18 found
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  1.  83
    Donkey pluralities: plural information states versus non-atomic individuals.Adrian Brasoveanu - 2008 - Linguistics and Philosophy 31 (2):129-209.
    The paper argues that two distinct and independent notions of plurality are involved in natural language anaphora and quantification: plural reference (the usual non-atomic individuals) and plural discourse reference, i.e., reference to a quantificational dependency between sets of objects (e.g., atomic/non-atomic individuals) that is established and subsequently elaborated upon in discourse. Following van den Berg (PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 1996), plural discourse reference is modeled as plural information states (i.e., as sets of variable assignments) in a new dynamic system (...)
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  2.  86
    At-issue Proposals and Appositive Impositions in Discourse.Scott Anderbois, Adrian Brasoveanu & Robert Henderson - 2015 - Journal of Semantics 32 (1):fft014.
    Potts (2005) and many subsequent works have argued that the semantic content of appositive (non-restrictive) relative clauses, e.g., the underlined material in John, who nearly killed a woman with his car, visited her in the hospital, must be in some way separate from the content of the rest of the sentence, i.e., from at-issue content. At the same time, there is mounting evidence from various anaphoric processes that the two kinds of content must be integrated into a single, incrementally evolving (...)
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  3. How indefinites choose their scope.Adrian Brasoveanu & Donka F. Farkas - 2011 - Linguistics and Philosophy 34 (1):1-55.
    The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of scope posed by natural language indefinites that captures both the difference in scopal freedom between indefinites and bona fide quantifiers and the syntactic sensitivity that the scope of indefinites does nevertheless exhibit. Following the main insight of choice functional approaches, we connect the special scopal properties of indefinites to the fact that their semantics can be stated in terms of choosing a suitable witness. This is in contrast to bona fide (...)
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  4.  88
    Sentence-internal different as quantifier-internal anaphora.Adrian Brasoveanu - 2011 - Linguistics and Philosophy 34 (2):93-168.
    The paper proposes the first unified account of deictic/sentence-external and sentence-internal readings of singular different . The empirical motivation for such an account is provided by a cross-linguistic survey and an analysis of the differences in distribution and interpretation between singular different , plural different and same (singular or plural) in English. The main proposal is that distributive quantification temporarily makes available two discourse referents within its nuclear scope, the values of which are required by sentence-internal uses of singular different (...)
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  5. Presuppositional TOO, Postsuppositional TOO.Adrian Brasoveanu & Anna Szabolcsi - 2013 - The Dynamic, Inquisitive, and Visionary Life of Φ, ?Φ, and ◊Φ Subtitle: A Festschrift for Jeroen Groenendijk, Martin Stokhof, and Frank Veltman.
    One of the insights of dynamic semantics in its various guises (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982, Groenendijk & Stokhof 1991, Kamp & Reyle 1993 among many others) is that interpretation is sensitive to left-to-right order. Is order sensitivity, particularly the default left-to-right order of evaluation, a property of particular meanings of certain lexical items (e.g., dynamically interpreted conjunction) or is it a more general feature of meaning composition? If it is a more general feature of meaning composition, is it a processing (...)
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  6. (1 other version)Structured anaphora to quantifier domains: A unified account of quantificational and modal subordination.Adrian Brasoveanu - manuscript
    The paper proposes an account of the contrast (noticed in Karttunen 1976) between the interpretations of the following two discourses: Harvey courts a girl at every convention. {She is very pretty. vs. She always comes to the banquet with him.}. The initial sentence is ambiguous between two quantifier scopings, but the first discourse as a whole allows only for the wide-scope indefinite reading, while the second allows for both. This cross-sentential interaction between quantifier scope and anaphora is captured by means (...)
     
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  7. Say reports, assertion events and meaning dimensions.Adrian Brasoveanu & Donka F. Farkas - manuscript
    In this paper, we study the parameters that come into play when assessing the truth conditions of say reports and contrast them with belief attributions. We argue that these conditions are sensitive in intricate ways to the connection between the interpretation of the complement of say and the properties of the reported speech act. There are three general areas this exercise is relevant to, besides the immediate issue of understanding the meaning of say: (i) the discussion shows the need to (...)
     
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  8. The grammar of quantification and the fine structure of interpretation contexts.Adrian Brasoveanu - 2013 - Synthese 190 (15):3001-3051.
    Providing a compositional interpretation procedure for discourses in which descriptions of complex dependencies between interrelated objects are incrementally built is a key challenge for formal theories of natural language interpretation. This paper examines several quantificational phenomena and argues that to account for these phenomena, we need richly structured contexts of interpretation that are passed on between different parts of the same sentence and also across sentential boundaries. The main contribution of the paper is showing how we can add structure to (...)
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  9. Scope and the grammar of choice.Donka F. Farkas & Adrian Brasoveanu - unknown
    and Data The essence of scope in natural language semantics can be characterized as follows: an expression e1 takes scope over an expression e2 iff the interpretation of the former affects the interpretation of the latter. Consider, for example, the sentence in (1) below, which is typical of the cases discussed in this paper in that it involves an indefinite and a universal (or, more generally, a non-existential) quantifier. (1) Everyx student in my class read ay paper about scope. How (...)
     
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  10.  55
    Strategies for scope taking.Adrian Brasoveanu & Jakub Dotlačil - 2015 - Natural Language Semantics 23 (1):1-19.
    This squib reports the results of two experimental studies, a binary choice and a self-paced reading study, that provide strong support for the hypothesis in Tunstall that the distinct scopal properties of each and every are at least to some extent the consequence of an event-differentiation requirement contributed by each. However, we also show that the emerging picture is more complex than Tunstall suggests: English speakers seem to fall into at least three groups regarding the scopal properties of each and (...)
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  11. Dissertation: Structured nominal and modal reference.Adrian Brasoveanu - manuscript
    Committee: Maria Bittner (chairperson), Hans Kamp (external member), Roger Schwarzschild and Matthew Stone.
     
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  12. Exceptional wide scope as anaphora to quantificational dependencies.Adrian Brasoveanu & Donka F. Farkas - manuscript
    The paper proposes a novel account to the problem of exceptional scope (ES) of (in)definites, e.g. the widest and intermediate scope readings of the sentence Every student of mine read every poem that a famous Romanian poet wrote before World War II. We propose that ES readings are available when the sentence is interpreted as anaphoric to quantificational domains and quantificational dependencies introduced in the previous discourse. For example, the two every quantifiers and the indefinite elaborate on the sets of (...)
     
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  13. Optimality theory & cognitive science.Adrian Brasoveanu - manuscript
    donkey anaphora, quantificational and modal subordination, static and dynamic approaches to mood, tense and aspect, entailment in natural language, parallels between the individual, temporal and modal domain.
     
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  14.  13
    Reinforcement Learning for Production‐Based Cognitive Models.Adrian Brasoveanu & Jakub Dotlačil - 2021 - Topics in Cognitive Science 13 (3):467-487.
    We investigate how Reinforcement Learning methods can be used to solve the production selection and production ordering problem in ACT‐R. We focus on four algorithms from the Q learning family, tabular Q and three versions of Deep Q Networks, as well as the ACT‐R utility learning algorithm, which provides a baseline for the Q algorithms. We compare the performance of these five algorithms in a range of lexical decision tasks framed as sequential decision problems.
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  15. Semantics & Cognition.Adrian Brasoveanu - unknown
    The VP ellipsis (VPE) ‘remnants’ did too/did in sentences like (1) and (2) below can have two different readings depending on whether the reflexive pronoun himself covertly recovered at the VPE site is interpreted as referring back to John (the strict reading) or to Bill (the sloppy reading).
     
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  16. Structured discourse reference to individuals.Adrian Brasoveanu - manuscript
     
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  17. Semantics & pragmatics.Adrian Brasoveanu - manuscript
    donkey anaphora, quantificational and modal subordination, static and dynamic approaches to mood, tense and aspect, entailment in natural language, parallels between the individual, temporal and modal domain.
     
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  18. Uniqueness effects in correlatives.Adrian Brasoveanu - manuscript
    paper, abstract, revised handout, original handoutto appear in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 12 (Oslo, 2007). The paper argues that the variability of the uniqueness effects exhibited by Hindi and Romanian correlatives is due to their mixed referential and quantificational nature. The account involves an articulated notion of quantification, independently motivated by donkey anaphora and quantificational subordination and consisting of both (discourse) referential components and non-referential components (dynamic operators over plural info states). The variable uniqueness effects emerge out of (...)
     
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