The papers in this volume address central issues in the study of Plurality and Quantification from three different perspectives: - Algebraic approaches to Plurals and Quantification - Distributivity and Collectivity: Theoretical Foundations - Distributivity and Collectivity: Empirical Investigations Algebraic approaches to the semantics of natural languages were in- dependently introduced for the study of generalized quantification, pred- ication, intensionality, mass terms and plurality. The most prominent modern advocate for an algebraic theory of plurality (and mass terms) is certainly...

1. 1 OBJECTIVES The main objective of this joint work is to bring together some ideas that have played central roles in two disparate theoretical traditions in order to con- tribute to a better understanding of the relationship between focus and the syn- tactic and semantic structure of sentences. Within the Prague School tradition and the branch of its contemporary development represented by Hajicova and Sgall (HS in the sequel), topic-focus articulation has long been a central object of study, and it has long been a tenet of Prague school linguistics that topic-focus structure has...

Computational semantics is concerned with computing the meanings of linguistic objects such as sentences, text fragments, and dialogue contributions. As such it is the interdisciplinary child of semantics, the study of meaning and its linguistic encoding, and computational linguistics, the discipline that is concerned with computations on linguistic objects.
From one parent computational semantics inherits concepts and techniques that have been developed under the banner of formal (or model-theoretic) semantics. This blend of logic and linguistics applies the methods of logic to the...

Predicates and their Subjects is an in-depth study of the syntax-semantics interface focusing on the structure of the subject-predicate relation. Starting from where the author's 1983 dissertation left off, the book argues that there is syntactic constraint that clauses (small and tensed) are constructed out of a one-place unsaturated expression, the predicate, which must be applied to a syntactic argument, its subject. The author shows that this predication relation cannot be reduced to a thematic relation or a projection of argument structure, but must be a purely syntactic...

Based on an earlier edition published in 1992 in Bulgarian, this book offers a specific approach to one of the most controversial problems in linguistics. According to it, aspect is the result of a subtle and complex interplay between the referents of verbs and nouns in the sentence. Special attention is paid to the role nouns and noun phrases play in the explication of aspect in English (and similar languages). The grammatical marking of aspect is shown to be a compensatory phenomenon imposed by language structure. Comparisons made using Slavic (mainly Bulgarian) data reveal that...

JERUSALEM LECTURES In 1992, I was a Lady Davis Fellow in the English Department at the Hebrew Univer- sity of Jerusalem. In the context of this, Edit Doron asked me to present a series of weekly evening lectures. The idea was that I would be talking about my own current research on plurality in an event based theory, without the restraints that a nonnal seminar fonnat would im- pose: i.e. the idea was that I would actually get to the part where I would talk about my own work. At the same time, Edit added, it would be nice if, rather than just presupposing or presenting a neo-Davidsonian...

Beyond Brain Death offers a provocative challenge to one of the most widely accepted conclusions of contemporary bioethics: the position that brain death marks the death of the human person. Eleven chapters by physicians, philosophers, and theologians present the case against brain-based criteria for human death. Each author believes that this position calls into question the moral acceptability of the transplantation of unpaired vital organs from brain-dead patients who have continuing function of the circulatory system. One strength of the book is its international approach to the...

This book is a collection of papers written by outstanding researchers in the newly emerging field of computational semantics. Computational semantics is concerned with the computation of the meanings of linguistic objects such as text fragments, spoken dialogue utterances, and e-mail messages. The meaning of such an object is determined partly by linguistic information and partly by information from the context in which the object occurs. The information from these sources is combined by processes that infer which interpretation of the object applies in the given context. This applies not...

Glutathione is a thiol-containing tripeptide, which appears to be present in nearly all living organisms and which is involved in many important metabolic and physiological processes. The present volume focuses on the biological significance of glutathione in plants. The biochemistry and the metabolism of glutathione are reviewed, and its role in sulphur and selenium metabolism in plants is discussed. The significance of glutathione and of glutathione-related enzymes in the adaptation to natural stress, heavy metals, xenobiotics, air pollution, and in plant-pathogen and plant-animal...

In recent years, the study of events and their role as implicit arguments of predicates has been at the center of much important work in semantics and the syntax/semantics interface. This volume brings together fourteen original studies by leading scholars in semantics and the syntax/semantics interface, covering a broad spectrum of research into the role of events in grammar. The papers extensively address the following topics, among others: event arguments and thematic argument structure; the role of events in verbal aspectual distinctions; events and the distinction between stage and...