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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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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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1982
Pelletier, Francis J., Schubert, Lenhart K.
Introduction: We describe an approach to parsing and logical translation that was inspired by Gazdar's work on context-free grammar for English. Each grammar rule consists of a syntactic part that specifies an acceptable fragment of a parse tree, and a semantic part that specifies how the logical...
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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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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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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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1986
Pelletier, Francis J., Rudnicki, Piotr
Introduction: Some problems that are difficult for automated theorem provers (ATPs) are so merely because of their size, but not because of any logical or conceptual complexity. Examples of this type of difficult problem have been published in the past: see Pelletier [1986: problems 12, 29, 34,...
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1977
It is an extremely popular view among logicians and some linguists (McCawley, Hurford) that there are two distinct or's in English - an \"inclusive\" and an \"exclusive\". It seems equally popular among lexicographers, experts on proper usage, and some linguists (R. Lakoff) that there is only...