The Formal Semantics and Pragmatics of Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English

The Formal Semantics and Pragmatics of Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English PDF Author: Gregory Thomas Stump
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Engelse taal
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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The Formal Semantics and Pragmatics of Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English

The Formal Semantics and Pragmatics of Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English PDF Author: Gregory Thomas Stump
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Engelse taal
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description


Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English

Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English PDF Author: Bernd Kortmann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136122206
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Free adjuncts and absolutes typically function as adverbial clauses which are not overtly specified for any particular adverbial relation. The book is a non-formal, corpus based study of their current use in English. Its particular focus is on a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of their semantic indeterminacy and the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors that help resolve it.

Proceedings of the 11th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics

Proceedings of the 11th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics PDF Author: Jonathan Mead
Publisher: Center for the Study of Language (CSLI)
ISBN: 9781881526124
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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The Semantic Variability of Absolute Constructions

The Semantic Variability of Absolute Constructions PDF Author: G.T. Stump
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400952775
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
The goal of this book is to investigate the semantics of absolute constructions in English; specifically, my object is to provide an explanation for the semantic variability of such constructions. As has been widely noted in traditional grammatical studies of English, free adjuncts and absolute phrases have the ability to playa number of specific logical roles in the sentences in which they appear; yet, paradoxically, they lack any overt indication of their logical connection to the clause which they modify. How, then, is the logical function of an absolute construction determined? In attempting to answer this question, one must inevitably address a number of more general issues: Is the meaning assigned to a linguistic expression necessarily determined by linguistic rules, or can the grammar of a language in some cases simply underdetermine the interpretation of expressions? Are the truthconditions of a sentence ever sensitive to the inferences of language users? If so, then is it possible to maintain the validity of any really substantive version of the Compositionality Principle? 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. The descriptive framework assumed throughout is the semantic theory developed by Richard Montague (1970a, 1970b, 1973) and his followers. (For a very thorough introduction to Montague semantics, the reader may refer to Dowty, Wall and Peters (1981 ).

Compositionality in Formal Semantics

Compositionality in Formal Semantics PDF Author: Barbara H. Partee
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470751290
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Compositionality in Formal Semantics is a collection of Barbara Parteeā€™s papers that have been influential in the field but are not readily available and includes a new introductory essay in which Partee reflects on how her thinking and the field of semantics have developed over the past 35 years. Brings together, in one volume, influential but difficult to find papers by one of the most important researchers in formal semantics. Includes a new introductory essay in which Partee reflects on how her research and the field of semantics have developed over the past 35 years. Discusses critical themes in semantic theory.

Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English

Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English PDF Author: Bernd Kortmann
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415063913
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book presents a corpus-based syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis of free adjuncts and absolutes in present-day English. The main focus of the book is on central problems of their use and interpretation.Free adjuncts and absolutes typically function as adverbial clauses which are not overtly specified for any particular adverbial relation. The book is a non-formal, corpus based study of their current use in English. Its particular focus is on a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of their semantic indeterminacy and the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors that help resolve it.

Main Clause Phenomena

Main Clause Phenomena PDF Author: Lobke Aelbrecht
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027255733
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Main Clause Phenomena: New Horizons takes the study of Main Clause Phenomena (MCP) into the 21st century, without neglecting the origins of the topic. It brings together work by both established and up-and-coming scholars, who present analyses for a wide range of MCP, from a variety of languages, with a particular focus on particles and agreement markers, complementizers and verb second, and the licensing of MCP in different types of clauses. Besides enriching the empirical domain, this volume also engages with the theoretical question of how best to capture the distribution of MCP and, in particular, to what extent they are embeddable and why. The diverse patterns and analyses presented challenge the idea that MCP constitute a homogeneous class. Main Clause Phenomena: New Horizons is of interest not just to scholars specializing in the study of MCP, but to all linguists interested in the syntax and/or semantics of the clause.

Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning

Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning PDF Author: Hans Kamp
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004487220
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
This collection of papers addresses context-dependence and methods for dealing with it. The book also records comments to the papers and the authors' replies to the comments. In this way, the contributions themselves are contextually dependent. It represents an inquiry into the activities on the semantics side of the pragmatics boundary.

The Language of Time: A Reader

The Language of Time: A Reader PDF Author: Inderjeet Mani
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191533300
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 602

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Book Description
This reader collects and introduces important work in linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics on the use of linguistic devices in natural languages to situate events in time: whether they are past, present, or future; whether they are real or hypothetical; when an event might have occurred, and how long it could have lasted. In focussing on the treatment and retrieval of time-based information it seeks to lay the foundation for temporally-aware natural language computer processing systems, for example those that process documents on the worldwide web to answer questions or produce summaries. The development of such systems requires the application of technical knowledge from many different disciplines. The book is the first to bring these disciplines together, by means of classic and contemporary papers in four areas: tense, aspect, and event structure; temporal reasoning; the temporal structure of natural language discourse; and temporal annotation. Clear, self-contained editorial introductions to each area provide the necessary technical background for the non-specialist, explaining the underlying connections across disciplines. A wide range of students and professionals in academia and industry will value this book as an introduction and guide to a new and vital technology. The former include researchers, students, and teachers of natural language processing, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, computer science, information retrieval (including the growing speciality of question-answering), library sciences, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science. Those in industry include corporate managers and researchers, software product developers, and engineers in information-intensive companies, such as on-line database and web-service providers.

Predication Theory

Predication Theory PDF Author: Donna Jo Napoli
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521368209
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
In this study Donna Jo Napoli takes a common-sense approach to the notions of argument and predicate. Discussions of predication within Government and Binding theory have stressed the configurational properties of the phrases involved, and Napoli argues that this has led to proposals for more and more elaborate syntactic structures that nevertheless fail to provide genuinely explanatory accounts. She presents a convincing case for viewing the notion of predicate as a semantic primitive which cannot be defined by looking simply at the lexicon or simply at the syntactic structure, and offers a theory or predication where the key to the subject-predicate relationship is theta-role assignment. The book then goes on to offer principles for the coindexing of a predicate with its subject role player. These coindexing principles make use of Chomsky's 1986 notion of barriers, but instead of being sensitive to configurational notions like c-command and governing category, Napoli argues that they are sensitive to thematic structure. In the final chapter of the book Napoli extends the principles for predication coindexing to anaphor binding, by introducing the notion of argument ladders.