Part of a Book
Refine
Year of publication
- 2018 (72) (remove)
Document Type
- Part of a Book (72) (remove)
Language
- English (72) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (72)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (72)
Keywords
- focus (4)
- alternative semantics (3)
- counterfactuals (3)
- presuppositions (3)
- relative clauses (3)
- scalar implicature (3)
- tense (3)
- Japanese (2)
- comparatives (2)
- discourse particles (2)
Institute
The article presents an interdisciplinary project that is focussed on an important cultural monument, namely a fortified hilltop settlement in the cadastre of Hradiště near Pilsen. This fortification is attested by five phases, which correspond to the main epochs of the erection of west Bohemian ramparts during the time span from the turn of the early to the Middle Bronze Age until the early medieval period. Geophysical prospection and trial excavations conducted there in 2012 and 2013 revealed important and new information on the stratigraphy and natural environment of the site. The project is particularly directed towards collaboration between archaeology and scientific studies. Geophysical and geochemical aspects of archaeological contexts, archaeobotanical and archaeozoological finds as well as geological composition of the materials from the fortification were analysed. Special attention was given to the problematic of the so-called vitrified walls (Schlackenwälle) associated with this site.
This paper addresses the question of how to account for the semantic variability of weak free adjuncts. Weak free adjuncts are non-clausal adjuncts that associate with an argument of the main predicate, contribute propositional content, and can interact with temporal or modal operators, which leads to different, adverbial-clause-like interpretations. I focus on a specific type of weak adjuncts, non-clausal as-phrases, and propose a unified semantic analysis for the full range of interpretational possibilities that takes into account the interpretational contingency on different syntactic positions. I show that this analysis improves on Stump’s (1985) original analysis of weak adjuncts. I then go on to discuss the limitations of both Stump’s account and the unified account. Both accounts fail to capture that the interaction of weak adjuncts with modal operators underlies certain restrictions on the properties of the modal operators—an observation that has not been discussed in the literature so far.
'Enough'-/'too'-constructions (E/T constructions) have an implicative reading: e.g., "Mary was clever enough to leave early yesterday" entails Mary left early yesterday. I argue that this implicative reading is not due to the lexical semantics proper of 'enough'/'too', but due to its bi-clausal structure (e.g., the above-mentioned example is analyzed as "Mary left early yesterday because she was clever enough"). I analyze 'enough' and 'too' simply as degree modifiers that involve a comparison: 'enough' means reaching the lower bound of an interval, while 'too' means exceeding the upper bound of an interval. Then inspired by Schulz (2011), Baglini and Francez (2015), and Nadathur (2016), I relate the semantics of E/T constructions to causal dependence: due to some sufficiency/excess, the infinitival complement clause in E/T constructions is episodically or generically (depending on its aspect being perfective or imperfective) true/false. I also argue that this infinitive has its tense and aspect marked on the main predicate of sentences, resulting in the seeming correlation between aspect and implication in languages that overtly make a distinction between perfective and imperfective aspects (e.g., French).
Recent work by Sudo (2012) and Klinedinst (2016) proposes a new perspective on differences between classes of presupposition triggers, with an empirical split roughly mirroring Abusch’s (2002) hard vs. soft distinction and related notions. These two authors propose that triggers differ in whether or not their presuppositional content simultaneously affects the calculation of the presuppositions and of the entailments of the sentences in which they appear.
Drawing on a proposal by Glanzberg (2005) we formulate the Removability/Independence Hypothesis: triggers that do not affect entailments are triggers that can be left out of sentences without affecting interpretability. We experimentally test the hypothesis by embedding 'return', '(go) again' and '(go) back' in non-monotonic environments, which Sudo argues to elicit differences in presuppositions and entailments. Our results provide clear evidence against the RI hypothesis: whereas only the trigger 'return' is crucial for the sake of interpretability, all three triggers produced similar results. At the same time, data for the triggers 'stop' and 'also', included as controls, lend further support in favor of Sudo’s entailment-contrast proposal.
In April 2018 the European Commission announced its holistic approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) based on the following three pillars: first, to boost financial support and encourage uptake by the public and private sectors in order to reach investments in AI-related research and innovation by at least 20 billion Euros by the end of 2020. The second pillar aims at preparing for socio-economic changes in terms of the upcoming transformation of the labour market. Finally, the European Commission will ensure an appropriate ethical and legal framework by developing AI ethics guidelines and providing guidance on the interpretation of the Product Liability directive. ...
This article pinpoints the double being and doing of weapons, warriors and warrior fraternities as quite possibly a characterising trait from the onset of the Corded Ware period well into the mature Bronze Age and beyond. Exquisitely crafted weapons of bronze – many spirited with a life-energy of their own – were used to wage war and sometimes to hack victims into pieces with strong indications that the beautiful warrior with his trained well-groomed body was capable of extreme violence. The companionship of warrior peers in the fraternity was a social construct enabling effective waging of war as well as fulfilling other roles in Bronze Age society, contributing to rituals and social interaction.
Recent investigations at the Teleac hillfort in south-western Transylvania have generated new data on the spatial organisation and history of the settlement. A combination of excavations and geophysical prospection revealed that Teleac was a dense and well organised settlement with a substantial population, and that some sections of the hillfort likely were used for different activities. It is also argued that Teleac likely dominated the open settlements and acted as a hub for transportation and trade throughout the region.
Students of computer science studies enter university education with very different competencies, experience and knowledge. 145 datasets collected of freshmen computer science students by learning management systems in relation to exam outcomes and learning dispositions data (e. g. student dispositions, previous experiences and attitudes measured through self-reported surveys) has been exploited to identify indicators as predictors of academic success and hence make effective interventions to deal with an extremely heterogeneous group of students.
Based on a sample of seven languages, I show that the so-called modal inferences in ever free relatives (ignorance and indifference) are not universally available. The primary reading of ever free relatives crosslinguistically turns out to be a “non-modal” one, which is available to all languages under investigation. The implication is that if there is a modal inference triggered by the use of the ever-morpheme in FRs, the inference is likely to have a source external to the ever free relative (Lauer, 2009; Condoravdi, 2015; Hirsch, 2016). In line with this conclusion, I propose to generalize Hirsch’s (2016) analysis of ignorance ever free relatives, suggesting that all ever free relatives, no matter how they are ultimately interpreted, are instances of (un)conditionals + donkey-anaphoric definite descriptions.