Author : Alex Oliver
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 399 pages
File Size : 49,22 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0198744382
Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley provide a new account of plural logic. They argue that there is such a thing as genuinely plural denotation in logic, and expound a framework of ideas that includes the distinction between distributive and collective predicates, the theory of plural descriptions, multivalued functions, and lists.
Author : Stanley Peters
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 549 pages
File Size : 12,96 MB
Release : 2006-04-27
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 019929125X
Quantification is a topic which brings together linguistics, logic, and philosophy. Quantifiers are the essential tools with which, in language or logic, we refer to quantity of things or amount of stuff. In English they include such expressions as no, some, all, both, and many. Peters and Westerstahl present the definitive interdisciplinary exploration of how they work - their syntax, semantics, and inferential role.Quantifiers in Language and Logic is intended for everyone with a scholarly interest in the exact treatment of meaning. It presents a broad view of the semantics and logic of quantifier expressions in natural languages and, to a slightly lesser extent, in logical languages. The authors progress carefully from a fairly elementary level to considerable depth over the course of sixteen chapters; their book will be invaluable to a broad spectrum of readers, from those with a basicknowledge of linguistic semantics and of first-order logic to those with advanced knowledge of semantics, logic, philosophy of language, and knowledge representation in artificial intelligence.
Author : Nicholas Asher
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 16,72 MB
Release : 2011-03-17
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1139501313
This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the amalgamation of a predicate and argument would produce what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a 'category mistake'. It argues for a theory in which words get assigned both an intension and a type. The book develops a rich system of types and investigates its philosophical and formal implications, for example the abandonment of the classic Church analysis of types that has been used by linguists since Montague. The author integrates fascinating and puzzling observations about lexical meaning into a compositional semantic framework. Adjustments in types are a feature of the compositional process and account for various phenomena including coercion and copredication. This book will be of interest to semanticists, philosophers, logicians and computer scientists alike.
Author : Hanoch Ben-Yami
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 30,78 MB
Release : 2019-09-16
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1351921525
Frege's invention of the predicate calculus has been the most influential event in the history of modern logic. The calculus’ place in logic is so central that many philosophers think, in fact, of it when they think of logic. This book challenges the position in contemporary logic and philosophy of language of the predicate calculus claiming that it is based on mistaken assumptions. Ben-Yami shows that the predicate calculus is different from natural language in its fundamental semantic characteristics, primarily in its treatment of reference and quantification, and that as a result the calculus is inadequate for the analysis of the semantics and logic of natural language. Ben-Yami develops both an alternative analysis of the semantics of natural language and an alternative deductive system comparable in its deductive power to first order predicate calculus but more adequate than it for the representation of the logic of natural language. Ben-Yami's book is a revolutionary challenge to classical first order predicate calculus, casting doubt on many of the central claims of modern logic.
Author : Massimiliano Carrara
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 29,52 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 019871632X
Unity and Plurality presents novel ways of thinking about plurality while casting new light on the interconnections among the logical, philosophical, and linguistic aspects of plurals. The volume brings together new work on the logic and ontology of plurality and on the semantics of plurals in natural language. Plural reference, the view that definite plurals such as 'the students' refer to several entities at once (the individual students), is an approach favoured by logicians and philosophers, who take sentences with plurals ('the students gathered') not to be committed to entities beyond individuals, entities such as classes, sums, or sets. By contrast, linguistic semantics has been dominated by a singularist approach to plurals, taking the semantic value of a definite plural such as 'the students' to be a mereological sum or set. Moreover, semantics has been dominated by a particular ontological view of plurality, that of extensional mereology. This volume aims to build a bridge between the two traditions and to show the fruitfulness of nonstandard mereological approaches. A team of leading experts investigates new perspectives that arise from plural logic and non-standard mereology and explore novel applications to natural language phenomena.
Author : F. Hamm
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 18,35 MB
Release : 2013-03-14
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9401727066
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 Godehard Link. It is indicative of the Wirkungsgeschichte of Link's work that most of the contributions in this volume take the logic of plurals proposed by Godehard Link (Link 1983, 1987) as their foundation or, at the very least, as their point of reference. Link's own paper in this volume provides a concise summary of many of the central research issues that have engaged semanticists during the last decade. Link's paper also contains an extensive bibliography that provides an excellent resource for scholars interested in the semantics of plurals. Since we can refer readers to Link's paper for an excellent survey of the subject matter of this book, we will limit our attention in this in troduction to summarizing the individual contributions in this volume. The book is organized into three main sections; within each section the papers are ordered alphabetically. However, as in much of linguistic the orizing, there is an exception: for reasons pointed out above, Godehard Link's article appears as Chapter 1.
Author : Jun Abe
Publisher : Springer
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 26,4 MB
Release : 2016-10-21
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 3319473042
This volume examines how the displacement property of language is characterized in formal terms under the Minimalist Program and to what extent this proposed characterization of it can explain relevant displacement properties. The birth of the Principles and Parameters Approach makes it possible to simplify transformational rules so radically as to be reduced to the single rule Move. The author proposes that Move, as conceived as a special case of Merge, named internal Merge, under the Minimalist Program requires two prerequisite operations: one is to “dig” into a structure to find a target of Merge, called Search, and the other is to make this target reach the top of the structure, called Float. The author argues that these two different operations are constrained by “minimal computation.” Due to the nature of how they apply, these operations are constrained by this economy condition in such a way that Search must be minimal and Float obeys Minimize chain links, which requires that this operation cannot skip possible landing sites. The author demonstrates that this mechanism of minimal Search and Float deals with a variety of phenomena that involve quantifier raising, such as rigidity effects of scope interaction, the availability of cumulative readings of plural relation sentences and pair-list readings of multiple wh-questions. Also demonstrated in this volume is that the same mechanism properly captures the locality effects of topicalization, focus movement, and ellipsis with contrastive focus.
Author : Tania Ionin
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 423 pages
File Size : 13,47 MB
Release : 2018-12-11
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0262535785
An argument that complex cardinals are not extra-linguistic but built using standard syntax and standard principles of semantic composition. In Cardinals, Tania Ionin and Ora Matushansky offer a semantic and syntactic analysis of nominal expressions containing complex cardinals (for example, two hundred and thirty-five books). They show that complex cardinals are not an extra-linguistic phenomenon (as is often assumed) but built using standard syntax and standard principles of semantic composition. Complex cardinals can tell us as much about syntactic structure and semantic composition as other linguistic expressions. Ionin and Matushansky show that their analysis accounts for the internal composition of cardinal-containing constructions cross-linguistically, providing examples from more than fifteen languages. They demonstrate that their proposal is compatible with a variety of related phenomena, including modified numerals, measure nouns, and fractions. Ionin and Matushansky show that a semantic or syntactic account that captures the behavior of a simplex cardinal (such as five) does not automatically transfer to a complex cardinal (such as five thousand and forty-six) and propose a compositional analysis of complex cardinals. They consider the lexical categories of simplex cardinals and their role in the construction of complex cardinals; examine in detail the numeral systems of selected languages, including Slavic and Semitic languages; discuss linguistic constructions that contain cardinals; address extra-linguistic conventions on the construction of complex cardinals; and, drawing on data from Modern Hebrew, Basque, Russian, and Dutch, show that modified numerals and partitives are compatible with their analysis.
Author : Gerhard Preyer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 534 pages
File Size : 39,79 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780199245550
One of the central issues of analytic philosophy and especially the theory of language is the concept of logical form. As typically understood this concept covers investigations into universal logical features underlying languages. However, from Frege and Russell onwards logical form analysts were no longer confined to such narrow linguistic perspectives. For them, investigating the logical form of language took the wider philosophical perspective of trying to understand language as our principal means for representing the world. From Russell's theory of definite descriptions to Davidson's truth-theoretical analyses of adverbial modification, citation, and reported speech, to lay open the logical structures underlying language is seen as a way of revealing the structure and features of the thereby represented world. Seventeen specially written essays by eminent philosophers and linguists appear for the first time in this anthology. Logical Form and Language brings together exciting new contributions from diverse points of view, which illuminate the lively current debate about this topic.
Author : Barry Schein
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 412 pages
File Size : 28,50 MB
Release : 1993
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780262193344
Barry Schein proposes combining a second-order treatment of plurals with Donald Davidson's suggestion that there are positions for reference to events in ordinary predicates in order to account for several of the more puzzling features of plurals without invoking plural objects, with its attendant metaphysics, and also provide an absolute truth-theoretic characterization of the semantics of sentences with plurals in them. How do we make sense of sentences with plural noun phrases in them? In Plurals and Events, Barry Schein proposes combining a second-order treatment of plurals with Donald Davidson's suggestion that there are positions for reference to events in ordinary predicates in order to account for several of the more puzzling features of plurals without invoking plural objects, with its attendant metaphysics, and also provide an absolute truth-theoretic characterization of the semantics of sentences with plurals in them. Schein's highly original argument should have significant impact on how natural-language semantics is done, with repercussions for philosophy and logic. The book opens with foundational arguments that the logical language should have four major features: reduction to singular predication via a Davidsonian logical form, amereology of events, a logical syntax that allows the constituents of a Davidsonian analysis to be predicated of distinct events and separated from one another by other logical elements, and descriptive anaphors that cross-refer to the events described by antecedent clauses. A semantics for plurality and quantification is developed in the remaining chapters, which address some of the empirical and formal questions raised by the variety of interpretations in which plurals and quantifiers participate.
