cornelia Ebert
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048123038
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Addressing an issue that has puzzled the linguistics community for many years, this book offers a novel approach to the exceptional wide scope behaviour of indefinites. It is the first book explicitly dedicated to exceptional wide scope phenomena. Its unique approach offers an explanation for the fact that it is only a proper subset of the indefinites that shows this exceptional wide scope behaviour. The author draws a careful distinction between genuine and apparent scope readings, a distinction that is usually not taken care of and has thus led to certain confusions. In particular, it is argued that functional readings have to be kept strictly apart from non-functional ones and that all proposals that use functional mechanisms to explain the phenomena at hand face severe problems. The existing body of literature on the main issues of the book is thoroughly reviewed. This makes the book well suited as background literature for graduate seminars on those topics.

Quantificational Topics

Quantificational Topics PDF Author: Cornelia Ebert
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048123038
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Get Book Here

Book Description
Addressing an issue that has puzzled the linguistics community for many years, this book offers a novel approach to the exceptional wide scope behaviour of indefinites. It is the first book explicitly dedicated to exceptional wide scope phenomena. Its unique approach offers an explanation for the fact that it is only a proper subset of the indefinites that shows this exceptional wide scope behaviour. The author draws a careful distinction between genuine and apparent scope readings, a distinction that is usually not taken care of and has thus led to certain confusions. In particular, it is argued that functional readings have to be kept strictly apart from non-functional ones and that all proposals that use functional mechanisms to explain the phenomena at hand face severe problems. The existing body of literature on the main issues of the book is thoroughly reviewed. This makes the book well suited as background literature for graduate seminars on those topics.

Linguistic and Cognitive Aspects of Quantification

Linguistic and Cognitive Aspects of Quantification PDF Author: Katalin É. Kiss
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319915665
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This volume presents the results of psycholinguistic research into various aspects of the grammar of quantification. The investigations involve children and adults, speakers of different languages, using a variety of experimental paradigms. A shared aspect of the studies is that they present their experimental results as evidence evaluating linguistic theories of quantification. Topics discussed include the interpretation of universal, comparative, and superlative quantifiers, quantifier spreading, scope interaction between pairs of quantifiers and between quantifiers and wh-phrases, distributivity and cumulativity, the interaction of quantifier interpretation with information structure, the disambiguating role of prosody, the functional overlap between universal quantification and perfectivity, and much more. The focus on experimental evidence makes this book essential reading for linguists (syntacticians, semanticists and pragmatists), psycholinguists and psychologists interested in quantification.

The Seductions of Quantification

The Seductions of Quantification PDF Author: Sally Engle Merry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022626131X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
We live in a world where seemingly everything can be measured. We rely on indicators to translate social phenomena into simple, quantified terms, which in turn can be used to guide individuals, organizations, and governments in establishing policy. Yet counting things requires finding a way to make them comparable. And in the process of translating the confusion of social life into neat categories, we inevitably strip it of context and meaning—and risk hiding or distorting as much as we reveal. With The Seductions of Quantification, leading legal anthropologist Sally Engle Merry investigates the techniques by which information is gathered and analyzed in the production of global indicators on human rights, gender violence, and sex trafficking. Although such numbers convey an aura of objective truth and scientific validity, Merry argues persuasively that measurement systems constitute a form of power by incorporating theories about social change in their design but rarely explicitly acknowledging them. For instance, the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report, which ranks countries in terms of their compliance with antitrafficking activities, assumes that prosecuting traffickers as criminals is an effective corrective strategy—overlooking cultures where women and children are frequently sold by their own families. As Merry shows, indicators are indeed seductive in their promise of providing concrete knowledge about how the world works, but they are implemented most successfully when paired with context-rich qualitative accounts grounded in local knowledge.

Uncertainty Quantification

Uncertainty Quantification PDF Author: Ralph C. Smith
Publisher: SIAM
ISBN: 1611977843
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 571

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Book Description
Uncertainty quantification serves a fundamental role when establishing the predictive capabilities of simulation models. This book provides a comprehensive and unified treatment of the mathematical, statistical, and computational theory and methods employed to quantify uncertainties associated with models from a wide range of applications. Expanded and reorganized, the second edition includes advances in the field and provides a comprehensive sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification framework for models from science and engineering. It contains new chapters on random field representations, observation models, parameter identifiability and influence, active subspace analysis, and statistical surrogate models, and a completely revised chapter on local sensitivity analysis. Other updates to the second edition are the inclusion of over 100 exercises and many new examples — several of which include data — and UQ Crimes listed throughout the text to identify common misconceptions and guide readers entering the field. Uncertainty Quantification: Theory, Implementation, and Applications, Second Edition is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in mathematics, statistics, engineering, physical and biological sciences, operations research, and computer science. Readers are assumed to have a basic knowledge of probability, linear algebra, differential equations, and introductory numerical analysis. The book can be used as a primary text for a one-semester course on sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification or as a supplementary text for courses on surrogate and reduced-order model construction and parameter identifiability analysis.

Semantics. Volume 2

Semantics. Volume 2 PDF Author: Klaus von Heusinger
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110255073
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1079

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Book Description
No detailed description available for "SEMANTICS (VON HEUSINGER ET AL.) BD. 33.2 HSK E-BOOK".

Aspects of the Grammar of Focus

Aspects of the Grammar of Focus PDF Author: Przemysław Tajsner
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631579558
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
The book examines the aspects of focus within the recent minimalist paradigm. Focus is viewed here as a grammar's response to the requirements of the systems external to (narrowly defined) language. Thus, the properties of focus are explored at the two interfaces: syntax-phonology and syntax-semantics. The book surveys some recent views on the interface and left-periphery status of focus. With respect to the semantics of focus, the book argues for its tripartite division into: information, non-exhaustive identification, and exhaustive identification. It further contains a proposal of the phase-based derivation of sentences featuring focus in English, and finally, offers an account of Polish, in which focus interestingly correlates with the phenomenon of scrambling.

Beyond Semantics and Pragmatics

Beyond Semantics and Pragmatics PDF Author: Gerhard Preyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192565966
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
The study of meaning in language embraces a diverse range of problems and methods. Philosophers think through the relationship between language and the world; linguists document speakers' knowledge of meaning; psychologists investigate the mechanisms of understanding and production. Up through the early 2000s, these investigations were generally compartmentalized: indeed, researchers often regarded both the subject-matter and the methods of other disciplines with skepticism. Since then, however, there has been a sea change in the field, enabling researchers increasingly to synthesize the perspectives of philosophy, linguistics and psychology and to energize all the fields with rich new intellectual perspectives that facilitate meaningful interchange. The time is right for a broader exploration and reflection on the status and problems of semantics as an interdisciplinary enterprise, in light of a decade of challenging and successful research in this area. Taking as its starting-point Lepore and Stone's 2014 book Imagination and Convention, this volume aims to reconcile different methodological perspectives while refocusing semanticists on new problems where integrative work will find the broadest and most receptive audience.

Information Structuring in Discourse

Information Structuring in Discourse PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004436723
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A text usually provides more information than a random sequence of clauses: It combines sentence-level information to larger units which are glued together by coherence relations that may induce a hierarchical discourse structure. Since linguists have begun to investigate texts as more complex units of linguistic communication, it has been controversially discussed what the appropriate level of analysis of discourse structure ought to be and what the criteria to identify (minimal) discourse units are. Linguistic structure–and more precisely, the extraction and integration of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information–is shown to be at the center of text processing and discourse comprehension. However, its role in the establishment of basic building blocks for a coherent discourse is still a subject of debate. This collection addresses these issues using various methodological approaches. It presents current results in theoretical, diachronic, experimental as well as computational research on structuring information in discourse.

Locality and Information Structure

Locality and Information Structure PDF Author: Yoshio Endo
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027233806
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This monograph presents a systematic exploration of Japanese syntax within the cartographic approach, paying special attention to the locality effects induced by discourse-based features such as topic and focus. Although the main focus is on Japanese syntax, implications of the analyses developed are investigated from a broader comparative perspective. Unlike previous works on Japanese generative syntax, this book is based partially on informant surveys, including the distribution of adverbials and the categorical status of nominative-Case-marked adverbials, as well as an exhaustive survey of ditransitive predicates in terms of word formation and idioms in Koujien, one of the most comprehensive Japanese dictionaries. A systematic syntactic study of the nature of clause-final particles in Japanese, an area previously only explored in the framework of discourse analysis, is also presented. It is shown that the EPP may be satisfied by such discourse-related elements as topic and focus and by these sentence final particles.

Quantification in Natural Languages

Quantification in Natural Languages PDF Author: Emmon Bach
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401728178
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 760

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Book Description
This volume of papers grew out of a research project on "Cross-Linguistic Quantification" originated by Emmon Bach, Angelika Kratzer and Barbara Partee in 1987 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and supported by National Science Foundation Grant BNS 871999. The publication also reflects directly or indirectly several other related activ ities. Bach, Kratzer, and Partee organized a two-evening symposium on cross-linguistic quantification at the 1988 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in New Orleans (held without financial support) in order to bring the project to the attention of the linguistic community and solicit ideas and feedback from colleagues who might share our concern for developing a broader typological basis for research in semantics and a better integration of descriptive and theoretical work in the area of quantification in particular. The same trio organized a six-week workshop and open lecture series and related one-day confer ence on the same topic at the 1989 LSA Linguistic Institute at the University of Arizona in Tucson, supported by a supplementary grant, NSF grant BNS-8811250, and Partee offered a seminar on the same topic as part of the Institute course offerings. Eloise Jelinek, who served as a consultant on the principal grant and was a participant in the LSA symposium and the Arizona workshops, joined the group of editors for this volume in 1989.