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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]

Sentences φ and ψ are cognitive synonyms for one when they play the same role in one's cognitive life. The notion is pervasive (Sect. 1), but elusive: it is bound to be hyperintensional (Sect. 2), but excessive fine-graining would trivialize it and there are reasons for some coarse-graining (Sect. 2.1). Conceptual limitations stand in the way of a natural algebra (Sect. 2.2), and it should be sensitive to subject matters (Sect. 2.3). A cognitively adequate individuation of content may be intransitive (Sect. 3) due to 'dead parrot' series: sequences of sentences φ 1 , ... , φ n where adjacent φ i and φ i + 1 are cognitive synonyms while φ 1 and φ n are not (Sect. 3.1). Finding an intransitive account is hard: Fregean equipollence won't do (Sect. 3.2) and a result by Leitgeb shows that it wouldn't satisfy a minimal compositionality principle (Sect. 3.3).Sed contra, there are reasons for transitivity, too (Sect. 3.4). In Sect. 4, we come up with a formal semantics capturing this jumble of desiderata, thereby showing that the notion is coherent. In Sect. 5, we re-assess the desiderata in its light. [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]

ESL learners often show great variation in article use. This study proposes that article use can be improved if the semantic feature (non)boundedness is introduced into ELT. This study argues that articles carry highly relevant information that is crucial, together with a number of other elements, for the signalling of aspectual values in English. It is argued that the signalling of aspectual values is the primary role of articles and that if ESL learners receive instruction on this role, they may learn how to signal aspectual values correctly, but also improve their article use thanks to a greater awareness of articles. The paper reports on an experiment conducted to test ESL learners' response to such instruction and concludes that incorporating (non)boundedness into ESL instruction is both reasonable and necessary. [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]

This paper argues that there are three reasons why we should regard Wittgenstein's Tractatus as a forerunner of formal semantics: Wittgenstein is convinced that we can apply formal notions to natural languages, that the meaning of a sentence is to be explained in terms of its truth-conditions and that language is compositional. These claims are also defended against the following three objections. First, the formal semantics defines truth-conditions using the language-metalanguage distinction, while Wittgenstein doesn't. He relies on the picture theory, which is not a formal notion. Secondly, the formal semanticists' 'compositionality principle' presupposes that the truth-conditions of complex sentences should be understood in terms of the truth-conditions of elementary ones, whereas Wittgenstein applies the notion of truth-conditions only to complex sentences. And, finally, that differently from the formal semanticists, Wittgenstein doesn't envisage recursive rules for the combination of the semantic primitives. The claim of this paper is that the first objection can be overcome by relating the picture theory to the pre-Tractarian principle of bipolarity, the second by relying on the famous distinction between what a sentence says and what it shows and the third by acknowledging that Wittgenstein, differently from the formal semanticists, works with propositional logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compositionality is undoubtedly one of the hardest problems in linguistics. In decoding theories, the speaker occupies a leading role, having to carefully choose the form that better encodes the meaning to be communicated. In contrast, in inferential theories, the burden is shifted from speaker to hearer: linguistic information typically underspecifies meaning and the hearer must make a number of inferences to bridge the gap between what is said and what is meant. In this article, I argue that constructional meaning can aid the process of sentence meaning formation by providing a scaffold that can help the hearer with the construal operations. Constructions, by providing an additional layer of meaning, constrain the range of possible meanings activated by words thereby reducing the combinatorial explosion when several words are joined together. This process is examined here by analysing the meanings associated with the grammatical construction [from X to Y], which is connected to a polysemy network of related senses, using examples extracted from a multimodal corpus. A preliminary analysis of the gesturing behaviour associated with the different senses proposed is also included, which can be seen to contribute to the characterisation of the different senses of the polysemy network. [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]

Utterances of natural language sentences can be used to communicate not just contents, but also forces. This paper examines this topic from a cross-linguistic perspective on sentential mood (declarative, interrogative, imperative). Recent work in this area focuses on conversational dynamics: the three sentence types can be associated with distinctive kinds of conversational effects called sentential forces, modeled as three kinds of updates to the discourse context. This paper has two main goals. First, it provides two arguments, on empirical and methodological grounds, for treating sentential force (context update rules) as part of a compositional dynamic semantics, rather than a dynamic pragmatics. Second, it formulates a minimal dynamic semantic analysis that covers the data at the heart of these arguments, incorporating existing analyses of the three major moods, evidentials and conjunction. A further aim of the paper is to sharpen the distinction between sentential force and utterance (illocutionary) force, and discuss its implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides their ordinary cardinal and proportional meanings, many and few have been argued to allow for a 'reverse proportional' reading (Westerståhl in Linguist and Philos 8:387–413, 1985). This reading has later been characterised in two opposite directions: Cohen's (Nat Lang Semant 69:41–67, 2001) reading where the proportion | P ∩ Q | : | P | matters and Herburger's (Nat Lang Semant 5:53–78, 1997) where it does not. We develop a compositional analysis that derives the correct truth conditions for both characterisations of Westerståhl-style sentences while (i) maintaining conservativity, (ii) assuming a standard syntax/semantics mapping and (iii) reducing their context-dependence to mechanisms independently needed for degree constructions in general. In a nutshell, mirroring the decomposition of other degree expressions like tall, many is decomposed into the parametrized determiner many and the operator POS, where POS combines with a contextually salient comparison class C matching the alternatives triggered by some element X ALT in the sentence. Non-reverse readings obtain when X ALT is external to the original host NP and reverse readings when X ALT is internal to the host NP. Cohen's (2001) (amended) truth conditions for Westerståhl-style sentences are derived as a (true) reverse proportional reading and Herburger's (1997) interpretation as a sub-case of the non-reverse cardinal reading. [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, 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]

The syntactic literature on idioms contains some proposals that are surprising from a compositional perspective. For example, there are proposals that, in the case of verb-object idioms, the verb combines directly with the noun inside its DP complement, and the determiner is introduced higher up in the syntactic structure, or is late-adjoined. This seems to violate compositionality insofar as it is generally assumed that the semantic role of the determiner is to convert a noun to the appropriate semantic type to serve as the argument to the function denoted by the verb. In this paper, we establish a connection between this line of analysis and lines of work in semantics that have developed outside of the domain of idioms, particularly work on incorporation and work that combines formal and distributional semantic modelling. This semantic work separates the composition of descriptive content from that of discourse referent introducing material; our proposal shows that this separation offers a particularly promising way to handle the compositional difficulties posed by idioms, including certain patterns of variation in intervening determiners and modifiers. [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]

This paper presents an account of notional belief attributions, that is, belief attributions where the belief content is fully specified. The proposal combines a Hintikka style possible-worlds semantics for the belief operator and a structured meanings approach for giving a structured mode of presentation of the belief content. The semantics is not standard compositional, but it satisfies a more general notion of compositionality, explained in the paper. This notion, general compositionality, allows semantic switching : the semantic function relevant for an embedded term is distinct from that which applies to the term in which it is embedded. The general relation between compositionality and hyperintensional contexts is discussed in detail. In the first section, it is argued that we need to combine structured and unstructured meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nominal compounds such as red wine and nut case display a continuum of compositionality, with varying contributions from the components of the compound to its semantics. This article proposes a framework for compound compositionality prediction using distributional semantic models, evaluating to what extent they capture idiomaticity compared to human judgments. For evaluation, we introduce data sets containing human judgments in three languages: English, French, and Portuguese. The results obtained reveal a high agreement between the models and human predictions, suggesting that they are able to incorporate information about idiomaticity. We also present an in-depth evaluation of various factors that can affect prediction, such as model and corpus parameters and compositionality operations. General crosslingual analyses reveal the impact of morphological variation and corpus size in the ability of the model to predict compositionality, and of a uniform combination of the components for best results. [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]

Weak distribution bisimilarity is an equivalence notion on probabilistic automata, originally proposed for Markov automata. It has gained some popularity as the coarsest behavioral equivalence enjoying valuable properties like preservation of trace distribution equivalence and compositionality. This holds in the classical context of arbitrary schedulers, but it has been argued that this class of schedulers is unrealistically powerful. This paper studies a strictly coarser notion of bisimilarity, which still enjoys these properties in the context of realistic subclasses of schedulers: Trace distribution equivalence is implied for partial information schedulers, and compositionality is preserved by distributed schedulers. The intersection of the two scheduler classes thus spans a coarser and still reasonable compositional theory of behavioral semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the implications of the distribution of tone sandhi domains in Yixing Chinese (a largely undescribed Wu variety) for the syntactic analysis of a type of compound, labelled a non-compositional compound (NCC). Various diagnostics identify these compounds as a well-defined type in Yixing, including non-compositional/idiomatic semantics and opacity in coreference and coordination. NCCs also undergo a particular tone sandhi process, Pattern Substitution (PS). These diagnostics, we show, suggest an analysis whereby NCCs are formed by Merging two uncategorised roots. The root Merge is symmetric, leading to questions of how the resulting structure is to be linearised and labelled. The linearisation, we suggest, is determined post-syntactically by an Encyclopedia entry imposing an order due to the diachronic reanalysis of a compositional structure. This Encyclopedia entry is also the source of the non-compositional semantics of these structures, permitted by the encyclopedic search (en-search) of Borer (2013a). Symmetric root Merge cannot yield a compositionally derived meaning, which we show follows from the theory of labelling of Chomsky (2013, 2015). Our account explains proposals by authors such as Arad (2003) and Borer (2013a), who stipulate that a first-categorisation domain receives non-compositional, atomic content. The paper also includes a preliminary description of the Yixing tonal system in general. [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]

In this study the co-occurrences of two markers in spoken language are addressed by analyzing the markers derived from motion verbs in Spanish (anda, vamos, vaya y venga). First of all, a quantitative method is proposed to identify the non-casual co-occurrences. By calculating the strength of association between the constituents the casual cooccurrences can be distinguished from the true ones. Within this last group, and on the basis of a qualitative analysis, three types of co-occurrence can be discerned depending on their internal structure and the corresponding functional integration of their constituents. Concerning the communicative intentions of the co-occurrence, the study shows that they are above all summative Pero vamos is the only co-occurrence that seems to have developed a holistic meaning, given its reduction in compositionality on the semantic level. Because of its high case frequency and its form-function pairing when used as a turn-yielder, we conclude that pero vamos is a wellentrenched combination in the minds of the speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new approach to the intervention effect in Korean. Instead of attributing this effect to the failure of proper binding between a wh-phrase and its Q-operator in syntactic (Beck 1996; Beck and Kim 1997) or in semantic sense (Beck 2006; Kim 2002; Wee 2007), this paper points out that the properties of the semantics of interveners and the contribution of interveners scope to compositional process of forming a wh-interrogative meaning should be investigated more carefully. In this paper, I regard quantifying items as potential interveners and suggest how only some specific classes of quantifying items escape from being a real intervener. As for the remnant quantifying items, the real interveners, two factors are suggested as the cause of intervention effect: (1) combinatorial mismatch in wh-interrogative composition process and (2) improper formation of informative content when an intervener scopes over a wh-phrase. We can find that not only the positive information but also the negative information delivered by strong exhaustive reading of a wh-question are not formed properly when an intervener scopes over a wh-phrase. This suggestion is distinguished from previous ones in that it explains why not all quantifying items are interveners and how interveners cause semantic problems, not syntactic problems. [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]

Frege's puzzle is a fundamental challenge for accounts of mental and linguistic representation. This piece surveys a family of recent approaches to the puzzle that posit representational relations. I identify the central commitments of relational approaches and present several arguments for them. I also distinguish two kinds of relationism-semantic relationism and formal relationism-corresponding to two conceptions of representational relations. I briefly discuss the consequences of relational approaches for foundational questions about propositional attitudes, intentional explanation, and compositionality. [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]

The Rigidity Thesis states that no rigid term can have the same semantic content as a nonrigid one. Drawing on Dummett (1973; 1991), Evans (1979; 1982) and Lewis (1980), Stanley (1997a; 1997b; 2002) rejects the thesis since it relies on an illicit identification of compositional semantic content and the content of assertion (henceforth, assertoric content). I argue that Stanley's critique of the Rigidity Thesis fails since it places constraints on assertoric content that cannot be satisfied by any plausible notion of content appropriately related to compositional semantic content. For similar reasons, I also challenge a recent two-dimensionalist defense of Stanley by Ninan (2012). The moral is far-reaching: any theory that invokes a distinction between semantic and assertoric contents is unsatisfactory unless it can plausibly explain the connection between them. [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]

A key feature of human thought and language is compositionality, the ability to bind pre-existing concepts or word meanings together in order to express new ideas. Here we ask how newly composed complex concepts are mentally represented and matched to the outside world, by testing whether it is harder to verify if a picture matches the meaning of a phrase, like big pink tree, than the meaning of a single word, like tree. Five sentence-picture verification experiments provide evidence that, in fact, the meaning of a phrase can often be checked just as fast as the meaning of one single word (and sometimes faster), indicating that the phrase's constituent concepts can be represented and checked in parallel. However, verification times were increased when matched phrases had more complex modification structures, indicating that it is costly to represent structural relations between constituent concepts. This pattern of data can be well-explained if concepts are composed together using two different mechanisms, binding by synchrony and binding by asynchrony, which have been suggested as solutions to the "binding problem" faced in both vision science and higher-level cognition. Our results suggest that they can also explain aspects of compositional language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article, in the first part, aims at providing a positive answer to the ontological question about fictional objects starting from semantic reflections on the negative existential statements containing terms purporting to refer to such objects and the principle of compositionality. In the second part is proposed a Meinongian account of ficta, showing how it handles the problem of negative existentials without giving up neither the principle of compositionality nor our way of talking about fictional characters in the natural languages. It is also considered a particular kind of Meinongianism, namely Modal Meinongianism which seems to be the best Meinongian theory in order to explore the modal properties of ficta. [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]

In this article, we explore an integration of a formal semantic approach to lexical meaning and an approach based on distributional methods. First, we outline a formal semantic theory that aims to combine the virtues of both formal and distributional frameworks. We then proceed to develop an algebraic interpretation of that formal semantic theory and show how at least two kinds of distributional models make this interpretation concrete. Focusing on the case of adjective-noun composition, we compare several distributional models with respect to the semantic information that a formal semantic theory would need, and we show how to integrate the information provided by distributional models back into the formal semantic framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a new framework for compositional distributional semantics in which the distributional contexts of lexemes are expressed in terms of anchored packed dependency trees. We show that these structures have the potential to capture the full sentential contexts of a lexeme and provide a uniform basis for the composition of distributional knowledge in a way that captures both mutual disambiguation and generalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces RELPRON, a large data set of subject and object relative clauses, for the evaluation of methods in compositional distributional semantics. RELPRON targets an intermediate level of grammatical complexity between content-word pairs and full sentences. The task involves matching terms, such as "wisdom," with representative properties, such as "quality that experience teaches." A unique feature of RELPRON is that it is built from attested properties, but without the need for them to appear in relative clause format in the source corpus. The article also presents some initial experiments on RELPRON, using a variety of composition methods including simple baselines, arithmetic operators on vectors, and finally, more complex methods in which argument-taking words are represented as tensors. The latter methods are based on the Categorial framework, which is described in detail. The results show that vector addition is difficult to beat--in line with the existing literature--but that an implementation of the Categorial framework based on the Practical Lexical Function model is able to match the performance of vector addition. The article finishes with an in-depth analysis of RELPRON, showing how results vary across subject and object relative clauses, across different head nouns, and how the methods perform on the subtasks necessary for capturing relative clause semantics, as well as providing a qualitative analysis highlighting some of the more common errors. Our hope is that the competitive results presented here, in which the best systems are on average ranking one out of every two properties correctly for a given term, will inspire new approaches to the RELPRON ranking task and other tasks based on linguistically interesting constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We distinguish three ways that a theory of linguistic meaning and communication might be considered dynamic in character. We provide some examples of systems which are dynamic in some of these senses but not others. We suggest that separating these notions can help to clarify what is at issue in particular debates about dynamic versus static approaches within natural language semantics and pragmatics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The standard relation of logical consequence allows for non-standard interpretations of logical constants, as was shown early on by Carnap. But then how can we learn the interpretations of logical constants, if not from the rules which govern their use? Answers in the literature have mostly consisted in devising clever rule formats going beyond the familiar what follows from what. A more conservative answer is possible. We may be able to learn the correct interpretations from the standard rules, because the space of possible interpretations is a priori restricted by universal semantic principles. We show that this is indeed the case. The principles are familiar from modern formal semantics: compositionality, supplemented, for quantifiers, with topic-neutrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Category Mistakes, Magidor proposes that sortal restrictions should be viewed as pragmatic presuppositions. This contrasts with recent linguistic theories of successfully resolved category mistakes, e.g. coercions or copredication. It has been argued that for the proper treatment of such examples, sortal restrictions should be expressed by semantic presuppositions since they need to interact with compositional semantics. I explore possible ways in which Magidor’s theory could be extended to explain examples of coercion and copredication. The outcome of the discussion is that incorporation of these facts into Magidor’s pragmatic system might be possible, but ecessitates choices that are far from trivial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the analysis of 'short' or 'fragment' answers to questions, and the relationship between these and the hypothesis of DIRECT COMPOSITIONALITY (DC) (e.g. Montague 1970). DC claims that the syntax and semantics work 'in tandem' to prove expressions well formed, while at the same time assigning them a meaning (a model-theoretic object). DC makes it difficult to state any kind of identity condition for 'ellipsis' and would hence lead one to suspect that short answers do not contain hidden linguistic material. This article argues that they indeed do not. Rather, as proposed in Groenendijk & Stokhof 1984, the question and short answer together fonn a linguistic unit, which I call a Qu-Ans, whose semantics gives the proposition that is understood as following from the pair. Three new arguments are adduced for the Qu-Ans analysis over one making use of silent linguistic material, and a core class of traditional arguments for silent linguistic material are answered. Moreover, it is shown that many of the traditional arguments for silent linguistic material themselves presuppose a non-DC architecture. If (as is claimed) these arguments do not hold, the Qu-Ans analysis of short answers actually supports the DC view, under which no use is made of logical form, and no use is made of representational constraints on structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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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]