Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning最新文献

Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning Pub Date : 2002-01-01 DOI: 10.1163/9789004487222_007

P. Dekker

引用次数: 3

Comments on Kaplan’s ‘Demonstratives’ and Zimmermann’s ‘Tertiumne Datur? Possessive Pronouns and the Bipartition of the Lexicon’

Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning Pub Date : 1900-01-01 DOI: 10.1163/9789004487222_030

H. Kamp, Antje Roßdeutscher

引用次数: 4

Dynamic Semantics with Choice Functions 带有选择函数的动态语义

Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning Pub Date : 1900-01-01 DOI: 10.1163/9789004487222_015

J. Peregrin, K. Heusinger

{"title":"Dynamic Semantics with Choice Functions","authors":"J. Peregrin, K. Heusinger","doi":"10.1163/9789004487222_015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004487222_015","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last two decades, semantic theory has been marked by a continuing shift from a static view of meaning to a dynamic one. The increasing interest in extending semantic analysis from isolated sentences to larger units of discourse has fostered the intensive study of anaphora and coreference, and this has engendered a shift from viewing meaning as truth conditions to viewing it as the potential to change the \"informational context\". One of the central problems of discourse analysis is the treatment of anaphoric expressions, of discourse pronouns and definite NPs. The traditional solution is to take pronouns as bound variables and to analyze definite NPs by means of the Russellian iota inversum operator; and this solution is usually taken over also by those semantic theories which take the dynamics of language at face value. However, as we try to show, theories falling in with this approach necessarily stop half way in the dynamic enterprise and, therefore, cannot achieve a satisfactory semantical analysis of anaphora. In the present paper we propose to apply the dynamic approach uniformly to all expressions. We give a dynamic treatment not only to meanings of sentences and supersentential units of discourse, but also to those of pronouns and NPs. This is possible by exploring the intuitive idea of salience and by its formalization by means of choice functions. A definite NP the P is taken to refer to the most salient P (to that entity which is yielded by the actual choice function for the set of all P’s); discourse pronouns are then considered as equivalent to certain definite NPs. Thus, the mechanism of choice manages to supplant both the apparatus of binding of variables (or discourse markers), on the one hand, and the Russellian analysis of definite NPs, on the other. This enables us to represent all anaphoric expressions uniformly. Salience, however is not a global and static property of a discourse, but rather a local and dynamic one an indefinite NP can change a given salience by raising a new entity to the most salient one.1 Therefore, a linguistic expression is semantically characterized neither by its truth conditions, nor by its potential to","PeriodicalId":448521,"journal":{"name":"Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130652766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 24

Accommodating Topics 的主题

Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning Pub Date : 1900-01-01 DOI: 10.1163/9789004487222_006

D. Beaver

{"title":"Accommodating Topics","authors":"D. Beaver","doi":"10.1163/9789004487222_006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004487222_006","url":null,"abstract":"This paper concerns the relevance of notions of sentence topic and discourse topic to the analysis of sentences containing presuppositions. Firstly I consider sentences where quantificational determiners quantify-in to presuppositions. By considering texts containing such sentences, I show that intermediate accommodation cannot be triggered by presuppositions, contrary to the predictions of van der Sandt’s recent model. However, a process I refer to as topical accommodation could justify the existence of the readings predicted by van der Sandt’s model in some cases. I then show that similar problems occur in the treatment of presuppositions occurring in the consequents of conditionals, and once again conclude that current models err by not taking into account topic-focus articulation and issues of discourse coherency. 1 The Naive Informant How is a naive informant to guess what the relevant topic of conversation is when presented with a decontextualised single sentence example? The mysteriousness of the way in which people “make up a context” for such examples is generally recognised to be problematic for standard linguistic methodology. When we come to studying aspects of meaning which specifically concern the previous context — I would call all such aspects of meaning presuppositional — the problem becomes acute. The question of what a sentence presupposes becomes a question of what propositions hold in normal contexts of utterance of the sentence. But what does normal mean? The standard tests for presupposition are doubly problematic in this respect. Although the informant is asked about implications and not presuppositions, two sentences rather than one are involved (eg. a sentence and its negation). That the informant is asked about implications cannot disguise the fact that they are presuppositionally derived, that what we are really after is propositions that may be presumed to hold in normal contexts of utterance. Only now we are concerned with normal contexts of utterance of two sentences, and not one. Again, what is a normal context of utterance? Exactly what ceteris have to be paribus across the contexts of utterance for the two example sentences? I will suggest that it is vitally important to consider explicitly the discourse contexts in which presuppositional example sentences occur. 2 Presupposition and Quantification I now want to draw attention to one particular aspect of the elegant theory of presupposition presented in [van der Sandt 92], namely the way in which presuppositions can trigger quantificational domain restriction, or something like it. I will argue that this aspect of the theory is not sustainable once the relevance of discourse context to the interpretation of example sentences is taken into account. Consider the following example: E1 Every German woman drives to work in her car. According to conventional wisdom, the NP her car carries a presupposition of car ownership. Exactly what happens to this presupposition in","PeriodicalId":448521,"journal":{"name":"Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125130135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 20

Focus and/or Context: A Second Look at Second Occurrence Expressions 焦点和/或上下文:再看第二次出现的表达

Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning Pub Date : 1900-01-01 DOI: 10.1163/9789004487222_011

M. Krifka

{"title":"Focus and/or Context: A Second Look at Second Occurrence Expressions","authors":"M. Krifka","doi":"10.1163/9789004487222_011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004487222_011","url":null,"abstract":"Recent discussion of the meaning contribution of focus centered around the question of how focus information is integrated into semantic and pragmatic interpretation. One type of theory assumes that certain operators can make direct use of focus information. These theories stipulate that focus-sensitive operators like only or even, quantificational adverbials, and reason clauses have to be associated with a focus in their scope. Such “association with focus” theories have been proposed, for example, by Jackendoff (1972), Jacobs (1983), Rooth (1985), von Stechow (1990) and Krifka (1992). More recently, Rooth (1992) has proposed that focus contributes in a more indirect way to the interpretation of these operators. Rooth argued that the quantificational domain of such operators is fixed by contextual factors, and that these contextual factors in turn are influenced by focus. More specifically, focus is seen as a device that introduces and regulates contextual variables that are then taken up by certain operators. One important argument for the contextual account of focus is that it does not have to stipulate focus in certain cases, namely socalled “second occurrence expressions”, in which there is little, if any, phonological evidence for it.","PeriodicalId":448521,"journal":{"name":"Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114552816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 28

Cases, Adverbs, Situations and Events 格、副词、情景和事件

Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning Pub Date : 1900-01-01 DOI: 10.1163/9789004487222_024

P. Dekker, H. Kamp, B. Partee

引用次数: 30

Order-Independence and Underspecification 顺序独立和规格不足

Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning Pub Date : 1900-01-01 DOI: 10.1163/9789004487222_014

R. Muskens

{"title":"Order-Independence and Underspecification","authors":"R. Muskens","doi":"10.1163/9789004487222_014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004487222_014","url":null,"abstract":"1. Two Desiderata: Order-independence and Underspecification In standard Montague Semantics we find a very close correspondence between syntactic and semantic rules (the ‘Rule-to-Rule Hypothesis’). This is attractive from a processing point of view, as we like to think of syntactic and semantic processing as being done in tandem, with information flowing in both directions, from parsing to interpretation and vice versa. The parsing procedure erects the necessary scaffolding for interpretation, while semantics (and via semantics context and world knowledge) ideally rules out wrong parses at an early stage. Montague Semantics, however, also seems to favour a strictly bot om up semantic processing architecture. The principle of Compositionality, which says that the meaning of a mother node is to be computed from the meanings of her daughters, seems to enforce such a bottom up procedure. Since we know that parsing algorithms that make use of top down predictions are often much more efficient than those that do not, and since we do not therefore expect human syntactic processing to be strictly bottom up, there is a dilemma. On the one hand, we want interpretation to be order-independent: it should not be decided a priori whether we assign meanings in a top-down, a bottom-up, or any other fashion. On the other hand, the building block picture of meaning that the principle of Compositionality has to offer is attractive too, if it were only because it explains why language users seem to be able to construct unlimited numbers of meanings from the finite set they find in the lexicon. A second desirable constraint on processing meanings has to do with the many readings that semantic theories normally assign to any given syntactic input and the combinatorial explosion resulting from this multitude of analyses. As the average sentence will naturally contain at least some scope bearing elements, the number of readings of even a short text may well run into the thousands. Poesio [1994], inspired by Lincoln’s saying no doubt, gives the example in (1). Since the two conjuncts of this sentence count five scope bearing elements each, there will be 5!*5! = 14400 permutations of these elements that respect the constraint that conjunctions are scope islands. Not all of these permutations lead to semantically different readings, but the number of readings that are predicted is still immense.","PeriodicalId":448521,"journal":{"name":"Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning","volume":"117 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131601019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 36