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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]

Copyright of Bulletin of Ablai Khan KazUIRandWL: Series 'Philological sciences' is the property of Kazakh Ablai Khan University of International Relations & World Languages and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In order to determine narrative moments in comics, both from an analytical and a didactic perspective, the main focus is usually on its sequentiality. In doing so, it is easy to overlook the fact that the comic page itself is structured by its layout like a coherent picture. In this coherent pictoral unit the panels are designed and composed in a distinct way. This article delivers a poietic perspective on conventionalized ways of page design as well as the compositional knowledge and skills that go along with it. From this point of view further conclusions are drawn with regard to comics as a subject in art classes. [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 aim of this paper is to argue for the new Wittgensteinians' claim that Frege and Wittgenstein share a contextualist attitude with respect to the individuation of content and, as a result, an austere conception of nonsense. To do this, I offer alternative interpretations of the passages of the Tractatus in which Wittgenstein seems committed to the attitude opposed to contextualism -- compositionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The expression of future time in the English language seems to lack uniformity. The lack of consistency is influenced by speakers' intentions, so these various ways of marking future time in English pose a challenge to second-language (L2) learners. Therefore, this article investigates first-language (L1) Sesotho speakers' ways of expressing English future time within the basic linguistic theory framework. It further seeks to identify factors influencing the students' formation of future-time expressions. In this qualitative study, data was collected through 30 written compositions by third-year Linguistics students at the National University of Lesotho. The study reveals that L1 Sesotho speakers mark English future time through will and shall. They also use the phrasal markers such as want to, have to, hope to, be going to, be supposed to, be about to, will + be + PROGRESSIVE, will + have + PERFECT PARTICIPLE and will + have + been, which they use appropriately. Would + be, would + progressive, would + have + PERFECT PARTICIPLE are also used but incorrectly. The article further demonstrates that they use would erroneously to express English future time. In addition, Sesotho, by virtue of having equivalents of some of these markers, influenced the students' formation of future-time expressions. Therefore, L1 interference plays a great part in L2 learning. The study concludes that the use of will is more dominant than shall because even British English, which was known for the common use of shall has started to shift and to lose this distinction like American English has done. [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]

Research over the last 20 years has investigated the processing costs for sentences such as John began the book. Much of this work has conflated sentences with aspectual verbs, like start or finish, with psychological verbs, like enjoy or tolerate. However, recent studies have reported greater costs for aspectual verbs compared to psychological verbs (e.g., Katsika et al. in Ment Lex 7:58–76, 2012; Lai et al. in Compositionality and concepts in linguistics and psychology, 2017). The present paper reports an eye-tracking study that examined the costs of processing both verb types in Mandarin Chinese. The results revealed greater costs both for aspectual verbs compared to controls (John read the book) and for aspectual verbs compared to psychological verbs, reinforcing the claims of the Structured Individual Hypothesis (Piñango and Deo in J Semant 33:359–408, 2016). Strikingly, there was an early effect at the verb for aspectual verbs but not for psychological verbs. We argue that this result, together with previous findings and other conceptual issues, necessitates a conservative modification of the SIH: aspectual verbs are semantically more complex than psychological verbs. This modification retains the core analysis underlying the SIH, but reconciles the SIH with experimental findings by bringing it in line with the view that lexical semantic complexity has immediate consequences in processing (e.g., Brennan and Pylkkänen in Lang Cogn Process 25:777–807, 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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.

Differential object marking (DOM) interacts with nominal structure in complex ways across Romance languages. For example, in Spanish, it has been claimed to ban bare nominals. For Romanian, in turn, two main restrictions have been discussed: (i) ban on overt definiteness on unmodified nominals; and (ii) ban on bare nominals, if the structure contains an overt modification. This paper has two main goals. First, it examines some contexts where these types of restrictions can be lifted for some speakers; such contexts allow us to grasp a better understanding of the limits of variation permitted by DOM in its interaction with nominal structure and determiner systems. Secondly, it proposes that a theory under which DOM signals a licensing strategy beyond Case can derive the variation patterns observed in the data. Subsequently, various parameters are examined, which encode (i) how specifications responsible for DOM interact with other features in the composition of nominals; and (ii) how the resulting complex containing DOM as well as other features is resolved at PF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work suggests that cultural transmission can lead to the emergence of linguistic structure as speakers' weak individual biases become amplified through iterated learning. However, to date no published study has demonstrated a similar emergence of linguistic structure in children. The lack of evidence from child learners constitutes a problematic gap in the literature: if such learning biases impact the emergence of linguistic structure, they should also be found in children, who are the primary learners in real-life language transmission. However, children may differ from adults in their biases given age-related differences in general cognitive skills. Moreover, adults' performance on iterated learning tasks may reflect existing (and explicit) linguistic biases, partially undermining the generality of the results. Examining children's performance can also help evaluate contrasting predictions about their role in emerging languages: do children play a larger or smaller role than adults in the creation of structure? Here, we report a series of four iterated artificial language learning studies (based on Kirby, Cornish & Smith, 2008) with both children and adults, using a novel child-friendly paradigm. Our results show that linguistic structure does not emerge more readily in children compared to adults, and that adults are overall better in both language learning and in creating linguistic structure. When languages could become underspecified (by allowing homonyms), children and adults were similar in developing consistent mappings between meanings and signals in the form of structured ambiguities. However, when homonimity was not allowed, only adults created compositional structure. This study is a first step in using iterated language learning paradigms to explore child-adult differences. It provides the first demonstration that cultural transmission has a different effect on the languages produced by children and adults: While children were able to develop systematicity, their languages did not show compositionality. We focus on the relation between learning and structure creation as a possible explanation for our findings and discuss implications for children's role in the emergence of linguistic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Verbal Phraseological Unit (VPU) is a phrase or expression that has either a literal or figurative (non-compositional) meaning. Identifying, in an automatic manner, which meaning is associated to a VPU in a certain context is an open problem in natural language processing, whose solution impacts in various real life applications. In this paper we present a method for the automatic verification of non-compositionality of a VPU based on the use of lexical domains. The methodology proposed is based in the degree of overlapping between the VPU domain and its context domain. This methdology is general in the sense that it opens the opportunity of applying different overlapping metrics, and different methods for calculating the domain of a given phrase. The experiments carried out show that this novel approach can be efficiently applied in high volumes of data with competitive results close to 65%. [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]

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]

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]

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]

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

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]

We prove that the theory of the extensional compositional truth predicate for the language of arithmetic with Δ0-induction scheme for the truth predicate and the full arithmetical induction scheme is not conservative over Peano Arithmetic. In addition, we show that a slightly modified theory of truth actually proves the global reflection principle over the base theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is meaning-preserving, compositionality can be approximated as the semantic similarity between a phrase and a version of that phrase where words have been replaced by their synonyms. Different ways of representing such phrases exist (e.g., vectors (Kiela and Clark, 2013) or language models (Lioma, Simonsen, Larsen, and Hansen, 2015)), and the choice of representation affects the measurement of semantic similarity. We propose a new compositionality detection method that represents phrases as ranked lists of term weights. Our method approximates the semantic similarity between two ranked list representations using a range of well-known distance and correlation metrics. In contrast to most state-of-the-art approaches in compositionality detection, our method is completely unsupervised. Experiments with a publicly available dataset of 1048 human-annotated phrases shows that, compared to strong supervised baselines, our approach provides superior measurement of compositionality using any of the distance and correlation metrics considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a Curry-Howard correspondence between a language for programming multiparty sessions and a generalisation of Classical Linear Logic (CLL). In this framework, propositions correspond to the local behaviour of a participant in a multiparty session type, proofs to processes, and proof normalisation to executing communications. Our key contribution is generalising duality, from CLL, to a new notion of n-ary compatibility, called coherence. Building on coherence as a principle of compositionality, we generalise the cut rule of CLL to a new rule for composing many processes communicating in a multiparty session. We prove the soundness of our model by showing the admissibility of our new rule, which entails deadlock-freedom via our correspondence. [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]

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

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

Two contrasting portraits of exorcism in the Roman period for patients with symptoms consistent with epilepsy, drawn by Josephus (A.J. 8.45–47) and Lucian (Philops. §16), illustrate a substantial albeit contested diffusion of that ancient technique from the Jewish tradition to a wider Mediterranean public. The process is reflected in a similarly complex traditional background and textual composition of a group of inscribed Greek amulets for epilepsy. A sidelight on attitudes towards the practice of exorcism, on its way to wider popularity, and the conception of epilepsy is cast by these amulets, which have not yet been studied as a group. Their texts witness the application of precise Greek medical terminology, yet to an end, and in a compositional company, that authors in the Hippocratic tradition would have rejected. More generally, the artifacts offer a cross-section of amuletic practice and its diversity in the Roman and late ancient periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research paper is a comprehensive analysis of Mishing verb inflection and its implementation in a DM-based Morphological Analyser. In this paper we try to sketch a descriptive idea of Mishing verbal inflection within the framework of Distributed morphology. For this we basically discuss the categories that are associated with the verb stems and the verb suffixes. Here, we are also put an emphasis to see how we can analyse a language in detailed including its producing morpheme. With this how does the framework of distributed morphology allows for morphology to work in tandem with syntax to analyse will draw processes of the DMbased Mishing Morphological Analyser. After all description this paper figure out the main postulating purpose behind this compositional study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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]

The article discusses the role played by rhetoric quandaries, a primary category of constraints that a person faces during composition writing or teaching. Topics discussed include the value of difficult dilemmas for teaching composition studies, composition teaching methods based on rhetoric quandaries and types of quandaries and how students reacted against them..

The most important forms of idioms in Chinese, chengyus (CYs), have a fixed length of four Chinese characters. Most CYs are joined structures of two, two-character words-subject-verb units (SVs), verb-object units (VOs), structures of modification (SMs), or verb-verb units-or of four, one-character words. Both the first and second pairs of words in a four-word CY form an SV, a VO, or an SM. In the present study, normative measures were obtained for knowledge, familiarity, subjective frequency, age of acquisition, predictability, literality, and compositionality for 350 CYs, and the influences of the CYs' syntactic structures on the descriptive norms were analyzed. Consistent with previous studies, all of the norms yielded a high reliability, and there were strong correlations between knowledge, familiarity, subjective frequency, and age of acquisition, and between familiarity and predictability. Unlike in previous studies (e.g., Libben & Titone in Memory & Cognition, 36, 1103-1121, 2008), however, we observed a strong correlation between literality and compositionality. In general, the results seem to support a hybrid view of idiom representation and comprehension. According to the evaluation scores, we further concluded that CYs consisting of just one SM are less likely to be decomposable than those with a VOVO composition, and also less likely to be recognized through their constituent words, or to be familiar to, known by, or encountered by users. CYs with an SMSM composition are less likely than VOVO CYs to be decomposable or to be known or encountered by users. Experimental studies should investigate how a CY's syntactic structure influences its representation and comprehension. [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]

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]

Some strange cases have gripped philosophers of mind. They have been deployed against materialism about human persons, functionalism about mentality, the possibility of artificial intelligence, and more. In this paper, I cry “foul”. It’s not hard to think that there’s something wrong with the cases. But what? My proposal: their proponents ignore questions about composition (questions about when some things make up another). And ignoring composition is a mistake. Indeed, materialists about human persons, functionalists about mentality, and believers in the possibility of artificial intelligence can plausibly deploy moderate theories of composition in defense of their views. And as it turns out, these strange cases are an interesting source of evidence for moderate theories of composition. [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]

Vector representation is a common approach for expressing the meaning of a relational pattern. Most previous work obtained a vector of a relational pattern based on the distribution of its context words (e.g., arguments of the relational pattern), regarding the pattern as a single ‘word’. However, this approach suffers from the data sparseness problem, because relational patterns are productive, i.e., produced by combinations of words. To address this problem, we propose a novel method for computing the meaning of a relational pattern based on the semantic compositionality of constituent words. We extend the Skip-gram model ( Mikolov et al., 2013 ) to handle semantic compositions of relational patterns using recursive neural networks. The experimental results show the superiority of the proposed method for modeling the meanings of relational patterns, and demonstrate the contribution of this work to the task of relation extraction. [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]

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]

Although “The Philosophy of Composition" is usually referred to as Edgar Allan Poe's best-known critical essay,“The Rationale of Verse" can certainly be seen as his most elaborate. “Rationale" presents a consideration of the poem as a unit with elements that function together as a unique achievement of a single effect. In this essay Poe developed his “mathematical approach" to a poem in minute detail, emphasizing his proposition that verse is based on time as it is in music, not on accent. This paper will highlight Poe's most significant ideas on versification and poetry as expressed in “The Rationale of Verse" as well as reveal the basic shortcomings of the essay, a text which can be said to represent the first significant American attempt at laying out the foundations for a modern science of English language verse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Importance measures are used to identify weak components and/or states in a system based on the component state random variables, which seem to be inadequate to show the corresponding actual situations. By contrast, the performance random variables own significant practical meanings and eliminate the subjectivity and limitation of state division and definition in many actual situations. In this paper, instead of state random variables, the performance stochastic processes are used for modeling all the components and the entire system, and the integrated importance measure (IIM) for the performance random variables are extended. The generalized IIM evaluates the contribution of component performance to the desired level of system performance. A case study of an oil transmission system is used to illustrate the effectiveness of our approach with importance measures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]