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2013
Because of ‘arguments from the infinity of language’, compositionality is often seen as a ‘non-negotiable’ feature of any theory of the semantics of natural language. But there are a number of features of ‘ordinary language discourse’ that make it seem that compositionality is not true of natural...
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2013
Pelletier, Francis J., Asher, Nicholas
In Pelletier and Asher (1997) we presented a modal conditional analysis of the semantic interpretation of characterizing generics (in the terminology of Krifka et al. 1995). Since that time there have been a number of advances to our understanding of this area: Cohen (1999a,b, 2005), Leslie...
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2012
This chapter investigates the rationale for having the lexical categories or features mass and count. Some theories make the features be syntactic; others make it be semantic. It is concluded here that none of the standard accounts of their function actually serve the purpose for which they are...
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2012
Pelletier, Francis J., Lepore, Ernest
This paper is an investigation into the role of linguistics in philosophical theorizing. In particular, we will show how linguistic evidence can be adduced in support of an event approach to action verbs and their adverbial modifiers: if we increase the adicity of verbs, if we allow there to be...
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2010
This chapter introduces the linguistic phenomena that are called “genericity” (both the so‐called reference to a kind and the characterizing statement types) and shows how they have figured into a wide range of fields, such as ethics and philosophy of science (both within philosophy), commonsense...
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2008
Pelletier, Francis J., Jin, Yi, Delgrande, James
In this paper we explore a class of belief update operators, in which the definition of the operator is compositional with respect to the sentence to be added. The goal is to provide an update operator that is intuitive, in that its definition is based on a recursive decomposition of the update...
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2007
Pelletier, Francis J., Pagin, Peter
Introduction: It is traditional, at least since Grice, to make a distinction between what is called the literal meaning of an utterance and what is meant by that utterance. The former notion is sometimes thought of as ‘‘the dictionary meanings of words plus standard semantic effects of the...
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[Review of the book Representation and Inference for Natural Language: A First Course in Computational Semantics, by Plackburn, & Jos]
Download2006
Introduction: Computational semantics is the study of how to represent meaning in a way that computers can use. For the authors of this textbook, this study includes the representation of the meaning of natural language in logic formalisms, the recognition of certain relations that hold within...
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2006
Intensional logic (IL) and its application to natural language, which the present monograph addresses, was first developed by Richard Montague in the late 1960s (e.g., Montague 1970a, 1970b). Through the efforts of (especially) Barbara Partee (e.g., Partee 1975, 1976), and Richmond Thomason, who...
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2000
Introduction: ‘Fuzzy logic’ means different things to different people. For some it is a philosophy of life— “a way to break the stranglehold that the black-and-white thinking of the Western tradition has upon us.” For others it is a more accurate way of describing our ordinary language (and...