Linguistik-Klassifikation
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of a Book (194)
- Article (93)
- Working Paper (75)
- Conference Proceeding (42)
- Review (6)
- Report (3)
- Book (1)
- Other (1)
- Preprint (1)
Language
- English (317)
- German (83)
- Portuguese (10)
- Croatian (5)
- Turkish (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (416)
Keywords
- Semantik (71)
- Englisch (51)
- Deutsch (50)
- Syntax (42)
- Formale Semantik (30)
- Metapher (29)
- Bedeutungswandel (18)
- Informationsstruktur (14)
- Lexikologie (12)
- Pragmatik (12)
Institute
Yatabe (2021) presents a theory according to which the meaning of a word like 'different' in a sentence like 'Anna and Bill like different films' contains the meaning of a reciprocal pronoun. Since the postulated reciprocal meaning inside the meaning of a word like 'different' requires the presence of a semantic antecedent, the theory entails that the apparent internal reading of a sentence like 'John saw and reviewed different films', which does not contain a plural DP that could serve as the semantic antecedent of the postulated reciprocal meaning, must be licensed in a way that is entirely different from the way in which the internal reading of a sentence like 'Anna and Bill like different films' is licensed. In the present paper, I adduce additional pieces of evidence for this theory. In order to enhance the plausibility of the proposed theory, I also show how the collective interpretation of reciprocals and the interaction of reciprocals and cumulative interpretation can be accounted for within the theory.
Semantic Representations become useful resources for various multilingual NLP applications such as Machine Translation, Multilingual Generation, cross Lingual QA, to name a few. No Semantic Representation, to our knowledge, adopts vivakṣā (Speaker's intention) as a guiding principle for the representation. This motivates us to develop a new Semantic Representation system – "Universal Semantic Representation (USR)" – following Indian Grammatical Tradition (IGT) and Paninian grammar. Since USR is designed to be language-independent, we have currently taken up the task of generating English, Hindi, Tamil and Bangla from the USR. For English generation, the USR is mapped to ERG meaning representation (Flickinger, D. 1999) which is couched in Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS). We use an off-the-shelf ACE generator that uses ERG as a resource-grammar for generating English. While designing the transfer module from USR to ERG-based MRS, we came across various Abstract Predicates (APs) in MRS representation as described in ErgSemantics_Basic (Flickinger et al., 2014). These APs are used to represent the semantic contribution of grammatical constructions or more specialized lexical entries such as compounding or the comparative use of more and so on. This paper presents the strategy for postulating the APs from the information given in USR and then reports the implementation of the transfer module keeping the focus on the postulation of APs. We get around 95% accuracy in postulating APs from USRs.
The theory of respectively interpretation proposed in Yatabe and Tam (2021) "In defense of an HPSG-based theory of non-constituent coordination" (Linguistics and Philosophy 44, pp. 1-77) entails that Binding Conditions A and B need to be formulated as constraints on the form of semantic representations. It is possible to formulate the two binding conditions as such constraints if anaphoric relations are encoded in semantic representations in a way analogous to the way they are encoded in Discourse Representation Theory.
How to be a ham sandwich or an eel: The English deferred equative and the Japanese eel sentence
(2022)
In some languages including English and Japanese, a nominal predicate construction (NPC; "NP1 is NP2") has a marked variety—"open-ended-relation NPCs" (ONPCs), to label it—where the referents of the subject NP and the predicate NP are understood to be in some pragmatically prominent relation other than identity or inclusion (e.g. I'm the ham sandwich 'I'm the customer who ordered the ham sandwich'). The Japanese ONPC has been called the "eel sentence (eel construction)", after an oft-cited example involving unagi 'eel' as its predicate NP. The English ONPC is discussed in good detail by Ward (2004; "Equatives and deferred reference", Language 80) under the rubric of the "deferred equative". The ONPCs in the two languages can be naturally used only under limited discourse configurations, with the English one being more severely constrained than the Japanese one. This work develops semantic analyses of the two ONPCs that improve on previous accounts.
This paper sketches an analysis in Lexical Resource Semantics of adverbial and adjectival modification in nominal projections which is extensible to modification of other syntactic categories. It combines insights into the syntax-semantics interface of recursive modification in HPSG with underspecified semantics and type-logical meaning representations in the tradition of Montague grammar. The analysis is phrased in such a way that it receives a direct implementation in the Constraint Language of Lexical Resource Semantics as part of the TRALE system.
The paper shows how the plural semantic ideas of (Sternefeld, 1998) can be captured in Lexical Resource Semantics, a system of underspecied semantics. It is argued that Sternefeld's original approach, which allows for the unrestricted insertion of pluralisation into Logical Form, suffers from a problem originally pointed out by Lasersohn (1989) with respect to the analysis offered by Gillon (1987). The problem is shown to stem from repeated pluralisation of the same verbal argument and to be amenable to a simple solution in the proposed lexical analysis, which allows for restricting the pluralisations that can be inserted. The paper further develops an account of maximalisation of pluralities as needed to obtain the correct readings for sentences with quantiers that are not upward monotone. Such an account is absent in the orginal system in (Sternefeld, 1998). The present account makes crucial use of the possibility to have distinct constituents contribute identical semantic material offered by LRS and employs it in an analysis of maximalisation in terms of polyadic quantication.
We look at definite marking in Esperanto, Papiamentu, and Yiddish considering three semantically definite contexts: the referential use of proper names and unique nouns, as well as anaphoric definites. We argue for a three-dimensional analysis of definiteness: an individual denotation, an existence presupposition, and a uniqueness conventional implicature. We present an HPSG encoding of this system and model the central aspects of the definite marking systems of our three object languages.
Early work on quantification in natural languages showed that sentences like 'Every ape picked different berries', on the reading that the sets of berries picked by any two apes are not the same, can be logically represented with a single polyadic quantifier for the two nominal phrases. However, since that quantifier cannot be decomposed into two quantifiers for the two nominal phrases, a compositional semantic analysis of this reading is not possible under standard assumptions about syntax and semantics. This paper shows how a constraint-based semantics with Lexical Resource Semantics can define a systematic syntax-semantics interface which captures the reading in question with a polyadic quantifier.
Backshift is a phenomenon affecting verb tense that is visible as a mismatch between some specific embedded contexts and other environments. For instance, the indirect speech equivalent of a sentence like 'Kim likes reading', with a present tense verb, may show the same verb in a past tense form, as in 'Sandy said Kim liked reading'. We present a general analysis of backshift, pooling data from English and Romance languages. Our analysis acknowledges that tense morphology is ambiguous between different temporal meanings, explicitly models the role of the speech time and the event times involved and takes the aspectual constraints of tenses into consideration.