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Given any set E of expressions freely generated from a set of atoms by syntactic operations, there exist trivially compositional functions on E (to wit, the injective and the constant functions), but also plenty of non-trivially compositional functions. Here we show that within the space of non-injective functions (and so a fortiori within the space of non-injective and non-constant functions), compositional functions are not sufficiently abundant in order to generate the consequence relation of every propositional logic. Logical consequence relations thus impose substantive constraints on the existence of compositional functions when coupled with the condition of non-injectivity (though not without it). We ask how the apriori exclusion of injective functions from the search space might be justified, and we discuss the prospects of claims to the effect that any function can be "encoded" in a compositional one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives a uniform account of the meaning of generalizations with explicit exceptions that employ the prepositions "but", "except", and "except for". Our theory is that exceptives depend on generalizations, which can but need not be universal, whose generality they limit, and some of whose exceptions they comment on. Every generalization intrinsically partitions its domain of applicability into regular cases, which are as it says to expect, and exceptions, which are not. A generalization's exceptions are instances that falsify it if sufficiently prevalent. These two facts underpin the meaning of exceptives as combining a generality claim with an exception claim, giving correct truth conditions for the several ways the three exceptive prepositions are used, and significantly improving on existing semantic accounts in the literature. We support this by analyzing a wide range of examples. The analysis applies whether or not the phrase following the exceptive preposition is a DP, and whether or not the generalization is expressed with a quantifier. We further argue that these exceptive prepositions are synonymous, contrary to the widely held view that a difference in meaning explains their different syntactic distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a parallel corpus study on the expression of the temporal construction 'not...until' in a sample of European languages. We use data from the Europarl corpus and create semantic maps by multidimensional scaling, in order to analyze cross-linguistic and language-internal variation. This paper builds on formal semantic and typological work, extending it by including conditional constructions, as well as connectives of the type as long as. In an investigation of 7 languages, we find that (i) languages use many more different constructions to convey this meaning than was expected from the literature; and (ii) the combination of polarity marking (negation/assertion) strongly correlates with the type of connective. We corroborate our results in a larger sample of 21 European languages. An analysis of clusters and dimensions of the semantic maps based on the enlarged dataset shows that connectives are not randomly distributed across the semantic space of the 'not...until'-domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The principle of compositionality requires that the meaning of a complex expression remains the same after substitution of synonymous expressions. Alleged counterexamples to compositionality seem to force a theoretical choice: either apparent synonyms are not synonyms or synonyms do not syntactically occur where they appear to occur. Some theorists have instead looked to Frege's doctrine of "reference shift" according to which the meaning of an expression is sensitive to its linguistic context. This doctrine is alleged to retain the relevant claims about synonymy and substitution while respecting the compositionality principle. Thus, Salmon (Philos Rev 115(4):415, 2006) and Glanzberg and King (Philosophers' Imprint 20(2):1–29, 2020) offer occurrence-based accounts of variable binding, and Pagin and Westerståhl (Linguist Philos 33(5):381–415, 2010c) argue that an occurrence-based semantics delivers a compositional account of quotation. Our thesis is this: the occurrence-based strategies resolve the apparent failures of substitutivity in the same general way as the standard expression-based semantics do. So it is a myth that a Frege-inspired occurrence-based semantics affords a genuine alternative strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Normative inferentialism is a semantic theory according to which the meaning of an expression is, or is determined by, its proper inferential role. Critics of inferentialism often argue that it violates the principle of compositionality, and that it is therefore unable to explain some important linguistic data. I have two tasks in this paper: the first is to demonstrate that inferentialism, appearances perhaps to the contrary, does not violate the principle of compositionality, and the second is to explain why this demonstration is unlikely to mollify critics of inferentialism. The dispute between inferentialists and their critics, I shall argue, is not about compositionality, it is a more fundamental dispute about the nature of representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to argue for the new Wittgensteinians' claim that Frege and Wittgenstein share a contextualist attitude with respect to the individuation of content and, as a result, an austere conception of nonsense. To do this, I offer alternative interpretations of the passages of the Tractatus in which Wittgenstein seems committed to the attitude opposed to contextualism -- compositionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present investigation focuses on first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers' sensitivity to lexical fixedness and compositionality of Italian word combinations. Two studies explored language users' intuitions about three types of word combinations: free combinations, collocations, and idioms. In Study 1, Italian Verb+Noun combinations were embedded in sentential contexts, with control conditions created by substituting the verb with a synonym. L1 and L2 speakers rated sentence acceptability. In Study 2, the original verb was removed from sentences. Participants chose the verb from the list provided they felt was most acceptable. Computational measures were used to measure compositionality of word combinations. Mixed-effects modelling revealed that L1 and L2 speakers judged target word combinations differently in terms of lexical fixedness. In line with phraseological models, L1 speakers judged the use of a synonym as less acceptable in collocations than free combinations. On the contrary, L2 learners judged the use of a synonym as more acceptable in collocations than free combinations. However, all participants perceived idioms as least flexible of the three combination types. Results further showed an interesting effect of compositionality on the speakers' intuitions about the use of word combinations. Taken together, the findings provide new insights into how L1 and L2 speakers perceive word combinations that vary along the continua of lexical fixedness and compositionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a review of Paweł Grabarczyk's latest book, Directival Theory of Meaning: From Syntax and Pragmatics to Narrow Linguistic Content. I focus mostly on two concepts constitutive for the directival theory of meaning--that of linguistic trial and that of meaning directive. These two concepts, while ingeniously developed by Grabarczyk, are not free of problems and somewhat controversial assumptions. I start with describing the basis of Grabarczyk's proposal, as well as of the historical background from which it originated. Then, I move on to the analysis of the notion of linguistic trial. After that I focus on the concept of meaning directive, criticising certain assumptions that come with it. The conclusion is that while Grabarczyk's version of the directival theory of meaning is an interesting proposal, most of its shortcomings stem from the fact that for a theory that is supposed to work well on natural languages, too many examples pertain to artificial languages. Until an analysis of a natural language in the style of the directival theory of meaning is conducted, it is not possible to properly judge the value of this theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A standard objection to Cappelen and Lepore's (Insensitive semantics: a defense of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005) Semantic Minimalism is that minimal propositions are explanatorily idle. But Schoubye and Stokke (Noûs 50:759–793, 2016) recently proposed that minimal proposition and the question under discussion of a conversation jointly determine what is said in a systematic and explanatory way. This note argues that their account both overgenerates and undergenerates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I make critical use of certain word order and semantic properties of ditransitive expressions to develop an argument for the LF-copy theory of argument ellipsis (Oku in A theory of selection and reconstruction in the minimalist perspective, University of Connecticut, Storrs, 1998; Saito in Lang Res 43:203–222, 2007; in: Shibatani, Miyagawa, and Noda (eds) Handbook of Japanese syntax, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2017; Sakamoto in J East Asian Linguist 25:243–274, 2016; Escape from silent syntax, University of Connecticut, Storrs, 2017). Firstly, I summarize and extend Sakamoto's (in: Paper presented at the 148th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of Japan, Hosei University, Tokyo, 2014; 2016; 2017) argument based on rigid ditransitive idioms and show that the possible ellipsis of a non-idiomatic argument to the exclusion of the idiom chunks and the ditransitive verb is best accounted for in terms of argument ellipsis. Secondly, I point out a hitherto unnoticed observation, that no internal constituent within ditransitive figurative expressions may undergo ellipsis without losing a non-literal, metaphorical interpretation associated with its containing VP, and I demonstrate how this observation presents critical evidence in favor of the LF-copy theory of argument ellipsis over its competing PF-deletion alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, two uses of según are analyzed: the one in which this particle has a complement with interrogative value (según quién venga; según si Juan viene o no, ‘depending on who comes; depending on whether John comes or not’) and the one in which the term includes a scalar change (Los árboles van perdiendo sus hojas según avanza el otoño, ‘The trees lose their leaves as autumn progresses’). The latter construction is interpreted in a similar way to proportional comparatives; however, they are not formally equivalent. It is argued that in both uses según has the same interpretation so that the differences come from the formal and interpretive properties of its arguments. In fact, según is a dependency predicate (Bosque 2010) that expresses a logical instruction according to which the set of alternatives contained in its internal argument (be it an interrogative sequence or a scalar change) must be replicated in its external argument in order to establish a distributive relationship between the elements of each of these sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A semantic theory is committed to semantic monism just in case every particular semantic property posited by the theory is a member of the same kind. The commitment to semantic monism appears to draw some support from the need to provide a compositional semantics, since taking a single kind of semantic property as key to a semantic theory affords a uniform pattern on the basis of which the meaning of any given sentence can be compositionally determined. This line of support highlights a tension between the principle of compositionality and taking a more pluralistic approach to semantic theorizing. In this essay, that tension is relieved, leaving open the prospect of a pluralistic semantic theory that observes the principle of compositionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pater's (2019) target article builds a persuasive case for establishing stronger ties between theoretical linguistics and connectionism (deep learning). This commentary extends his arguments to semantics, focusing in particular on issues of learning, compositionality, and lexical meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to some views (Carston, Fodor), natural language suffers from underdeterminacy, but thought doesn't. According to the underdeterminacy claim, sentence types underdetermine the truth-conditions of sentence tokens. In particular, the semantics of a predicate type seems to underdetermine the satisfaction conditions of its tokens. By contrast, mental representation-types are supposed to determine the truth-conditions of its tokens. In this paper I critically examine these mixed views. First, I argue that the arguments supporting the indispensability of including in one's theory mental representations that are free of the underdeterminacy exhibited by natural language are not sound. As a result, the possibility that mental representation-types are as underdetermined as natural language sentence-types has not been ruled out. Second, I argue that Carston's ad hoc concept-types are as underdetermined as word-types. I finish by arguing that mental representations are also underdetermined in a second sense—mental representation-tokens only determine a partial function from possible worlds to truth-values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The developments in Cognitive Linguistics have made it possible to uncover multiple meanings of composite structures to the effect that more and more scholars have become interested in the issue of semantic relations in verb-particle constructions. With only a handful of those focusing on both elements of such constructions, many of them have directed their research towards the study of particles exclusively. The current paper aims to advance the study on phrasal verbs by offering a new outlook on their compositional nature. In order to achieve a desired aim, the principle of partial compositionality is adopted here. Hence, apart from focusing on both the verb and the particle, the senses that go beyond those comprising the composite parts receive considerable attention in this study. The phrasal verbs singled out for the purpose of the analysis include: get and take with selected spatialorientational particles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is twofold; first, it aims to explore the variety of interpretations of the partially schematic Hebrew construction kexol as in kexol she'ratsiti ('as much as I wanted') within the framework of construction grammar; second, it aims to account for this variety through a demonstration of the interrelation between the grammaticalization of the construction and the process of (inter)subjectification or speech-act orientation. The analysis will show that this interrelation has resulted in considerable internal variation in meaning and function in the present day. Corpus findings reveal that initially kexol functioned as a compound consisting of a preposition and a universal quantifier to denote a relation of similarity and comparison. As a result of speaker orientation, the construction has come to exhibit a higher degree of grammaticality in its function as a scalar modifier. Additional schematic and procedural meanings which developed later seem to be the result of hearer-orientation and discourse-orientation tendencies all subsumed under the cover term speech-act orientation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the process of constructionalization and constructional change of apparently noncanonical yet highly frequent V-NP expressions in Mandarin Chinese, which exist in other languages as well (e.g., Southeast Asian languages and African languages). A corpus-based survey of 20 frequently used monosyllabic verbs shows that both the token and the type frequency of the noncanonical V-NP expressions have on the whole been increasing throughout the history of the Chinese language. From a constructional perspective, it is proposed that the noncanonical V-NP structure has gone through a process of grammatical constructionalization and constructional change (Traugott & Trousdale 2013), which involves diachronic changes in productivity, schematicity and compositionality and which is manifested in the increasing number of the semantic types of postverbal NPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different methods are proposed to learn phrase embedding, which can be mainly divided into two strands. The first strand is based on the distributional hypothesis to treat a phrase as one non-divisible unit and to learn phrase embedding based on its external context similar to learn word embedding. However, distributional methods cannot make use of the information embedded in component words and they also face data spareness problem. The second strand is based on the principle of compositionality to infer phrase embedding based on the embedding of its component words. Compositional methods would give erroneous result if a phrase is non-compositional. In this paper, we propose a hybrid method by a linear combination of the distributional component and the compositional component with an individualized phrase compositionality constraint. The phrase compositionality is automatically computed based on the distributional embedding of the phrase and its component words. Evaluation on five phrase level semantic tasks and experiments show that our proposed method has overall best performance. Most importantly, our method is more robust as it is less sensitive to datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a framework for compositional and iterative design and verification of systems with quantitative information, such as rewards, time or energy. It is based on disjunctive modal transition systems where we allow actions to bear various types of quantitative information. Throughout the design process, the actions can be further refined and the informationmade more precise.We showhowto compute the results of standard operations on the systems, including the quotient (residual), which has not been previously considered for quantitative non-deterministic systems. Our quantitative framework has close connections to the modal nu-calculus and is compositional with respect to general notions of distances between systems and the standard operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people recognize and learn about complex functional structure? Taking inspiration from other areas of cognitive science, we propose that this is achieved by harnessing compositionality: complex structure is decomposed into simpler building blocks. We formalize this idea within the framework of Bayesian regression using a grammar over Gaussian process kernels, and compare this approach with other structure learning approaches. Participants consistently chose compositional (over non-compositional) extrapolations and interpolations of functions. Experiments designed to elicit priors over functional patterns revealed an inductive bias for compositional structure. Compositional functions were perceived as subjectively more predictable than non-compositional functions, and exhibited other signatures of predictability, such as enhanced memorability and reduced numerosity. Taken together, these results support the view that the human intuitive theory of functions is inherently compositional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an in-depth study of the Frisian loan pindakaas from Dutch pindakaas. This word can be literally glossed as 'peanut cheese', but it translates into English as 'peanut butter'. The translation illustrates that the compound pindakaas is not compositional in Dutch and Frisian, that is, pindakaas is not a kind of kaas ('cheese'). Because of its non-compositional nature, Dutch pindakaas, we argue, has not been borrowed into Frisian as pindatsiis, even though Dutch kaas in Frisian is tsiis. In contrast, compositional compounds featuring Dutch -kaas surface in Frisian with -tsiis, such as Dutch schapenkaas, Frisian skieppetsiis. The non-compositional nature of pindakaas is shown to have a historical explanation. Independent evidence is cited from psycholinguistics supporting the claim that compositional compounds behave in a way that differs from non-compositional ones. Thus evidence is provided that borrowing is sensitive to compositionality in that elements of compounds are more easily left untranslated when their meaning is not predictable by compositionality from their usage elsewhere in the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kit Fine has argued that the Tarski Semantics for the language of first order logic (FOL) is inadequate. A semantic theory for FOL is inadequate if there are formulae of FOL whose meanings or satisfaction conditions it cannot compositionally account for. It is argued here that Fine's case against Tarski rests on a mistake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Invariantists argue that the notion of concept in psychology should be reserved for knowledge that is retrieved in a context-insensitive manner. Contextualists argue that concepts are to be understood in terms of context-sensitive ad hoc constructions. I review the central empirical evidence for and against both views and show that their conclusions are based on a common mischaracterization of both theories. When the difference between contextualism and invariantism is properly understood, it becomes apparent that the way the question of stability is currently investigated will not lead to a consensus. Instead of focusing directly on stability, we should turn our attention to other desiderata on a theory of concepts. In particular, I show that invariantism, but not contextualism, fails to account for compositionality and abstract concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Is a naturalistic account of reference possible? Here is a simple argument to the effect that it is not: Let R be the relation that allegedly naturalizes reference, and consider the predicate "being an object that does not stand in the relation R to this expression". Call this predicate "P". On the face of it, P is a counterexample to the alleged naturalization, since it appears to refer to all and only those objects that do not stand in the relation R to it. Actually, an argument like this was advanced more than twenty years ago by the late Paolo Casalegno. Although for various reasons it has not been given due attention by the philosophical community, the argument is interesting in its structure and remarkable in its conclusion. In this paper I shall reconstruct it in detail and discuss it. Then, I shall show that the argument fails, since, contrary to what Casalegno claimed, under certain conditions P is paradoxical, hence not a referring expression. My rejection builds on the fundamental distinction between simple and compound expressions, namely on the compositional structure of natural languages. If I am right, whether any attempt at naturalizing reference that takes care of this distinction will succeed remains an open empirical question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of recent works, Kit Fine ( The Journal of Philosophy, 100(12), 605-631, 2003, 2007) has sketched a novel solution to Frege's puzzle. Radically departing from previous solutions, Fine argues that Frege's puzzle forces us to reject compositionality. In this paper we first provide an explicit formalization of the relational semantics for first-order logic suggested, but only briefly sketched, by Fine. We then show why the relational semantics alone is technically inadequate, forcing Fine to enrich the syntax with a coordination schema. Given this enrichment, we argue, that that the semantics is compositional. We then examine the deep consequences of this result for Fine's proposed solution to Frege's puzzle. We argue that Fine has mis-diagnosed his own solution-his attempted solution does not deny compositionality. The correct characterization of Fine's solution fits him more comfortably among familiar solutions to the puzzle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a prominent line of work in natural language semantics, rooted in the work of Hamblin, in which the meaning of a sentence is not taken to be a single proposition, but rather a set of propositions-a set of alternatives. This allows for a more fine-grained view on meaning, which has led to improved analyses of a wide range of linguistic phenomena. However, this approach also faces a number of problems. We focus here on two of these, in our view the most fundamental ones. The first has to do with how meanings are composed, i.e., with the type-theoretic operations of function application and abstraction; the second has to do with how meanings are compared, i.e., the notion of entailment. Our aim is to reconcile what we take to be the essence of Hamblin's proposal with the more orthodox type-theoretic framework rooted in the work of Montague in such a way that both the explanatory utility of the former and the solid formal foundations of the latter are preserved. Our proposal builds on insights from recent work on inquisitive semantics, and it also contributes to the further development of this framework by specifying how the inquisitive meaning of a sentence may be built up compositionally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sophisticated senator and legislative onion. Whether or not you have ever heard of these things, we all have some intuition that one of them makes much less sense than the other. In this paper, we introduce a large dataset of human judgments about novel adjective-noun phrases. We use these data to test an approach to semantic deviance based on phrase representations derived with compositional distributional semantic methods, that is, methods that derive word meanings from contextual information, and approximate phrase meanings by combining word meanings. We present several simple measures extracted from distributional representations of words and phrases, and we show that they have a significant impact on predicting the acceptability of novel adjective-noun phrases even when a number of alternative measures classically employed in studies of compound processing and bigram plausibility are taken into account. Our results show that the extent to which an attributive adjective alters the distributional representation of the noun is the most significant factor in modeling the distinction between acceptable and deviant phrases. Our study extends current applications of compositional distributional semantic methods to linguistically and cognitively interesting problems, and it offers a new, quantitatively precise approach to the challenge of predicting when humans will find novel linguistic expressions acceptable and when they will not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shrug is a widely shared gesture ensemble with several different components. These include: lifting the shoulders; rotating the forearms outwards with extended fingers to a "palm up" position; with mouth firmly closed, pulling the lips downwards (the "mouth shrug"), which may or may not be combined with raising the eyebrows and tilting the head to one side. It comprises a rich yet consistent network of forms (a single component or a combination of components can index the whole enactment). These components, together or in various combinations, are shown to express incapacity, powerlessness, indetermination, indifference, obviousness which, we suggest, are unified by a common semantic theme of personal disengagement. Since the shrug expresses pragmatic meanings and its formational and semantic core remains stable across different contexts and speakers, the shrug also qualifies as a recurrent gesture. Based on empirical evidence gathered from a videotaped corpus of dyadic interactions between native speakers of British English, this study proposes a qualitative-yet-systematic method to provide a unified account of shrugging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to reconcile two claims that have long been thought to be incompatible: (a) that we compositionally determine the meaning of complex expressions from the meaning of their parts, and (b) that prototypes are components of the meaning of lexical terms such as fish, red, and gun. Hypotheses (a) and (b) are independently plausible, but most researchers think that reconciling them is a difficult, if not hopeless task. In particular, most linguists and philosophers agree that (a) is not negotiable; so they tend to reject (b). Recently, there have been some attempts to reconcile these claims (Prinz, Furnishing the mind: concepts and their perceptual basis 2002; The Oxford handbook of compositionality 2012; Jönsson and Hampton, Cognition 106:913-923, 2008; Hampton and Jönsson, The Oxford handbook of compositionality 2012; Schurz, The Oxford handbook of compositionality 2012), but they all adopt an implausibly weak notion of compositionality. Furthermore, parties to this debate tend to fall into a problematic way of individuating prototypes that is too externalistic. In contrast, I propose that we can reconcile (a) and (b) if we adopt, instead, an internalist and pluralist conception of prototypes and a context-sensitive but strong notion of compositionality. I argue that each of this proposals is independently plausible, and that, when taken together, provide the basis for a satisfactory account of prototype compositionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on the article "Experimental evidence for compositional syntax in bird calls" by T.N. Suzuki, published in a 2016 issue of the journal. Topics discussed include first evidence of combinatorial syntax and semantics in non-humans especially in Japanese great tits, and importance of studies of language-like behavior in non-humans to establish missing link in the evolutionary story of human language.

This paper is an extended description of SemEval-2014 Task 1, the task on the evaluation of Compositional Distributional Semantics Models on full sentences. Systems participating in the task were presented with pairs of sentences and were evaluated on their ability to predict human judgments on (1) semantic relatedness and (2) entailment. Training and testing data were subsets of the SICK (Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge) data set. SICK was developed with the aim of providing a proper benchmark to evaluate compositional semantic systems, though task participation was open to systems based on any approach. Taking advantage of the SemEval experience, in this paper we analyze the SICK data set, in order to evaluate the extent to which it meets its design goal and to shed light on the linguistic phenomena that are still challenging for state-of-the-art computational semantic systems. Qualitative and quantitative error analyses show that many systems are quite sensitive to changes in the proportion of sentence pair types, and degrade in the presence of additional lexico-syntactic complexities which do not affect human judgements. More compositional systems seem to perform better when the task proportions are changed, but the effect needs further confirmation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Male Putty-nosed monkeys have two main alarm calls, pyows and hacks . While pyows have a broad distribution suggestive of a general call, hacks are often indicative of eagles. In a series of articles, Arnold and Zuberbühler showed that Putty-nosed monkeys sometimes produce distinct pyow-hack sequences made of a small number of pyows followed by a small number of hacks ; and that these are predictive of group movement. Arnold and Zuberbühler claimed that pyow-hack sequences are syntactically combinatorial but not semantically compositional because their meaning cannot be derived from the meanings of their component parts. We compare two theories of this phenomenon. One formalizes and modifies the non-compositional theory. The other presents a semantically compositional alternative based on weak meanings for pyow (‘general alarm’) and hack (‘non-ground movement’), combined with pragmatic principles of competition; a crucial one is an ‘Urgency Principle’ whereby calls that provide information about the nature/location of a threat must come before calls that do not. Semantically, pyow-hack sequences are compatible with any kind of situation involving (moving) aerial predators or (arboreal) movement of the monkeys themselves. But in the former case, hacks provide information about the location of a threat, and hence should appear at the beginning of sequences. As a result, pyow-hack sequences can only be used for non-threat-related situations involving movement, hence a possible inference that they involve group movement. Without adjudicating the debate, we argue that a formal analysis can help clarify competing theories and derive new predictions that might decide between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extent to which the linguistic system--its architecture, the representations it operates on, the constraints it is subject to--is specific to language has broad implications for cognitive science and its relation to evolutionary biology. Importantly, a given property of the linguistic system can be "specific" to the domain of language in several ways. For example, if the property evolved by natural selection under the pressure of the linguistic function it serves then the property is domain-specific in the sense that its design is tailored for language. Equally though, if that property evolved to serve a different function or if that property is domain-general, it may nevertheless interact with the linguistic system in a way that is unique. This gives a second sense in which a property can be thought of as specific to language. An evolutionary approach to the language faculty might at first blush appear to favor domain-specificity in the first sense, with individual properties of the language faculty being specifically linguistic adaptations. However, we argue that interactions between learning, culture, and biological evolution mean any domain-specific adaptations that evolve will take the form of weak biases rather than hard constraints. Turning to the latter sense of domain-specificity, we highlight a very general bias, simplicity, which operates widely in cognition and yet interacts with linguistic representations in domain-specific ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Catalan Journal of Linguistics is the property of Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Based on a concise but comprehensive overview of some fundamental properties required from component-based frameworks, namely compositionality , incrementality , flattening , modularity and expressiveness , we review three modifications of the semantics of glue operators in the Behaviour–Interaction–Priority (BIP) framework. We provide theoretical results and examples illustrating the degree to which the three semantics meet these requirements. In particular, we show that the most recent semantics, based on the offer predicate is the only one that satisfies all of them. The classical and offer semantics are not comparable: there are systems that can be assembled in the classical semantics, but not in the offer one. We present a strict characterisation of the behaviour hierarchy determining the conditions, under which systems in the classical semantics can be transposed into the offer semantics: directly, with minor modifications, by introducing a new type of synchronisation or cannot be transposed at all. The offer semantics allows us to extend the algebras, which are used to model glue operators in BIP, to encompass priorities. This extension uses the Algebra of Causal Interaction Trees, T ( P ) , as a pivot: existing transformations automatically provide the extensions for the Algebra of Connectors. We then extend the axiomatisation of T ( P ) , since the equivalence induced by the new operational semantics is weaker than that induced by the interaction semantics. This extension leads to canonical normal forms for all structures and to a simplification of the algorithm for the synthesis of connectors from Boolean coordination constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the basic tenets of cognitive grammar, as developed by Langacker (1987, 1991), is that the meaning of complex lexemes can be described in terms of partial rather than full compositionality, resulting from the fact that composite expressions are frequently created by schema extension. This paper is based on the assumption that forming new words by derivation is characterised by the accommodation of the base and the affix, i.e. their reciprocal adjustment in the process of integrating them into the composite structure (Langacker 1987). The article focuses on two aspects of accommodation: profiling semantic roles and establishing new cognitive domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Foreign Literature Studies is the property of Foreign Literature Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Based on morphological phenomena found mostly in Japanese, a highly agglutinative language, this paper investigates how we might approach intra-word compositionality in a manner faithful to lexical integrity. First, we observe some word-formation phenomena that seem to apparently contradict lexical (or morphological) integrity and ‘direct compositionality’. These involve mismatches -- bracketing paradoxes -- between morphological constituency vis-à-vis syntactic or semantic constituency. We also survey how researchers have dealt or would deal with instances of such mismatches. Upon concluding that these mismatches are not obstacles to direct compositionality or lexical integrity, an even more drastic bracketing paradox, namely, the one involving the sized inalienable possession construction is introduced as a case study to give the concept of direct compositionality a further stress test. The viability and, arguably, advantage of a direct compositional semantically-oriented (as opposed to syntactic) approach to word-formation is demonstrated. Finally, after a summary of the paper, further conceptual issues regarding compositionality and word-formation are taken up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After introducing semantic anti-realism and the paradox of knowability, the paper offers a reconstruction of the anti-realist argument from understanding. The proposed reconstruction validates an unrestricted principle to the effect that truth requires the existence of a certain kind of "demonstration". The paper shows that that principle fails to imply the problematic instances of the original unrestricted feasible-knowability principle but that the overall view underlying the new principle still has unrestricted epistemic consequences. Appealing precisely to the paradox of knowability, the paper also argues, against the BHK semantics, for the non-constructive character of the demonstrations envisaged by semantic anti-realism, and contends that, in such setting, one of the most natural arguments for a broadly intuitionist revision of classical logic loses all its force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper are Dummett's meaning-theoretical arguments against classical logic based on considerations about the meaning of negation. Using Dummettian principles, I shall outline three such arguments, of increasing strength, and show that they are unsuccessful by giving responses to each argument on behalf of the classical logician. What is crucial is that in responding to these arguments a classicist need not challenge any of the basic assumptions of Dummett's outlook on the theory of meaning. In particular, I shall grant Dummett his general bias towards verificationism, encapsulated in the slogan 'meaning is use'. The second general assumption I see no need to question is Dummett's particular breed of molecularism. Some of Dummett's assumptions will have to be given up, if classical logic is to be vindicated in his meaning-theoretical framework. A major result of this paper will be that the meaning of negation cannot be defined by rules of inference in the Dummettian framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Figurative idioms constitute a large proportion of multi-word expressions in everyday language. Contrary to the traditional view of idioms as non-compositional units, numerous studies in cognitive linguistics show that most idioms are not arbitrary but motivated by conceptual metaphors and metonymies that provide a link between literal and figurative meanings. Familiarity with particular source domains and conceptual mappings is regarded as a source of idiom transparency. In this article, we report on a study in which 85 Slovak students participated. Their task was to guess the meanings of English idioms containing three body parts: the eye, the hand and the heart. These body parts are not equally productive metaphorical source domains in English and Slovak. The research results which we present indicate that different prominence of the source domains in students' mother tongue and the target language is one of the factors that influence idiom comprehension in a foreign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on morphological phenomena found in Japanese, a highly agglutinative language, this paper investigates how we might approach intra-word compositionality. First, we elucidate the concept of compositionality to properly frame the central issue. Second, we observe some word-formation phenomena that seem to apparently contradict lexical (or morphological) integrity as well as word-internal compositionality. These involve mismatches — bracketing paradoxes — between morphological constituency vis-à-vis syntactic or semantic constituency. Then, the center piece phenomena of this paper displaying even more drastic bracketing paradoxes are introduced as case studies, namely, the ones involving the negative morpheme and the sized inalienable possession construction. These serve as a testing ground for the concept of word-internal compositionality. The viability and, arguably, advantage of a (direct) compositional approach to word-formation is demonstrated in light of their behavior and the current accounts furnished for them. Finally, after a summary of the paper, further conceptual issues regarding compositionality and word-formation are taken up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many languages, the same particles that form quantifier words also serve as connectives, additive and scalar particles, question markers, roots of existential verbs, and so on. Do these have a unified semantics, or do they merely bear a family resemblance? Are they aided by silent operators in their varied roles-if yes, what operators? I dub the particles 'quantifier particles' and refer to them generically with capitalized versions of the Japanese morphemes. I argue that both MO and KA can be assigned a stable semantics across their various roles. The specific analysis I offer is motivated by the fact that MO and KA often combine with just one argument; I propose that this is their characteristic behavior. Their role is to impose semantic requirements that are satisfied when the immediately larger context is interpreted as the meet/join of their host's semantic contribution with something else. They do not perform meet/join themselves. The obligatory vs. optional appearance of the particles depends on whether the meet/join interpretations arise by default in the given constellation. I explicate the proposal using the toolkit of basic Inquisitive Semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A formal semantics for low-level perceptual aspects of meaning is presented, tying these together with the logical-inferential aspects of meaning traditionally studied in formal semantics. The key idea is to model perceptual meanings as classifiers of perceptual input. Furthermore, we show how perceptual aspects of meaning can be updated as a result of observing language use in interaction, thereby enabling fine-grained semantic plasticity and semantic coordination. This requires a framework where intensions are (i) represented independently of extensions, and (ii) structured objects which can be modified as a result of learning. We use Type Theory with Records (TTR), a formal semantics framework that starts from the idea that information and meaning is founded on our ability to perceive and classify the world, i.e. to perceive objects and situations as being of types. As an example of our approach, we show how a simple classifier of spatial information based on the Perceptron can be cast in TTR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which aims to analyse the principles of cognitive linguistics on a set of polysemous English phrasal verbs. It also investigates the interaction of semantic network of the verb and particle in construction of phrasal verb. Information regarding the analysis of prepositions, the compositionality, and the use of Principled Polysemy Model in analysing the semantics of particles, are discussed.

Integrated-time Markovian process calculi rely on actions whose durations are quantified by exponentially distributed random variables. The Markovian bisimulation equivalences defined so far for these calculi treat exponentially timed internal actions like all the other actions, because each such action has a nonzero duration and hence can be observed if it is executed between a pair of exponentially timed noninternal actions. However, no difference may be noted, at stationary state, between a sequence of exponentially timed internal actions and a single exponentially timed internal action, if their expected durations and execution probabilities coincide, a fact exploited in Hillston's weak isomorphism. We show that Milner's approach can be adapted on the basis of this fact, so to derive a weak bisimulation equivalence for integrated-time Markovian process calculi, up to a tradeoff between compositionality and exactness inherent to the Markovian setting. The resulting weak Markovian bisimulation equivalence induces a pseudo-aggregation that is exact at stationary state for all the considered processes, but turns out to be a congruence only over sequential processes. To achieve compositionality over concurrent processes, we need to enhance the abstraction capability of the equivalence in the presence of interleaved computations. However, the corresponding pseudo-aggregation turns out to be exact at stationary state only for a subset of concurrent processes. In addition to this tradeoff, we present, for the first equivalence, a sound and complete axiomatization over sequential processes, which is instrumental to characterize pseudo-aggregations, and a polynomial-time equivalence-checking algorithm, which can be exploited for the compositional minimization of concurrent processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues against Zoltán Szabó's claim in 'Compositionality as Supervenience' (Linguist Philos 23:475-505, ) that we ought to understand the principle of compositionality as the idea that in natural language, the meanings of complex expressions strongly supervene on the meanings of their constituents and how the constituents are combined. The argument is that if we understand compositionality Szabó's way, then compositionality can play no role in explanations of the acquirability of natural languages, because it makes these explanations circular. This, in turn, would undermine the primary motivation for thinking that natural language is compositional, and would thus undermine the importance of the principle in natural language semantics. Thus, even if Szabó's reading of the principle best accords with theorists' intuitions about what sorts of languages are compositional-as he claims it does-there is good reason to reject that reading. Finally, the paper defends the claim that we ought to think of the principle as the idea that in natural language, the meanings of complexes weakly supervene on the meanings of their constituents and how they are combined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contains a discussion of how the concept of critical aspects and the principle of compositionality can provide a powerful tool to analyse and understand the communications that occur in the classroom. It is grounded in data collected in a longitudinal study. The content chosen is algebra. It is argued that the critical aspects and the principle of compositionality should be considered as a methodological principle that describes how communication in the classroom should be designed. Here, I present the power of using variation theory whose main purpose is to generate an understanding of critical aspects and compositionality in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We formulate a compositional specification theory for interface automata, where a component model specifies the allowed sequences of input and output interactions with the environment. A trace-based linear-time refinement is provided, which is the weakest preorder preserving substitutivity of components, and is weaker than the classical alternating simulation defined on interface automata. Since our refinement allows a component to be refined by refusing to produce any output, we also define a refinement relation that guarantees safety and progress. The theory includes the operations of parallel composition to support the structural composition of components, logical conjunction and disjunction for independent development, hiding to support abstraction of interfaces, and quotient for incremental synthesis of components. Our component formulation highlights the algebraic properties of the specification theory for both refinement preorders, and is shown to be fully abstract with respect to observation of communication mismatches. Examples of independent and incremental component development are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a common view that radical contextualism about linguistic meaning is incompatible with a compositional explanation of linguistic comprehension. Recently, some philosophers of language have proposed theories of 'pragmatic' compositionality challenging this assumption. This paper takes a close look at a prominent proposal of this kind due to François Recanati. The objective is to give a plausible formulation of the view. The major results are threefold. First, a basic distinction that contextualists make between mandatory and optional pragmatic processes needs to be revised. Second, the pragmatic theory can with stand a Davidsonian objection only by rejecting the importance of a distinction between primitive and non-primitive semantic items. Thirdly, however, the theory is now open to a worry about how it should be understood: either the theory consists in a very broad functionalist generalization about communication, which makes it explanatorily inert, or it boils down to a highly particularist view about linguistic meaning. Finally, I argue that Recanati's notion of 'occasion meaning' is problematic and suggest replacing it with the notion of speaker meaning, which is explanatorily more basic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]