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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]

The article refers to the concept of text and its relationship with the basic law of time. Topics include various terms that are used for writing such as composition and text lens which highlights pure meaning of writing and its abstract nature; and a comparison between immortal nature of text that can be written in any form.

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]

Compositional “language of thought” models have recently been proposed to account for a wide range of children’s conceptual and linguistic learning. The present work aims to evaluate one of the most basic assumptions of these models: children should have an ability to represent and compose functions. We show that 3.5–4.5 year olds are able to predictively compose two novel functions at significantly above chance levels, even without any explicit training or feedback on the composition itself. We take this as evidence that children at this age possess some capacity for compositionality, consistent with models that make this ability explicit, and providing an empirical challenge to those that do not. [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.

Holistic theories of meaning have, at least since Dummett's Frege: The Philosophy of language, been assumed to be problematic from the perspective of the incremental nature of natural language learning. In this essay I argue that the general relationship between holism and language learning is in fact the opposite of that claimed by Dummett. It is only given a particular form of language learning, and a particular form of holism, that there is a problem at all; in general, for all forms of holism, and irrespective of how language learning is understood, semantic holism is conducive to language learning. The paper has three main parts. In the first, I demonstrate with the use of a simple formal system, that the form of holism that generates the problem that Dummett draws attention to is really decomposable into three distinct components, each of which is necessary for the problem to arise. In the second part, I demonstrate that even Dummett's strong form of holism is compatible with one natural way in which to understand the incremental nature of language learning. In the third part, I outline the reasons why all forms of holism are conducive to language learning and offer two ways in which this general fact can be spelled out precisely. I end the paper by addressing some possible objections, and in doing so I draw attention to some affinities between semantic holism and the principle of compositionality, a semantic principle which has long been assumed to be conducive to language learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regular expressions ( RE) are an algebraic formalism for expressing regular languages, widely used in string search and as a specification language in verification. In this paper, we introduce and investigate visibly rational expressions ( VRE), an extension of RE for the class of visibly pushdown languages ( VPL). We show that VRE capture precisely the class of VPL. Moreover, we identify an equally expressive fragment of VRE which admits a quadratic time compositional translation into the automata acceptors of VPL. We also prove that, for this fragment, universality, inclusion and language equivalence are EXPTIME-complete. Finally, we provide an extension of VRE for VPL over infinite words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: With the crystallization of the “generative enterprise” half a century ago, two concepts became salient: the initial state and final states of the language faculty, respectively, UG (the genetic component) and I-languages. Since then inquiry has gained far greater scope and depth. It has also led to sharpening of fundamental principles of language. At first, descriptive adequacy appeared to require rich and complex assumptions about UG. A primary goal has always been to overcome this deficiency. Core properties of concern have included compositionality, order, projection (labeling), and displacement. Early work assigned the first three to phrase structure rules and the last to the transformational component. Simplification of computational procedures suggests that compositionality and displacement (along with the “copy theory”) fall together while order may be a reflex of sensorimotor externalization, conclusions that have far-reaching consequences. As for labeling, minimal computation restricts options to the few that have considerable empirical support. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

I refer to the sentences that are the subject of this paper as Thing sentences (TSs), illustrated by The thing is that it's not my phone. These are copular specificational sentences with a definite singular subject and a finite complement clause. Prior research claimed that TSs focus attention on their complement clauses, are pragmatic or discourse markers, indicate a shift in subtopic or topic, communicate that the proposition represented by the complement clause is in "disconformity" with, or problematic in, its context, and that it represents a cause, reason, justification, or grounds for other propositions; these interpretations are claimed to be conventionally associated with the construction. I show that these earlier works are descriptively inaccurate and explanatorily incomplete. While the cause, reason, justification, and grounds interpretations have not been explained, some authors have claimed that the problem interpretation is due to the semantic poverty of thing. I demonstrate that the construction presents the complement proposition as both focused and presupposed and consequently as partially discontinuous with the discourse topic as it has developed up to the point at which the TS is uttered, thereby effecting a shift in the development of the current topic, though never a shift to an unrelated topic. I argue against analyzing TSs as discourse or pragmatic markers and I demonstrate that TSs need not communicate that their complements are problematic, that the range of other interpretations is greater than hitherto proposed, that these are due to the operation of general interpretive schemata, and therefore are not conventionally associated with the construction. I show that the presuppositional effects are due to the minimal semantic specification of thing and the fact that it is definite, and that the focusing effects axe due to the predicate position of the clause and to the specificationality of the construction which makes the clause an argument of the subject and thus a marked focus. This analysis of Thing sentences demonstrates that speakers are attuned to the expectations of their audiences and exploit the lexical and syntactic resources of the language to create expression types to manage such things as topical development, and in the case of Thing sentences to signal an unexpected development of the current topic, leading to a change in its trajectory. The analysis shows that at this point in its history, TS interpretations are due to its linguistic features interacting in context with general pragmatic principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I address the general mechanisms of argument selection in language, and specifically the role played by type coercion operations in linguistic theory. The view presented here is that compositional mechanisms must be open to more information than just the base type of an expression. Such 'compositional flexibility' in the type that accommodates to the one selected by the verb has been the topic of considerable research recently. In this article, I position how such coercion mechanisms operate in the larger context of general selectional strategies in the grammar. I first outline my assumptions regarding the general theory of type selection, adopting a model of Generative Lexicon Theory (GL). I distinguish between two strategies at work in language, type matching and type coercion, both treated as strong compositional mechanisms. A library of possible coercion operations is defined, as well as apparent constraints on their application in language. I conclude with a discussion of corpus-based experiments based on the formal models of coercion and selection presented here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Using three idiom characteristics (familiarity, literality, and compositionality), an idiom-processing model is advanced and applied to an advertising setting. Specifically, we propose that idioms of varying characteristics lead to one of six processing outcomes that can be differentiated based on processing time and comprehension. Further, we posit that consumers will exhibit different recall and attitude responses for advertisements using different types of idioms. Results from two studies provide some preliminary support for these predictions. Implications of the proposed framework for idiom research as well as for marketing theory and practice are discussed, and future research directions suggested. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

ABSTRACTTwo experiments examined whether text composition engages verbal, visual, and spatial working memory to different degrees. In Experiment 1, undergraduate students composed by longhand a persuasive text while performing a verbal, visual, or spatial concurrent task that was presented visually. In Experiment 2, participants performed a verbal or spatial concurrent task that was aurally presented. Writing performance was not disrupted differentially across the three tasks. Performance on all concurrent tasks showed fewer correct responses and longer RTs relative to single-task, baseline data. However, the demands on visual working memory were as high as those on verbal working memory, whereas demands on spatial working memory were minimal. The findings help to delineate the roles of the verbal, visual, and spatial working memory in written composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion of semantic compositionality, predicates, and properties. It provides information regarding the philosophical background and analysis of the three to further expound on the topic being discussed. It shows the relationship of the said three to language, ontology, natural science, and realism. The article also offers some arguments on compositionality and semantics to supplement knowledge. It further tackles the main point of the mentioned three words to shed light on the confusion and difficulty in understanding their definitions.

Abstract  Glue has evolved significantly during the past decade. Although the recent move to type-theoretic notation was a step in the right direction, basing the current Glue system on System F (second-order λ-calculus) was an unfortunate choice. An extension to two sorts and ad hoc restrictions were necessary to avoid inappropriate composition of meanings. As a result, the current system is unnecessarily complicated. A first-order Glue system is hereby proposed as its replacement. This new system is not only simpler and more elegant, as it captures the exact requirements for Glue-style compositionality without ad hoc improvisations, but it also turns out to be more powerful than the current two-sorted (pseudo-) second-order system. First-order Glue supports all existing Glue analyses as well as more elegant alternatives. It also supports new, more demanding analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the changing thoughts on sameness and difference in logic and theology of Peter Abelard in Great Britain. The sameness and difference in the three version of the Theologia has been analyzed by several recent writers such as Ian Wilks, Jeff Brower and Peter King. Despite some disagreements, they hold that Abelard's views are best expressed in the Theologia christiana and that he is putting forward a theory that can help philosophers in considering the material constitution of objects.

The article presents an analysis on the context and signification of Peter Abelard's mental language theory in Great Britain. It is said that Abelard has maintained individual works in a sentence which represent distinct semantic units from its overall meaning. He also employs two strategies to defend the position in the face of troublesome counterexamples. An example of his strategy evokes a fluid conception of what the signification of a word is and the considerable latitude to alter under the contextual influence of other words. As the evolution of the strategy is linked to a new willingness on Abelard's part to adopt the principle of charity in interpreting sentences, it also adopts the principle which is linked in developing vocation as an interpreter of biblical texts.

The article presents the author's view on the assault of the Peter Abelard's object in Great Britain. He states that he outlined the issue in holding the controversial position. As he observed the changes of parts compromised the matter of the object and the change of matter comprises the form of the object, he believes that both elements of an object are compromised by any gain or loss of a part such as the object that compromised by any such change. He added that an object that appears to survive change is really a series of related, however, non-identical objects. As he examined the apparent exception of Abelard's claim, he showed that a specific case does not undermine the general thesis.

The article focuses on the author's view about the theory of mental language of Peter Abelard in the Middle Ages. He argues that Abelard was the author of the first theory of mental language devising a language of thought to provide the semantics for ordinary languages based on the idea that has linguistic character. He examined the semantic framework with special attention to his principle of compositionality towards the results being applied from the distinction between sentences and the statements which the sentences are used to make. He believes that Abelard's theory of mental language is shown to be subtle and sophisticated.

It is generally assumed that if it is possible to believe that p without believing that q, then there is some difference between the object of the thought that p and the object of the thought that q. This assumption is challenged in the present paper, opening the way to an account of epistemic opacity that improves on existing accounts, not least because it casts doubt on various arguments that attempt to derive startling ontological conclusions from seemingly innocent epistemic premises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines writing conference discourse in one English as a Second Language (ESL) basic composition course. The study is based on a 25,000-word corpus of 10 writing conference interactions between the instructor and seven students. Through a microlevel analysis, the authors demonstrate how and to what degree the writing conference can serve as a locus of ‘emergent agency,’ with a particular focus on the second-language writer. The data exhibit patterns in the students' discourse such that earlier segments in the interactions tend to reflect uncertainty, confusion, negative self-evaluation, and negative other-evaluation. As the sessions progress, the authors note shifts in stance whereby students begin to propose candidate solutions to actual or perceived problems and evince more authorial direction. The authors demonstrate that the practice can serve as an effective pedagogical activity in which novice writers learn to navigate through challenges and obstacles associated with university-level reading and writing tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mundari, an Austroasiatic language of India (Munda family), has often been cited as an example of a language without word classes, where a single word can function as noun, verb, adjective, etc. according to the context. These claims, originating in a 1903 grammar by the missionary John Hoffmann, have recently been repeated uncritically by a number of typologists. In this article we review the evidence for word class fluidity, on the basis of a careful analysis of Hoffmann’s corpus as well as substantial new data, including a large lexical sample at two levels of detail. We argue that in fact Mundari does have clearly definable word classes, with distinct open classes of verb and noun, in addition to a closed adjective class, though there are productive possibilities for using all as predicates. Along the way, we elaborate a series of criteria that would need to be met before any language could seriously be claimed to lack a noun-verb distinction: most importantly strict compositionality, bidirectional flexibility, and exhaustiveness through the lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent articles Fodor and Lepore have argued that not only do considerations of learnability dictate that meaning must be compositional in the well-known sense that the meanings of all sentences are determined by the meanings of a finite number of primitive expressions and a finite number of operations on them, but also that meaning must be‘reverse compositional’ as well, in the sense that the meanings of the primitive expressions of which a complex expression is composed must be determined by the meaning of that complex expression plus the manner of its composition. I argue against the requirement of reverse compositionality and against the claim that learnability requires it. I consider some objections and close the paper by arguing against the related claim that concepts are reverse compositional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reprise questions are a common dialogue device allowing a conversational participant to request clarification of the meaning intended by a speaker when uttering a word or phrase. As such they can act as semantic probes, providing us with information about what meaning can be associated with word and phrase types and thus helping to sharpen the principle of compositionality. This paper discusses the evidence provided by reprise questions concerning the meaning of nouns, noun phrases and determiners. Our central claim is that reprise questions strongly suggest that quantified noun phrases denote (situation‐dependent) individuals—or sets of individuals—rather than sets of sets, or properties of properties. We outline a resulting analysis within the HPSG framework, and discuss its extension to such phenomena as quantifier scope, anaphora and monotone decreasing quantifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Language arises from the interaction of three complex adaptive systems — biological evolution, learning, and culture. We focus here on cultural evolution, and present an Iterated Learning Model of the emergence of compositionality, a fundamental structural property of language. Our main result is to show that the poverty of the stimulus available to language learners leads to a pressure for linguistic structure. When there is a bottleneck on cultural transmission, only a language which is generalizable from sparse input data is stable. Language itself evolves on a cultural time-scale, and compositionality is language's adaptation to stimulus poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on conditionals and compositionality. Examples of possible non-compositionality in English; Instances that depend upon sensitivity of conditionals to counterfactual situations; Description of the problem of the compositionality of quantified conditionals.

Ordinary semantic compositionality (meaning of whole determined from meanings of parts plus composition) can serve to explain how a hearer manages to assign an appropriate meaning to a new sentence. But it does not serve to explain how the speaker manages to find an appropriate sentence for expressing a new thought. For this we would need a principle of inverse compositionality, by which the expression of a complex content is determined by the expressions of it parts and the mode of composition. But this presupposes that contents have constituent structure, and this cannot be taken for granted. However, it can be proved that if a certain principle of substitutivity is valid for a particular language, then the meanings expressed by its sentences can justifiably be treated as structured. In its simplest form, this principle says that if in a complex expression a constituent is replaced by another constituent with a different meaning, the new complex has a meaning different from the original. This principle is again inversely related to the normal compositional principle of substitutivity. The combination of ordinary and inverse compositionality is here called ‘strong compositionality’. The proof is carried out in the algebraic framework developed by Wilfrid Hodges and Dag Westerståhl. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consider the task under which I labour: These are supposed to be talks in the millennial spirit. My charge is to find, somewhere in the philosophical landscape, a problem of whose current status I can give some coherent account, and to point the direction in which it seems to me that further research might usefully proceed, And I'm to try to sound reasonably cheerful and optimistic in the course of doing so. No sooner did I begin to ponder these terms of engagement, than it occurred to me that cheer and optimism aren't really my thing; also that I hadn't heard of a topic in the philosophy of mind (which is the only part of philosophy that even I think that I know anything about) which seems to me to be other than a godawful mess. It struck me that my best course would be for me to change my name and go into hiding. Thus my first choice of a title for this lecture, which was ‘To Be Announced’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this article is to elucidate the processes that characterize natural language interpretation. The basic hypothesis is that natural language interpretation can be characterized as an optimization problem. This innovative view on interpretation is shown to account for the crucial role of contextual information while avoiding certain well-known problems associated with compositionality. This will become particularly clear in the context of incomplete expressions. Our approach takes as a point of departure total freedom of interpretation in combination with the parallel application of soft constraints on possible interpretations. These constraints can be contextual, intonational or syntactic in nature. The integration of pragmatic and syntactic/semantic information in a system of ranked constraints is proposed to correctly derive the optimal interpretations in cases of nominal anaphorization, determiner quantification and elliptical comparatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the principle of compositionality which is a fundamental principle of semantics. It is often stated as "the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituents and by its structure." It has been suggested that the principle is a trivial platitude, a significant empirical hypothesis, a useful methodological assumption, a powerful philosophical thesis in need of a deep argument. If it is accepted that the principle of compositionality is an intricate thesis about the nature of possible human languages, one will be less inclined to think of it as a triviality or as a mere methodological assumption.

This paper describes a construction from (spoken) German that will be called INTEGRATED VERB SECOND (IV2). This term refers to V2 clauses that look like relative clauses except that they must contain a weak demonstrative in initial position and have to be extraposed. Their syntactic behavior will be accounted for by a paratactic analysis. IV2 can only modify wide scope indefinites inside what looks like the matrix clause. This is captured at the level of DRS construction. Since the matrix clause alone doesn't constitute a complete informational unit, IV2 can be introduced as a condition into the matrix DRS before evaluation. The weak demonstrative of IV2 establishes the relative link by copying a top-level discourse marker. In addition, the assertional nature of IV2 prevents it from modifying definite descriptions. Reference is made to the close relatedness of demonstrative and relative pronouns in Indo-European. Dutch, Swedish, and Zurich German provide the comparative horizon of this study. My answer to the question in the title is negative from the syntactic perspective but positive with reference to interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our tolerance for, and promotion of, linguistic irregularity is a key arbitrator between Arbib's proposal that holistic protolanguage preceded culturally imposed compositionality, and the standard view that discrete units with word-like properties came first. The former, coupled with needs-only analysis, neatly accounts for the second-order linguistic complexity that is rationalised as fuzzy grammaticality, subclass exception, and full irregularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important question in language evolution is whether segmentation as a linguistic process is able to yield compositionality. Segmentation is hypothesized to be a process to bridge the gap between holistic and compositional lexicons. However, to date no thorough analytical method has been provided to test the feasibility of segmentation. In this paper, an analytical model is presented that can predict the probability of encountering various kinds of overlaps by observing utterance pairs, and the probability of finding confirmation in the language for newly extracted segments. Language users start by using a previously evolved holistic lexicon to communicate about simple environments. They segment these holistic utterances to smaller pieces, which can be used as elements of a compositional lexicon. The model reveals that the feasibility of segmentation depends on the definition of counterexamples, i.e. those associations (pairs), which either cause ambiguous extraction of segments, or do not allow segmentation at all. On one hand if inexact overlaps are considered to be contradictory (i.e. causing confusion) to a perfect exact overlap, then the probability is so minuscule that it renders the role of segmentation marginal during language evolution. On the other hand, if such inexact counterexamples are able to be segmented unambiguously due to extra cognitive capacities, segmentation may have a much higher feasibility. Keywords: segmentation; fractionation; analysis; holistic; protolanguage; compositionality [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]