This paper classifies a family of grammar formalisms that extendcontext-free grammar by talking about tuples of terminal strings, ratherthan independently combining single terminal words into larger singlephrases. These include a number of well-known formalisms, such as headgrammar and linear context-free rewriting systems, but also a new formalism,(simple) literal movement grammar, which strictly extends the previouslyknown formalisms, while preserving polynomial time recognizability.The descriptive capacity of simple literal movement grammars isillustrated both formally through a weak generative capacity argument and ina more (...) practical sense by the description of conjunctive cross-serialrelative clauses in Dutch. After sketching a complexity result and drawing anumber of conclusions from the illustrations, it is then suggested that thenotion of mild context-sensitivity currently in use, that depends on therather loosely defined concept of constant growth, needs a modification toapply sensibly to the illustrated facts; an attempt at such a revision isproposed. (shrink)

Aravind Joshi famously hypothesized that natural language syntax was characterized (in part) by mildly context-sensitive generative power. Subsequent work in mathematical linguistics over the past three decades has revealed surprising convergences among a wide variety of grammatical formalisms, all of which can be said to be mildly context-sensitive. But this convergence is not absolute. Not all mildly context-sensitive formalisms can generate exactly the same stringsets (i.e. they are not all weakly equivalent), (...) and even when two formalisms can both generate a certain stringset, there might be differences in the structural descriptions they use to do so. It has generally been difficult to find cases where such differences in structural descriptions can be pinpointed in a way that allows linguistic considerations to be brought to bear on choices between formalisms, but in this paper we present one such case. The empirical pattern of interest involves wh-movement dependencies in languages that do not enforce the wh-island constraint. This pattern draws attention to two related dimensions of variation among formalisms: whether structures grow monotonically from one end to another, and whether structure-building operations are conditioned by only a finite amount of derivational state. From this perspective, we show that one class of formalisms generates the crucial empirical pattern using structures that align with mainstream syntactic analysis, and another class can only generate that same string pattern in a linguistically unnatural way. This is particularly interesting given that (i) the structurally-inadequate formalisms are strictly more powerful than the structurally-adequate ones from the perspective of weak generative capacity, and (ii) the formalism based on derivational operations that appear on the surface to align most closely with the mechanisms adopted in contemporary work in syntactic theory (merge and move) are the formalisms that fail to align with the analyses proposed in that work when the phenomenon is considered in full generality. (shrink)

The paper presents a generalization of pregroup, by which a freely-generated pregroup is augmented with a finite set of commuting inequations, allowing limited commutativity and cancelability. It is shown that grammars based on the commutation-augmented pregroups generate mildly context-sensitive languages. A version of Lambek’s switching lemma is established for these pregroups. Polynomial parsability and semilinearity are shown for languages generated by these grammars.

Four different kinds of grammars that can define crossing dependencies in human language are compared here: (i) context sensitive rewrite grammars with rules that depend on context, (ii) matching grammars with constraints that filter the generative structure of the language, (iii) copying grammars which can copy structures of unbounded size, and (iv) generating grammars in which crossing dependencies are generated from a finite lexical basis. Context sensitive rewrite grammars are syntactically, semantically and computationally unattractive. Generating (...) grammars have a collection of nice properties that ensure they define only “mildly context sensitive” languages, and Joshi has proposed that human languages have those properties too. But for certain distinctive kinds of crossing dependencies in human languages, copying or matching analyses predominate. Some results relevant to the viability of mildly context sensitive analyses and some open questions are reviewed. (shrink)

We introduce and study a natural extension of Marcus external contextual grammars. This mathematically simple mechanism which generates a proper subclass of simple matrix languages, known to be mildly context-sensitive ones, is still mildly context-sensitive. Furthermore, we get an infinite hierarchy of mildly context-sensitive families of languages. Then we attempt to fill a gap regarding the linguistic relevance of these mechanisms which consists in defining a tree structure on the strings generated (...) by many-dimensional external contextual grammars, and investigate some related issues. Several open problems are finally discussed. (shrink)

Back in the 1980’s, the class of mildly context-sensitive formalisms was introduced so as to capture the syntax of natural languages. While the languages generated by such formalisms are constrained by the constant-growth property, the most well-known and used ones—like tree-adjoining grammars or multiple context-free grammars—generate languages which verify the stronger property of being semilinear. In, the operation of IO-substitution was created so as to exhibit mildly-context sensitive classes of languages which are not (...) semilinear. In the present article, we extend the notion of semilinearity, and characterize the Parikh image of the languages in IO, the closure of a class L of semilinear languages under IO-substitution, as universally-semilinear. Based on this result and on the work of Fischer on macro-grammars, we then show that IO is not closed under inverse homomorphism when L is closed under inverse homomorphism, and encompasses the class of regular languages. This result proves that IO is not a full AFL, where \ denotes the class of multiple context-free languages, closing an open question in Bourreau et al.. More importantly, our proof gives an insight into the relation between the non-closure under inverse homomorphism of \}\) and how IO-substitution breaks semilinearity. (shrink)

Unification grammars are widely accepted as an expressive means for describing the structure of natural languages. In general, the recognition problem is undecidable for unification grammars. Even with restricted variants of the formalism, off-line parsable grammars, the problem is computationally hard. We present two natural constraints on unification grammars which limit their expressivity and allow for efficient processing. We first show that non-reentrant unification grammars generate exactly the class of context-free languages. We then relax the constraint and show that (...) one-reentrant unification grammars generate exactly the class of mildly context-sensitive languages. We thus relate the commonly used and linguistically motivated formalism of unification grammars to more restricted, computationally tractable classes of languages. (shrink)

An NP-hardness proof for non-local Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammar (MCTAG) by Rambow and Satta (1st International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammers 1992 ), based on Dahlhaus and Warmuth (in J Comput Syst Sci 33:456–472, 1986 ), is extended to some linguistically relevant restrictions of that formalism. It is found that there are NP-hard grammars among non-local MCTAGs even if any or all of the following restrictions are imposed: (i) lexicalization: every tree in the grammar contains a terminal; (ii) dominance links: (...) every tree set contains at most two trees, and in every such tree set, there is a link between the foot node of one tree and the root node of the other tree, indicating that the former node must dominate the latter in the derived tree. This is the version of MCTAG proposed in Becker et al. (Proceedings of the 5th conference of the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 1991 ) to account for German long-distance scrambling. This result restricts the field of possible candidates for an extension of Tree Adjoining Grammar that would be both mildly context-sensitive and linguistically adequate. (shrink)

Background Intensive and critical care nurses need to demonstrate ethical sensitivity especially in recognizing and dealing with ethical dilemmas particularly as they often care for patients living with life-threatening conditions. Theories suggest that there is a convergence between nurses’ empathy and ethical sensitivity. Evidence in the literature indicates that nurses’ emotional, demographic, and work characteristics are associated with their level of empathy and ethical sensitivity. Aim To investigate the relationship between nurses’ empathy and ethical sensitivity, considering their emotional states (depression, (...) anxiety, and stress), demographic and work characteristics, and test an empirical model describing potential predictors of empathy (as a mediator) and ethical sensitivity using path analysis. Research design Using a cross-sectional design, the philosophical theory of care ethics and empathy was extended and adopted as a conceptual framework for this study and tested by path analysis. Participants and research context: Data were collected from 347 intensive care nurses recruited by ten educational-medical hospitals in Iran using a questionnaire between February and March 2021. Ethical considerations The study was reviewed by the Ethical Advisory Board in Iran and conducted according to the Declaration of Helsinki. Findings Study participants demonstrated a mild level of stress, anxiety, and depression, alongside a relatively high level of empathy and ethical sensitivity. Nurses with good socioeconomic status had higher empathetic behavior with patients than those with weak status. Nurses aged over 40 who had received ethics training and had higher work experience were associated with higher ethical sensitivity compared to nurses under 20 years of age. Empathy directly affected ethical sensitivity; however, anxiety had an indirect effect on ethical sensitivity through empathy. Among demographic factors, age had a positive direct effect on ethical sensitivity. Conclusions Less anxiety and a high level of empathy contribute to higher levels of ethical sensitivity among intensive and critical care nurses. (shrink)

This article is a survey of the literature on context sensitivity in the philosophy of language.

We review the properties of Global Index Grammars (GIGs), a grammar formalism that uses a stack of indices associated with productions and has restricted context-sensitive power. We show how the control of the derivation is performed and how this impacts in the descriptive power of this formalism both in the string languages and the structural descriptions that GIGs can generate.

We describe a pattern acquisition algorithm that learns, in an unsupervised fashion, a streamlined representation of linguistic structures from a plain natural-language corpus. This paper addresses the issues of learning structured knowledge from a large-scale natural language data set, and of generalization to unseen text. The implemented algorithm represents sentences as paths on a graph whose vertices are words. Significant patterns, determined by recursive context-sensitive statistical inference, form new vertices. Linguistic constructions are represented by trees composed of significant (...) patterns and their associated equivalence classes. An input module allows the algorithm to be subjected to a standard test of English as a Second Language profi- ciency. The results are encouraging: the model attains a level of performance considered to be “intermediate” for 9th-grade students, despite having been trained on a corpus containing transcribed speech of parents directed to small children. (shrink)

According to contextualist accounts, the truth value of a given knowledge ascription may vary with features of the ascriber's context. As a result, the following may be true: "X doesn't know that P but Y says something true in asserting 'X knows that P'". The contextualist must defend his theory in the light of this unpleasant but inevitable consequence. The best way of doing this is to construe the context sensitivity of knowledge ascriptions not as deriving from an (...) alleged indexicality of the word "know" nor from its vagueness or ambiguity, but rather from a distinct semantic feature of the word "know", namely its unspecificity. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Contextualist theories of semantics are not undermined by their purported failure to explain the practice of indirect reporting. I adopt Cappelen & Lepore’s test for context sensitivity to show that the scope of context sensitivity is much broader than Semantic Minimalists are willing to accept. The failure of their arguments turns on their insistence that the content of indirect reports is semantically minimal.

The paper is primarily concerned with laying out the space of positions that purport to account for semantic context sensitivity of natural language expressions and with making a prima facie case for relativism. I start with distinguishing between pre-semantic, semantic and post-semantic context sensitivity. In the following section I briefly present the classic picture of indexicals due to David Kaplan and assess some arguments for the introduction of certain parameters in the circumstances of evaluation (specifically, time). In section (...) III I envisage two views that purport to expand semantic context sensitivity beyond expressions from “the basic set”: indexicalism and contextualism. In section IV, by means of an example taken from John Perry, I draw attention to a specific form of semantic context sensitivity, namely that in which what is affected by context are the circumstances of evaluation of utterances rather than their content. The example leads to the necessity of distinguishing between two roles of context: a content-determinative one and a circumstance-determinative one. In section V I introduce relativism as the view incorporating the claim that context has a circumstance-determinative role and contrast it with the two views presented before. In the final section I analyze a certain type of argument usually adduced in favor of contextualism (the so-called “context-shifting arguments”) and show that in order to work it has to rule out relativism. I conclude by claiming that the battle must be fought by giving arguments to the effect that a certain parameter should or should not be part of the circumstances of evaluation rather than the content of utterances. (shrink)

Una Stojnić urges the radical view that the meaning of context-sensitive language is not “partially determined by non-linguistic features of utterance situation”, as traditionally thought, but rather “is determined entirely by grammar—by rules of language that have largely been missed”. The missed rules are ones of discourse coherence. The paper argues against this radical view as it applies to demonstrations, demonstratives, and the indexical ‘I’. Stojnić’s theories of demon-strations and demonstratives are found to be seriously incomplete, failing to (...) meet the demands on any theory of reference. Furthermore, the paper argues that, so far as Stojnić’s theories of these terms go, they are false. This argument appeals to perception-based theories of demonstratives, a part of the tradition that Stojnić strangely overlooks. The paper ends by arguing briefly that though coherence has a place in a theory of understanding, it has no place in a theory of meaning. (shrink)

According to cognitivist truth-theoretic accounts of semantic competence, aspects of our linguistic behavior can be explained by ascribing to speakers cognition of truth theories. It's generally assumed on this approach that, however much context sensitivity speakers' languages contain, the cognized truththeories themselves can be adequately characterized context insensitively—that is, without using in the metalanguage expressions whose semantic value can vary across occasions of utterance. In this paper, I explore some of the motivations for and problems and consequences of (...) dropping this assumption. (shrink)

"This book represents a continuation of the research project in philosophy of language and semantics represented in the journal "Protosociology" at the J. W. ...

In this paper, I report new empirical data on folk semantic intuitions concerning color adjectives in so-called context-shifting experiments. Contextualists present such experiments — that is, they describe different conversational contexts in which a given sentence is uttered — in order to argue that context can shape meaning and truth conditions to such a degree that competent speakers would give opposite truth evaluations of the same sentence in different contexts. The initial findings of Hansen and Chemla (2013) suggest (...) that laypersons’ semantic judgments are sensitive to context in the same way that is predicted by contextualists. In this paper, I focus on context-shifting experiments that involve color adjectives; also, I present experiments that are a partial replication and methodological extension of Hansen and Chemla’s study. One aim of my study was to corroborate these authors’ findings using a bigger sample (total N = 1128), but the main goal was to test the stability of results in different methodological variants of empirical adaptations of context-shifting experiments. This part of the study addresses the issues pointed out in my earlier paper (Ziółkowski 2017), where I argued that certain experimental settings (within-subjects) might bring data that is more favorable to contextualism than other settings (between-subjects). My study compares three different experimental settings: within-subjects (with randomized order of context presentation), between-subjects (where participants evaluating different contexts aredistinct groups), and “contrastive design” (where both contexts are presented side by side on the same screen). My results are highly consistent across the methodological variants I employed, but while they show some of the effects expected by contextualists, it is disputable whether they bring strong support to contextualism with respect to color adjectives. (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that although ‘Superman is Clark Kent and some people who believe that Superman flies do not believe that Clark Kent flies’ is a logically inconsistent sentence, we can still utter this sentence, while speaking literally, without asserting anything false. The key idea is that the context-sensitivity of attitude reports can be - and often is - resolved in different ways within a single sentence.

Research on dyscalculia in neurodegenerative diseases is still scarce, despite high impact on patients’ independence and activities of daily living function. Most studies address Alzheimer’s Disease; however, patients with Parkinson’s Disease also have a higher risk for cognitive impairment while the relation to arithmetic deficits in financial contexts has rarely been studied. Therefore, the current exploratory study investigates deficits in two simple arithmetic tasks in financial contexts administered within the Clinical Dementia Rating in a sample of 100 PD patients. Patients (...) were classified as cognitively normal or mildly impaired according to Level I consensus criteria, and assessed using a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery, neurological motor examination, and sociodemographic and clinical questionnaires. In total, 18% showed arithmetic deficits: they were predominately female, had longer disease duration, more impaired global cognition, but minor signs of depression compared to PD patients without arithmetic deficits. When correcting for clinical and sociodemographic confounders, greater impairments in attention and visuo-spatial/constructional domains predicted occurrence of arithmetic deficits. The type of deficit did not seem to be arbitrary but seemed to involve impaired place × value processing frequently. Our results argue for the importance of further systematic investigations of arithmetic deficits in PD with sensitive tests to confirm the results of our exploratory study that a specific subgroup of PD patients present themselves with dyscalculia. (shrink)

Conditionals give rise to stand-offs that have become well known from Gibbard’s initial Sly Pete example. The stand-offs can be seen as evidence for the context-sensitivity of conditionals and arguably do not involve disagreement. I claim that the latter feature lends credibility to an indexical treatment of indicatives.

ABSTRACT Copredication, as exhibited by sentences such as ‘That book is heavy but informative,’ is commonly seen as a phenomenon that is tied to sentences featuring polysemous expressions. David Liebesman and Ofra Magidor have recently attacked this view by arguing that ‘book’ has a single context-sensitive sense. The first aim of the present paper is to show that Liebesman and Magidor are wrong to claim that ‘book’ is univocal, but that they may nonetheless be right to question that (...) copredication requires polysemy. Its second aim is to consider implications of this result for the debates on copredication and on semantic variability. (shrink)

Abstract: I argue that practically all vague language is context-sensitive in a covert and unfamiliar way. I first outline a novel puzzle concerning the interaction of conditionals and vagueness. I then argue that the best way of resolving the puzzle is through positing context-sensitive penumbral connections between sundry parts of language. I argue that these penumbral connections shift through a distinct form of Lewisian accommodation. The upshot is that meaning is a far shiftier thing than has (...) typically been thought. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that tests for semantic context-sensitivity are of no help in the debate between semantic contextualists and minimalists. Two kinds of context-sensitivity tests are discussed: Cappelen & Lepore's says-that tests and Cappelen & Hawthorne's agreement-based tests. It is shown that Cappelen & Lepore's tests are unreliable because they are based on unstable data. Then it is argued that although the data of Cappelen & Hawthorne's tests is more reliable, contextualists and minimalists (...) alike can explain this data. The paper ends by pointing to ways in which the debate might be moved forward without context-sensitivity tests. (shrink)

"This book represents a continuation of the research project in philosophy of language and semantics represented in the journal "Protosociology" at the J. W. ...

This paper introduces a notion of cognitive context-sensitivity, in contrast with linguistic context-sensitivity. When a sentence is cognitively contextsensitive, the truth-value assigned to the sentence can vary with context, without any corresponding shift in the interpretation of the terms or structure of the sentence. The notion will be deployed to explain the context-sensitivity of generic generalizations.

This paper outlines the major topics addressed in my book Description of Situations: An Essay in Contextualist Epistemology (Springer, 2018), anticipates some possible misunderstandings and discusses issues that warrant further investigation.

The target article criticises reductionist programs in cognitive science for failing to take into account important explanatory features of the organism's physical embodiment and task environment. My aim in this commentary is to show how such features are increasingly being taken seriously by (some) researchers in cognitive neuroscience, who describe the functional activity of neural structures in terms that are context-sensitive rather than intrinsic. This approach can allow us to take seriously the concerns presented in Gallagher’s [2019] target (...) article without having to completely give up on neuroscientific explanations of human behaviour. (shrink)

Despite the recent upsurge in research on abstract concepts, there remain puzzles at the foundation of their empirical study. These are most evident when we consider what is required to assess a person’s abstract conceptual abilities without using language as a prompt or requiring it as a response—as in classic non-verbal categorization tasks, which are standardly considered tests of conceptual understanding. After distinguishing two divergent strands in the most common conception of what it is for a concept to be abstract, (...) we argue that neither reliably captures the kind of abstraction required to successfully categorize in non-verbal tasks. We then present a new conception of concept abstractness—termed Trial Concreteness—that is keyed to individual categorization trials. It has advantages in capturing the context-relativity of the degree of abstraction required for the application of a concept and fittingly correlates with participant success in recent experiments. (shrink)

Indexicals shatter the view that sentences and, more generally, linguistic terms are context-insensitive items. A sentence containing an indexical expression such as.

The association of resilience-related factors with frailty is a recent research topic. Dispositional optimism and context sensitivity are two psychological factors that differently contribute to individual resilience. This study aimed at investigating whether dispositional optimism and context sensitivity might contribute to a multifactorial model of frailty, together with established relevant factors such as cognitive and physical factors. This cross-sectional study involved 141 elderly outpatients aged ≥65 years, who were referred to the Geriatrics and Multidimensional Evaluation Clinic of the (...) University Hospital of Messina. We used the following measures: the Mini-Mental State Examination to screen for global cognitive functioning; 4-m gait speed and handgrip strength to measure physical performance; a 35-item Frailty Index to evaluate patients’ frailty status; the revised Life Orientation Test to gauge dispositional optimism; and the Context Sensitivity Index to measure context sensitivity. We found that LOT-R, CSI, and MMSE were all significantly associated with FI. Gait speed was only marginally associated with FI. The present study showed a novel association of dispositional optimism and context sensitivity with frailty among elderly outpatients. These preliminary findings support a multidimensional approach to frailty in which even peculiar psychological features might provide a significant contribution. (shrink)

This paper investigates, formulates and proves an indexical barrier theorem, according to which sets of non-indexical sentences do not entail (except under specified special circumstances) indexical sentences. It surveys the usual difficulties for this kind of project, as well some that are specific to the case of indexicals, and adapts the strategy of Restall and Russell's "Barriers to Implication" to overcome these. At the end of the paper a reverse barrier theorem is also proved, according to which an indexical sentence (...) will not, except under specified circumstances, entail a non-indexical one. (shrink)

This thesis has two parts. In Part I there is an argument for the conclusion that a linguistic phenomenon known as (radical) context-sensitivity is to be expected given the limitations of those who use language to reason about empirical states of affairs. The phenomenon arises as a consequence of a process that must be performed to use language to reason validly. In Part II it is explained why the phenomenon, understood in light of the discussion of Part I, does (...) not threaten the possibility of communication. Some potential readers might be interested to know that in Part I there's a fair amount of exegesis of arguments for the existence of (radical) context-sensitivity put forward by Charles Travis. Some potential readers might be interested to know that in Part II use is made of work by Erving Goffman and some conversation analysts. (shrink)

It’s intuitively plausible to suppose that there are many things that we can be rationally certain of, at least in many contexts. The present paper argues that, given this principle of Abundancy, there is a Preface Paradox for credence. Section 1 gives a statement of the paradox, discusses its relation to its familiar counterpart for belief, and points out the congeniality between Abundancy and broadly contextualist trends in epistemology. This leads to the question whether considerations of context-sensitivity might lend (...) themselves to solving the Preface for credence. Sections 2 and 3 scrutinize two approaches in this spirit—one mimicking Hawthorne’s Semantic Contextualist approach to an epistemic version of the Preface, the other one analogous to Clarke’s Sensitivist approach to the doxastic version—arguing that neither approach succeeds as it stands. (shrink)

This paper studies the logical context-sensitivity of Aristotelian diagrams. I propose a new account of measuring this type of context-sensitivity, and illustrate it by means of a small-scale example. Next, I turn toward a more large-scale case study, based on Aristotelian diagrams for the categorical statements with subject negation. On the practical side, I describe an interactive application that can help to explain and illustrate the phenomenon of context-sensitivity in this particular case study. On the theoretical side, (...) I show that applying the proposed measure of context-sensitivity leads to a number of precise yet highly intuitive results. (shrink)

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is an emerging, multidisciplinary field of research that seeks to develop methods and tools for making AI systems more explainable or interpretable. XAI researchers increasingly recognise explainability as a context-, audience- and purpose-sensitive phenomenon, rather than a single well-defined property that can be directly measured and optimised. However, since there is currently no overarching definition of explainability, this poses a risk of miscommunication between the many different researchers within this multidisciplinary space. This is the (...) problem we seek to address in this paper. We outline a framework, called Explanatory Pragmatism, which we argue has two attractive features. First, it allows us to conceptualise explainability in explicitly context-, audience- and purpose-relative terms, while retaining a unified underlying definition of explainability. Second, it makes visible any normative disagreements that may underpin conflicting claims about explainability regarding the purposes for which explanations are sought. Third, it allows us to distinguish several dimensions of AI explainability. We illustrate this framework by applying it to a case study involving a machine learning model for predicting whether patients suffering disorders of consciousness were likely to recover consciousness. (shrink)

‘Chance’ is arguably a context‐sensitive expression, a fact that some have thought bears upon the debate about the compatibility of determinism with objective, non‐trivial chances (chances with values other than 0 or 1). In this paper, I argue that this attempted move from context sensitivity to compatibilism is misguided, for a number of reasons. First, it relies on a theory of context sensitivity that we have independent reason to reject. Second, the resulting compatibilist position leaves unanswered (...) precisely the sorts of questions we reasonably expect a metaphysical account of chance to answer. (shrink)