Eloise Jelinek was a leading authority on syntactic and semantic theory, information structure, and several Native American languages (including Lummi, Yaqui, and Navajo). She was one of the very first generative linguists who brought the theoretical implications of the properties of typologically unusual and understudied languages to the forefront of mainstream generative thinking.Jelinek originated the Pronominal Argument Hypothesis the idea that many languages restrict realization of their arguments to pronouns. In other work, Jelinek investigated a broad range of morphological, syntactic (...) and semantic phenomena in understudied and endangered languages. Besides the theoretical value of that work, it was instrumental in providing sophisticated semantic and syntactic documentation for such languages, where description is typically limited to the basic morphophonology and morphosyntax, as well as texts, that form the core of most descriptive work.Thirteen of her most important papers, together with a fourteenth essay previously unpublished, are here collected, each preceded by a short introduction that provides context for the work and evidence of its subsequent influence. (shrink)

This 1994 book develops a way of representing the meanings of linguistic expressions which is independent of any particular language, allowing the expressions to be manipulated in accordance with rules related to their meanings which could be implemented on a computer. It begins with a survey of the contributions of linguistics, logic and computer science to the problem of representation, linking each with a particular type of formal grammar. A system of graphs is then presented, organized by scope relations in (...) which linguistic constituents are sub-graphs whose configuration is determined by their categories. In developing this system, the author extends the notion of scope and argues that anaphoric and relative pronouns are structural signs not linguistic constituents. Certain count nouns are made the basis of this system and an account of proper names relating the count nouns, is given. (shrink)

This book, the first systematic exploration of the third person in English, German, and French, takes a fresh look at person reference within the realm of political discourse. By focusing on the newly refined speech role of the target, attention is given to the continuity between second and third grammatical persons as a system. The role played by third-person forms in creating and maintaining interpersonal relationships in discourse has been surprisingly overlooked. Until now, third-person forms have overwhelmingly been considered as (...) referring to the absent, i.e. to someone outside the communication situation, other than the speaker or the hearer: the "nonperson". By broadening the scope and finally integrating the third person, we come to understand The Politics of Person Reference fully, and to see the strategic, argumentative, and dialogical nature of the act of referring to other discourse participants, understood as the act of creating new referents. (shrink)

"An important contribution to contemporary jurisprudential debate and to legal thought more generally, Just Interpretations is far ahead of currently available work."--Peter Goodrich, author of Oedipus Lex "I was struck repeatedly by the clarity of expression throughout the book. Rosenfeld's description and criticism of the recent work of leading thinkers distinguishes his work within the legal theory genre. Furthermore, his own theory is quite original and provocative."--Aviam Soifer, author of Law and the Company We Keep.

Although the use of pronouns has been extensively investigated in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), most studies have focused on English, and no study to date has investigated the use of subject pronouns in null subject languages. The present study aims to fill this gap by investigating the use of subject and object pronouns in 5- to 8-year-old Greek-speaking high-functioning children with ASD compared to individually matched typically developing age and language controls. The ‘Frog where are you’ (Mayer, 1969) (...) narrative task was used to elicit subject and object pronouns as well as DPs. Greek is a null subject language, and as a result, subject pronouns most often remain without phonological content. The results showed that both groups used more null than overt subject pronouns, indicating that children with ASD know that Greek is a null subject language. TD children used more null subjects than subject DPs, whereas children with ASD used an equal proportion of null subjects and subject DPs. In terms of object pronouns, both groups produced more clitics and object DPs than strong object pronouns, but the difference between clitics and DPs did not reach significance in either of the groups. Importantly, the groups did not differ from each other in the use of ambiguous pronouns in both the subject and object position. The ASD children’s avoidance to use pronominal subjects can be taken as evidence that they use a strategy to avoid infelicitous reference. This would suggest that the ASD children’s difficulties with pronouns is not due to difficulties in core grammar. (shrink)

What do we express when we use the first-person pronoun 'I' in phrases such as 'I think' or 'I ought to'? Do we refer to ourselves as biologically unique, socially determined individuals? Or do we express a consciousness of ourselves as the bearers of thoughts we share, or can share, with all other human beings whatever their particular biological, social, or cultural background? Every year the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam invites a prominent philosopher to occupy (...) the Spinoza Chair and give two public lectures on a topic in philosophy. Beatrice Longuenesse, in these lectures, explores the contrast and complementarity between these two aspects of the use of 'I'. Her first lecture considers the first-person pronoun in relation to the exercise of our mental capacities in abstract reasoning, and in relation to our knowledge of objective facts about the world. Her second lecture explores the use of 'I' in relation to what we take to be our moral obligations. In bringing together these two fascinating lectures, this book presents contrasting aspects of the self as radically individual on the one hand, and as the bearer of universally shared capacities on the other. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson's essay traces some formal characteristics of logic and grammar to their roots in general features of thought and experience.

This volume covers a broad spectrum of research into the role of events in grammar. It addresses event arguments and thematic argument structure, the role of events in verbal aspectual distinctions, events and the distinction between stage and individual level predicates, and the role of events in the analysis of plurality and scope relations. It is of interest to scholars and students of theoretical linguistics, philosophers of language, computational linguists, and computer scientists.

The semantics of anaphoric pronouns or _relativa grammaticalia_ played an important role in the treatises of both grammarians and logicians in the middle ages. However only very recently has the theme again received comparable attention in transformational grammar and the analytic school of linguistic philosophy under the influence of Geach. Here philosophers of language take particular interest in the question of how far these expressions can be seen as colloquial counterparts of the bound variables known from predicate logic. This work (...) shows that scholastic theories of _suppositio relativorum_ underwent a development in the 14th century and that the theories which gradually emerged anticipated in important ways the insights of recent linguistic philosophy. This thesis is illustrated by editions of selected texts of the logicians of the new continental universities of Vienna and Prague of the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th centuries and make it clear that the often asserted decline of scholasticism had not yet set in in the period after Ockham and Buridan. (shrink)

Interesting observations and problems emerge as the author pursues a complete calculus of an adverbial logic. Author Bartsch establishes a total of 18 adverbial subcategories and proposes an equal number of logico-semantic basic constructions in a predicate logical notation to explain them. The logico-semantic basic constructions bring out certain aspects of adverbial semantics, insofar as they can be specified by predicate logical means. However, for a logical and linguistic analysis of adverbials to be complete, sentence semantic analysis - provided it (...) is carried out in a clear-cut manner with clear paraphrasing criteria, unambiguous notation and complete interpretation rules - must be supplemented by and combined with 'word semantics' and syntax in a more elaborate way. The topic of adverbial semantics is a complicated and rewarding field, and this book contains enough suggestions, challenging hypotheses and stimulating observations, so that anybody directly concerned with the study of adverbials will want to have a look. (shrink)

In The Dynamics of Meaning , Gennaro Chierchia tackles central issues in dynamic semantics and extends the general framework. Chapter 1 introduces the notion of dynamic semantics and discusses in detail the phenomena that have been used to motivate it, such as "donkey" sentences and adverbs of quantification. The second chapter explores in greater depth the interpretation of indefinites and issues related to presuppositions of uniqueness and the "E-type strategy." In Chapter 3, Chierchia extends the dynamic approach to the (...) domain of syntactic theory, considering a range of empirical problems that includes backwards anaphora, reconstruction effects, and weak crossover. The final chapter develops the formal system of dynamic semantics to deal with central issues of definites and presupposition. Chierchia shows that an approach based on a principled enrichment of the mechanisms dealing with meaning is to be preferred on empirical grounds over approaches that depend on an enrichment of the syntactic apparatus. Dynamics of Meaning illustrates how seemingly abstract stances on the nature of meaning can have significant and far-reaching linguistic consequences, leading to the detection of new facts and influencing our understanding of the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface. (shrink)

i How can one talk about 'understanding' and 'not understanding' a proposition? Surely it is not a proposition until it's understood ? ...

_Peirce’s Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics _offers a comprehensive, philologically accurate, and exegetically ambitious developmental account of Peirce’s theory of speculative grammar. The book traces the evolution of Peirce’s grammatical writings from his early research on the classification of arguments in the 1860s up to the complex semiotic taxonomies elaborated in the first decade of the twentieth century. It will be of interest to academic specialists working on Peirce, the history of American philosophy and pragmatism, the philosophy of language, the (...) history of logic, and semiotics. (shrink)

pt. 1. The proposition and its sense.--pt. 2. On logic and mathematics.

INTRODUCTION WERNER ABRAHAM, LACI MARÁCZ, SJAAK DE MEY & WIM SCHERPENISSE University of Groningen The Groningen Conference on Topic, ...

It is the aim of INDICES to document recent explorations in the various fields of philosophical logic and formal linguistics and their applications in other disciplines. The main emphasis of this series is on self-contained monographs covering particular areas of recent research and surveys of methods, problems, and results in all fields of inquiry where recourse to logical analysis and logical methods has been fruitful. INDICES will contain monographs dealing with the central areas of philosophical logic (extensional and intensional systems, (...) indexical logics, non-classical logics, philosophy of logic, etc.) as well as studies in which these systems are applied to specific issues in philosophy, in the formal semantics of natural languages, the foundations of linguistic theory, in computational linguistics, and in theoretical computer science. Constructive type theory was first presented in 1970, by the Swedish logician Per Martin-Lof. It has become one of the main approaches used in the foundations of mathematics and computer science. But it has remained relatively unknown among linguists and philosophers, although it provides a considerable extension of the concepts and techniques of logic. The book first gives an introduction to type theory from the point of view of linguistics and the philosophy of language. Type theory is then applied in the areas of quantification, anaphora, temporal reference, and the structure of text and discourse. By virtue of the type-theoretical concepts of proof object and context, various phenomena of dependence and progression in language can be discussed in precise terms, and several well-known problems can be solved. A categorial grammar is presented togenerate formally a fragment of English, together with an example of a computer implementation. (shrink)

A study of the relation of metaphysics to grammar, placing the central topics of philosophy in an entirely new light.

We present the results of three experiments investigating the interpretation of comparative constructions involving pronominal reference in which binding Principle C is violated. We show that both children and adults retrieve interpretations that are not predicted. On the one hand, children appear to represent elided pronominal material functionally instead of in a strict identity relation with a pronoun on the surface, generating interpretations that are entirely unexpected from the perspective of the adult grammar. On the other, adult participants (...) often appear to ignore Principle C, being influenced by factors such as prosodic focus, the type of comparative, and structural position of the pronoun. We propose that the way in which the sentence processor is deployed in the incremental processing of such comparative constructions gives rise to so-called acceptable ungrammaticality. (shrink)

Split constructions are widespread in natural languages. The separation of the semantic restriction of a quantifier from that quantifier is a typical example of such a construction. This study addresses the problem that such discontinuous strings exhibit--namely, a number of locality constraints, including intervention effects. These are shown to follow from the interaction of a minimalist syntax with a semantics that directly assigns a model-theoretic interpretation to syntactic logical forms. The approach is shown to have wide empirical coverage and a (...) conceptual simplicity. The book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of syntax and semantics. (shrink)

Research in linguistic semantics may be roughly divided into two broad traditions. Students concerned with lexical fields and lexical domains ('lexical semanticists') have interested themselves in the paradigmatic relations of contrast that obtain among related lexical items and the substantive detail of how particular lexical items map to the nonlinguistic objects they stand for. 'Formal semanticists' (those who study the combinatorial properties of word meanings) have been mostly unconcerned with these issues, concentrating rather on how the meanings of individual words, (...) whatever their internal structure may be and however they may be paradigmatically related to one another, combine into the meanings of phrases and sentences (and recently, to some extent, texts). (shrink)

Because of the ease of their implementation, attribute-value based theories of grammar are becoming increasingly popular in theoretical linguistics as an alternative to transformational accounts and in computational linguistics. This book provides a formal analysis of attribute-value structures, their use in a theory of grammar and the representation of grammatical relations in such theories of grammar. It provides a classical treatment of disjunction and negation, and explores the linguistic implications of different representations of grammatical relations. Mark Johnson is assistant professor (...) in cognitive and linguistic sciences at Brown University. He was a Fairchild postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the 1987-88 academic year. (shrink)

The format of this book is unusual, especially for a book about linguistics. The book is meant primarily as a research monograph aimed at linguists who have some background in formal semantics, e. g. Montague Grammar. However, I have two other audiences in mind. Linguists who have little or no experience of formal semantics, but who have worked through a basic mathematics for linguists course (e. g. using Wall, 1972, or Partee, 1978), should, perhaps with the help of a sympathetic (...) Montague gramma rian, be able to discover enough of how I have adapted some of the basic ideas in formal semantics to make the developments that I undertake in the rest of the book accessible. Logicians and computer scientists who know about model theoretic semantics and formal systems should be able to glean enough from Chapters I and II about linguistic concerns and techniques to be able to read the remainder of the book, again possibly with the help of a sympathetic Montague grammarian. However, readers should beware. Chapter II is not meant as a general introduction either to formal semantics or to linguistics and while much of the presentation there is going over ground that is already well covered in the literature, the particular formulation and the emphases are very much oriented to the developments to be undertaken later in the book. (shrink)

In this book, ten essays examine the contributions made to the issue of the philosophical significance of grammar by Frege, Russell, Bradley, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Carnap and Heidegger.

The contributions to this volume are concerned with questions of form, function, and genesis of canonical switch-reference systems.

Why do speakers of all languages use different grammatical structures under different communicative circumstances to express the same idea? In this comprehensive study, Professor Lambrecht explores the relationship between the structure of sentences and the linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts in which they are used. His analysis is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects a speaker's assumptions about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of the utterance. This relationship between speaker assumptions and (...) formal sentence structure is governed by rules and conventions of grammar, in a component called 'information structure'. Four independent but interrelated categories are analysed: presupposition and assertion, identifiability and activation, topic, and focus. (shrink)

The analysis of knowledge and belief has provoked intensive discussions in philosophy and linguistics. One of the issues in this area is the semantics of attitude verbs whose complement expresses a thought about the Self of the thinking person. What is the content of my belief when I think that I am tired? Some philosophers propose it is a proposition, others think it is a property. It will be shown in this essay that existing proposals in either direction are unsatisfying. (...) The property theorist expells the subject of the predicate "tired" from the analysis; their theory is at best incomplete. The propositionalist has difficulties with the analysis of the pronoun that refers back to the subject of the attitude, as is the case with "he" in "Wolfgang believes he is tired". The present new proposal ventures the idea that a conscious person is endowed with their own Logical Space that deviates from the standard model in providing for a separate entity, the Self, as the object or target of inner thoughts about oneself. Moreover, this Logical Space leaves room for linguistic error: in such a model, subjects may be unable to correctly identify the reference of a name or may fail to identify the Self with its bearer. By contrast, reference to the Self is immune to error through misidentification, it is a paradigm case of brute indexicality. In consequence, de se pronouns are rigid designators in the sense of Kripke. The book solves several puzzles of reference failure and explores numerous consequences for the semantics of attitude reports and for possible world semantics in general. (shrink)

This volume provides a detailed account of the syntax of expressive language, that is, utterances that express, rather than describe, the emotions and attitudes of the speaker... Daniel Gutzmann demonstrates that expressivity has strong syntactic reflexes that interact with the semantic and pragmatic interpretation of these utterances, and argues that expressivity is in fact a syntactic feature on a par with other established features such as tense and gender. Evidence for this claim is drawn from three detailed case studies of (...) expressive adjectives, intensifiers, and vocatives; their puzzling properties are accounted for through a minimalist approach to syntactic features and agreement, which shows that expressivity can partake in agreement operations, trigger movement, and be selected for syntactically. The analysis not only supports the hypothesis of expressive syntax, but also highlights the hidden role that grammar may play in phenomena that are traditionally considered to be solely semantic in nature" -- Publisher. (shrink)

What is the nature of a conceptual scheme? Are there alternative conceptual schemes? If so, are some more justifiable or correct than others? The later Wittgenstein already addresses these fundamental philosophical questions under the general rubric of "grammar" and the question of its "arbitrariness"--and does so with great subtlety. This book explores Wittgenstein's views on these questions. Part I interprets his conception of grammar as a generalized version of Kant's transcendental idealist solution to a puzzle about necessity. It also (...) seeks to reconcile Wittgenstein's seemingly inconsistent answers to the question of whether or not grammar is arbitrary by showing that he believed grammar to be arbitrary in one sense and non-arbitrary in another. Part II focuses on an especially central and contested feature of Wittgenstein's account: a thesis of the diversity of grammars. The author discusses this thesis in connection with the nature of formal logic, the limits of language, and the conditions of semantic understanding or access. Strongly argued and cleary written, this book will appeal not only to philosophers but also to students of the human sciences, for whom Wittgenstein's work holds great relevance. (shrink)

Introduction -- The syntax of English clefts -- Clefts and the licensing of relative clauses -- Clefts in Slavonic languages -- The syntax of specificational sentences -- Conclusion.

Comparative political theory is at best an embryonic and marginalized endeavor. As practiced in most Western universities, the study of political theory generally involves a rehearsal of the canon of Western political thought from Plato to Marx. Only rarely are practitioners of political thought willing (and professionally encouraged) to transgress the canon and thereby the cultural boundaries of North America and Europe in the direction of genuine comparative investigation. Border Crossings presents an effort to remedy this situation, fully (...) launching a new era in political theory. Thirteen scholars from around the world examine the various political traditions of West, South, and East Asia and engage in a reflective cross-cultural discussion that belies the assumptions of an Asian "essence" and of an unbridgeable gulf between West and non-West. The denial of essential differences does not, however, amount to an endorsement of essential sameness. As viewed and as practiced by contributors to this ground-breaking volume, comparative political theorizing must steer a course between uniformity and radical separation--this is the path of "border crossings.". (shrink)

This title considers whether any generalisations can be made about word order in language. The chapters, written by international scholars, draw on data from several 'disharmonic' and typologically distinct languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Basque, French, English, Hixkaryana (a Cariban language), Khalkha Mongolian, Uyghur Turkic, and Afrikaans.

This volume gathers papers, which were read at the congress held at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Toledo (Spain), in September 2007, under the general subject of phenomenology. The book is devoted to Wittgenstein s thoughts on phenomenology. One of its aims is to consider and examine the lasting importance of phenomenology for philosophic discussion. For E. Husserl phenomenology was a discipline that endeavoured to describe how the world is constituted and experienced through a series of conscious acts. (...) His fundamental concept was that of intentional consciousness. What did drag Wittgenstein into working on phenomenology? In his 'middle period' work, Wittgenstein used the headline 'Phenomenology is Grammar'. These cornerstones can be signalled by notions like language, grammar, rule, visual space versus Euclidean space, minima visibilia and colours. L. Wittgenstein s main interest takes the form of a research on language.". (shrink)

Stojnić (2021) argues that the content of linguistic utterances is determined by the rules of natural language grammar more stringently than what is generally assumed. She proposes specifically that coherence relations are encoded by the linguistic structures and determine what individuals count as most prominent, thereby serving as the referents of free (“demonstrative”) pronouns. In this paper, I take a close look at the empirical evidence from English and Serbian that she offers in support of this position. Considering these data (...) points in connection with additional linguistic data (also from German and Japanese), I argue that there is no compelling evidence for the assumption that coherence relations directly determine the resolution of pronouns. Instead, grammatical restrictions imposed by different types of pronouns and tenses have a larger impact on the meaning conventionally expressed by complex utterances than what is generally assumed in the literature on coherence relations. (shrink)

Our knowledge about the world is often expressed by generic sentences, yet their meanings are far from clear. This book provides answers to central problems concerning generics: what do they mean? Which factors affect their interpretation? How can one reason with generics? Cohen proposes that the meanings of generics are probability judgments, and shows how this view accounts for many of their puzzling properties, including lawlikeness. Generics are evaluated with respect to alternatives. Cohen argues that alternatives are induced by the (...) kind as well as by the predicated property, and thus provides a uniform account of the varied interpretations of generics. He studies the formal properties of alternatives and provides a compositional account of their derivation by focus and presupposition. Cohen uses his semantics of generics to provide a formal characterization of adequate default reasoning, and proves some desirable results of this formalism. (shrink)

This work adopts the perspective of plural logic and measurement theory in order first to focus on the microstructure of comparative determiners; and second, to derive the properties of comparative determiners as these are studied in Generalized Quantifier Theory, locus of the most sophisticated semantic analysis of natural language determiners. The work here appears to be the first to examine comparatives within plural logic, a step which appears necessary, but which also harbors specific analytical problems examined here.Since nominal (...) comparatives involve plural and mass reference, we begin with a domain of discourse upon which a lattice structure (Link's) is imposed, and which maps (via abstract dimensions such asweight in kilograms) to concrete measures (in N,R+). The mapping must be homomorphic and Archimedean. Comparisons begin as simple predicates on dimensions or measures; from these we derive classes of predicates on the domain, i.e., generalized determiners (quantifiers), and show, e.g., how monotonicity properties follow in the derivation. This results in a proposal for a logical language which includes derived determiners, and which is an attractive target for semantics interpretation; it also turns out that some interesting comparative determiners are first order, at least when restricted to nonparametric and noncollective predications. (shrink)

Some fifteen years ago, research on generalized quantifiers was con sidered to be a branch of mathematical logic, mainly carried out by mathematicians. Since then an increasing number of linguists and philosophers have become interested in exploring the relevance of general quantifiers for natural language as shown by the bibliography compiled for this volume. To a large extent, the new research has been inspired by Jon Barwise and Robin Cooper's path-breaking article "Generalized Quantifiers and Natural Language" from 1981. A (...) concrete sign of this development was the workshop on this topic at Lund University, May 9-11, 1985, which was organized by Robin Cooper, Elisabet Engdahl, and the present editor. All except two of the papers in this volume derive from that workshop. Jon Barwise's paper in the volume is different from the one he presented in connection with the workshop. Mats Rooth's contribution has been added because of its close relationship with the rest of the papers. The articles have been revised for publication here and the authors have commented on each other's contributions in order to integrate the collection. The organizers of the workshop gratefully acknowledge support from the Department of Linguistics, the Department of Philosophy and the Faculty of Humanities at Lund University, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (through the Wallenberg Foundation), the Swedish Institute, and the Letterstedt Foundation. (shrink)

In recent years, the study of formal semantics and formal pragmatics has grown tremendously showing that core aspects of language meaning can be explained by a few principles. These principles are grounded in the logic that is behind - and tightly intertwined with - the grammar of human language. In this book, some of the most prominent figures in linguistics, including Noam Chomsky and Barbara H. Partee, offer new insights into the nature of linguistic meaning and pave the way for (...) the further development of formal semantics and formal pragmatics. Each chapter investigates various dimensions in which the logical nature of human language manifests itself within a language and/or across languages. Phenomena like bare plurals, free choice items, scalar implicatures, intervention effects, and logical operators are investigated in depth and at times cross-linguistically and/or experimentally. This volume will be of interest to scholars working within the fields of semantics, pragmatics, language acquisition and psycholinguistics. (shrink)

This article explores the claim that representative legislatures should create general legal norms. After distinguishing the requirement that statutes be general from the broader rule‐of‐law idea that law be general, I concentrate on the French constitutional tradition to argue that the plausibility of the claim turns on the elucidation of a set of social norms and understandings about the proper role of representative legislatures mediating between abstract ideals of the common good and local practices. I call these (...) norms grammars. The article then briefly compares the French “Sieyèsian” with the US “Madisonian” grammar of political representation regarding the issue of the generality of statutes and concludes with a plea for an in‐depth comparative investigation into different such grammars. (shrink)