This anthology of papers analyzes a range of specificity markers found in natural languages. It reflects the fact that despite intensive research into these markers, the vast differences between the markers across languages and even within single languages have been less acknowledged. Commonly regarded specific indefinites are by no means a homogenous class, and so this volume fills a gap in our understanding of the semantics and pragmatics of indefinites.
The papers explore differences and similarities among these specificity markers, concentrating on the following issues:...
This anthology of papers analyzes a range of specificity markers found in natural languages. It reflects the fact that despite intensive research i...
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 substantially revises and extends the...
Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse presents a novel framework and analysis of the ways we refer to abstract objects in natural langua...
This book argues that languages are composed of sets of signs, rather than strings . This notion, first posited by de Saussure in the early 20th century, has for decades been neglected by linguists, particularly following Chomsky s heavy critiques of the 1950s. Yet since the emergence of formal semantics in the 1970s, the issue of compositionality has gained traction in the theoretical debate, becoming a selling point for linguistic theories.
Yet the concept of compositionality itself remains ill-defined, an issue this book addresses. Positioning compositionality as a...
This book argues that languages are composed of sets of signs, rather than strings . This notion, first posited by de Saussure in the early 20...
The volume contains the proceedings of the 7th Course on Physics and Technology of Free Electron Lasers of the International School of Quantum Electronics, which was held in Erice (Italy) from 17 to 29 August 1980, under the auspices of the "Ettore Majorana" Centre for Scientific Culture. The level of this Course was much closer to a workshop than to a school, and "Advances in Free Electron Lasers" might have been an appropriate title. Many of the world's leading scientists in the field (among them, the inventor of FEL, J. M. J. Madey) were brought together to review the accomplishments of...
The volume contains the proceedings of the 7th Course on Physics and Technology of Free Electron Lasers of the International School of Quantum Electro...
GOAL This is the funniest book I have ever written - and the ambiguity here is deliberate. Much of this book is about deliberate ambiguity, described as unambiguously as possible, so the previous sentence is probably the fIrst, last, and only deliberately ambiguous sentence in the book. Deliberate ambiguity will be shown to underlie much, if not all, of verbal humor. Some of its forms are simple enough to be perceived as deliberately ambiguous on the surface; in others, the ambiguity results from a deep semantic analysis. Deep semantic analysis is the core of this approach to humor. The book...
GOAL This is the funniest book I have ever written - and the ambiguity here is deliberate. Much of this book is about deliberate ambiguity, described ...
VIrtually all the papers in these volumes originated in presentations at the Fourth Groningen Round Table, held in July 1980. That conference, organ ized by the Institute for General linguistics of Groningen University was the fourth in an irregular series of meetings devoted to issues of topical interest to linguists. Its predecessor, the Third Round Table, was held in June 1976, and dealt with the semantics of natural language. A selection of the papers was published as Syntax and Semantics 10, Selections from the Third Groningen Round Table, ed. by F. Heny and H. Schnelle, Academic Press,...
VIrtually all the papers in these volumes originated in presentations at the Fourth Groningen Round Table, held in July 1980. That conference, organ i...
Virtually all the papers in these volumes originated in presentations at the Fourth Groniogen Round Table, held in July 1980. That conference, organ ized by the Institute for General linguistics of Groniogen University was the fourth in an irregular series of meetings devoted to issues of topical interest to linguists. Its predecessor, the Third Round Table, was held in June 1976, and dealt with the semantics of natural language. A selection of the papers was published as Syntax and Semantics 10, Selections from the Third Groningen Round Table, ed. by F. Heny and H. Schnelle, Academic Press,...
Virtually all the papers in these volumes originated in presentations at the Fourth Groniogen Round Table, held in July 1980. That conference, organ i...
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...
Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specificall...
The purpose clause is a common fonn of adverbial modification in English. The bracketed phrases below are purpose clauses, and they look and sound unremarkable. We hear and see these things all the time. John came [to play with the children] [to play with] I brought John along Insofar as purpose clauses appear to be adverbial, they frequently occupy a relatively low place on the scale of important things for syntactic theory to address itself to. In this book I assume the theoretical framework that has come to be known as 'Government-Binding' theory (GB), initiated in Chomsky (1981). The...
The purpose clause is a common fonn of adverbial modification in English. The bracketed phrases below are purpose clauses, and they look and sound unr...
This volume of papers grew outof 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...
This volume of papers grew outof a research project on "Cross-Linguistic Quantification" originated by Emmon Bach, Angelika Kratzer and Barbara Partee...
