Search

Jerry Fodor has claimed to have a solution to the traditional problem of what comes first, thought or language. Compositionality, he says, will give us the answer, for at least one must be compositional, and if only one of them is, that is the one that has underived semantic content. He argues that natural languages are not compositional, and therefore that the content of language is derived from the content of thought. I will argue that the idea that language is not compositional conflicts with his productivity and systematicity arguments for the existence of a language of thought. I will also show that Fodor's solution to the problem fails, as his main argument is circular. Finally, I suggest that Fodor's argument against the compositionality of language is not decisive, and that we can still attribute at least some degree of compositionality to language. [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]

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]

In accordance with the compositionality criterion and hierarchy principle of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), this study reframes each tree in the RST Discourse Treebank into three new dependency trees with ultimate nodes being clauses, sentences, and paragraphs, respectively, which also draw on an analogy between syntactic and discourse trees. Detailed percentages of various RST relations at the three granularity levels are examined, illuminating the discourse processes of organizing units of one granularity level into those of the next upper level and suggesting certain homogeneity and interaction across levels in the Treebank, particularly at the two upper levels. The study demonstrates the applicability of RST analysis between same-level terminal units. With unique analytical advantages, the newly constructed discourse dependency trees provide new research prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to examine Korean learners’ language development under four different learning conditions with the aid of input enhancement. Four types of learning conditions were carefully manipulated: (1) more incidental, (2) less incidental, (3) rule-search, and (4) instructed. The two incidental groups were told to understand the meaning of the passage, while the rule-search group was asked to find the embedded rule while reading. The instructed group received explicit rule instruction before the reading task. A total of 141 11th< grade high school students in South Korea participated in this study and took pre/post grammatical judgment tests, a reading comprehension test, and a guided sentence composition test. The findings indicated that incidental rule learning in Korean EFL was possible while their attention was on meaning. In addition, the degree of rule learning and output was maximized when explicit instruction was presented. However, there was no significant difference in the participants’ overall reading comprehension. Along with pedagogical implications, the three interface positions are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on propositions and compositionality. He examines the semantic value of a natural language sentence and discusses compositionality and syntax and the belief that a natural language has a propositional and compositional semantic value assignment. He also tackles sentencization, schmentencite, Vacuous Quantification, and variable-free semantics.

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]

The article focuses on the polarity and the fixedness of multi-word expression and its complex complementation. It is stated that Can (-ed) not help2 is a verbal word combination that shows semantic opacity up to some extent. It is mentioned that compositionality is a semantic measure that refers to the extent of predictability of the meaning of a whole sentence from the meaning of its component parts.

Feature-based regular tree grammars (FRTG) can be used to generate the derivation trees of a feature-based tree adjoining grammar (FTAG). We make use of this fact to specify and implement both an FTAG-based sentence realiser and a benchmark generator for this realiser. We argue furthermore that the FRTG encoding enables us to improve on other proposals based on a grammar of TAG derivation trees in several ways. It preserves the compositional semantics that can be encoded in feature-based TAGs; it increases efficiency and restricts overgeneration; and it provides a uniform resource for generation, benchmark construction and parsing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, a novel summarization method that uses nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) and the clustering method is introduced to extract meaningful sentences relevant to a given query. The proposed method decomposes a sentence into the linear combination of sparse nonnegative semantic features so that it can represent a sentence as the sum of a few semantic features that are comprehensible intuitively. It can improve the quality of document summaries because it can avoid extracting those sentences whose similarities with the query are high but that are meaningless by using the similarity between the query and the semantic features. In addition, the proposed approach uses the clustering method to remove noise and avoid the biased inherent semantics of the documents being reflected in summaries. The method can ensure the coherence of summaries by using the rank score of sentences with respect to semantic features. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has better performance than other methods that use the thesaurus, the latent semantic analysis (LSA), the K-means, and the NMF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, Dummett argues at length that Geach has been wrong in taking the sense of a predicate to be a function that sends the sense of a proper name to that of a sentence, and claims that it should instead be a means to determine the referent of the predicate, as is suggested by Frege's sense-determinesreference (SDR) principle. This disagreement between Dummett and Geach calls for a serious investigation into two of Frege's sense-related principles, namely the Compositionality thesis and the SDR thesis. By making precise both theses in terms of supervenience, we pin down a preferable sense of compositionality for senses, and resolve the debate in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the study on presuppositions. It presents the theoretical descriptions of presupposition projection. It discusses symmetries, the compositional rules, as well as the symmetric heritage rules. An overview on the older presuppositions theories are included. Recent symmetric theories of presuppositions are reviewed. The author believes that his proposed theories make plausible an overarching principle on presupposition projection.

Languages can express the existence of an easy way of achieving a goal in a construction we call the sufficiency modal construction (SMC), which combines a minimizing/exclusive operator like only or ne . . . que and a goal-oriented necessity modal like have to or need to, as in To get good cheese, you only have to go to the North End. We show that the morphosyntactic makeup of the SMC is crosslinguistically stable. We show that the semantics of the construction poses a severe compositionality problem. We solve the problem by giving the negation and the exclusive operator differential scope. For only, this means decomposing it into negation and an exclusive other than component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central and influential idea among researchers of language is that our language faculty is organized according to Fregean compositionality, which states that the meaning of an utterance is a function of the meaning of its parts and of the syntactic rules by which these parts are combined. Since the domain of syntactic rules is the sentence, the implication of this idea is that language interpretation takes place in a two-step fashion. First, the meaning of a sentence is computed. In a second step, the sentence meaning is integrated with information from prior discourse, world knowledge, information about the speaker and semantic information from extra-linguistic domains such as co-speech gestures or the visual world. Here, we present results from recordings of event-related brain potentials that are inconsistent with this classical two-step model of language interpretation. Our data support a one-step model in which knowledge about the context and the world, concomitant information from other modalities, and the speaker are brought to bear immediately, by the same fast-acting brain system that combines the meanings of individual words into a message-level representation. Underlying the one-step model is the immediacy assumption, according to which all available information will immediately be used to co-determine the interpretation of the speaker's message. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data that we collected indicate that Broca's area plays an important role in semantic unification. Language comprehension involves the rapid incorporation of information in a ‘single unification space’, coming from a broader range of cognitive domains than presupposed in the standard two-step model of interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This experiment examined the time course of integration of modifier-noun (conceptual) combinations during auditory sentence comprehension using cross-modal lexical priming. The study revealed that during ongoing comprehension, there is initial activation of features of the noun prior to activation of (emergent) features of the entire conceptual combination. These results support compositionality in conceptual combination; that is, they indicate that features of the individual words constituting a conceptual combination are activated prior to combination of the words into a new concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the variety of strategy used by the Dutch, to dislocate elements from the main proposition. An overview of the types of peripheral dislocation following the potentially sentence-internal dislocations, such as apposition and parenthesis, is offered. It is said that dislocation is parenthetic construal, where in Dutch, hanging topic left-dislocation (HTLD), backgrounding right-dislocation (BRD) and afterthoughts (AFT) can be distinguished. Moreover, the compared construction in the paragraph presented from a syntactic point of view and that proposed general approach to dislocation in terms of specifying coordination is presented

1. Introduction This paper argues that a sideward/parallel movement analysis of so-called “Left- Peripheral Ellipsis” (LPE; Sag 1976) and Gapping constructions improves on the traditional deletion analysis in at least two important ways. First, it avoids the need to appeal to the notion of non-constituent deletion. Second, we attempt to show that directionality effects (Ross 1970 and others) can be derived without recourse to the head parameter or directionality stipulated in the application of transformational rules (which would require linear order in the narrow syntax and, further, would need to be parametrized); rather, we show that apparent directionality in LPE and Gapping constructions is a natural consequence of the interaction of Copy, Merge, PF-deletion of copies, and Cyclic Spell-Out— an effect that is derived only under a movement-based approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The article analyzes the construction of the Chinese predicate ba from an aspectual point of view. It emphasizes that the context where this predicate occurs is event-dependent. It stresses that the dependency of the ba argument and the aspectual properties of the predicate can be characterized as a homorphism. It asserts that the construction of such predicate is unique cross-linguistically as there are no languages where exactly the same range of predicate structures.