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...

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...

1. OUTLINE German has the three main perfect constructions which are illustrated in (1. 1). 1 In each of these constructions, the verb appears in the past participial form and is combined with an auxiliary - in this case, haben ('have'); other verbs form their perfect constructions with the auxiliary sein ('be'). 2 The auxiliary can then be com- bined with a tense -Le. the present tense as in (Ua), the past tense as in (b), or the future tense as in (c). 3 (1. 1) a. PRESENT PERFECT: Die Eule hat die Schule verlassen. the owl has the school left b. PAST PERFECT: Die Eule hatte die Schule...

1. OUTLINE German has the three main perfect constructions which are illustrated in (1. 1). 1 In each of these constructions, the verb appears in the past participial form and is combined with an auxiliary - in this case, haben ('have'); other verbs form their perfect constructions with the auxiliary sein ('be'). 2 The auxiliary can then be com- bined with a tense -Le. the present tense as in (Ua), the past tense as in (b), or the future tense as in (c). 3 (1. 1) a. PRESENT PERFECT: Die Eule hat die Schule verlassen. the owl has the school left b. PAST PERFECT: Die Eule hatte die Schule...

The contributions in this volume result from discussions on and with John R. Searle, containing Searle's own latest views - including his seminal ideas on Rationality in Action. The collection provides a good basis for advanced seminar debates in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy, and will also stimulate some further research on all of the three main topics.

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...

The papers in this volume address two main topics: Q1: What is the nature, and especially the scope, of ellipsis in natural l- guage? Q2: What are the linguistic/philosophical implications of what one takes the nature/scope of ellipsis to be? As will emerge below, each of these main topics includes a large sub-part that deals speci?cally with nonsentential speech. Within the ?rst main topic, Q1, there arises the sub-issueofwhethernonsententialspeechfallswithinthescopeofellipsisornot;within the second main topic, Q2, there arises the sub-issue of what linguistic/philosophical implications...

This book is a collection of studies applying game-theoretical concepts and ideas to analysing the semantics of natural language and some formal languages. The bulk of the book consists of several papers by Hintikka, Carlson and Saarinen and discusses several of the central problems of the semantics of natural language.

The topics covered are the semantics of natural language quantifiers, conditionals, pronouns and anaphora more generally. Hintikka's famous essay presenting examples of "branching quantifier structures" in English, as well as one formulating his "any-every thesis,"...

The second Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter was held in Jerusalem on April 25-28, 1976. The symposium was originally planned to celebrate the 60th birthday of Y ehoshua Bar-Hillel, philosopher and friend. But his sudden death intervened, and turned celebration into commemoration. The topic of the symposiumwas Meaning and Use. For Bar-Hillel, the question 'meaning or use?' was of great importance, one which he took as a question of priorities. Which approach to natural language is prior: the formal, semantical approach, which accords a central position to the truth- functional concept of...

I. MASS TERMS, COUNT TERMS, AND SORTAL TERMS Central examples of mass terms are easy to come by. 'Water', 'smoke', 'gold', etc., differ in their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties from count terms such as 'man', 'star', 'wastebasket', etc. Syntactically, it seems, mass terms do, but singular count terms do not, admit the quantifier phrases 'much', 'an amount of', 'a little', etc. The typical indefinite article for them is 'some' (unstressed) , and this article cannot be used with singular count terms. Count terms, but not mass terms, use the quantifiers 'each', 'every', 'some',...