On verbal similative plurality of shenme de in Mandarin Chinese

Guinea-Bissau Portuguese Creole or Kriyol is one of those languages where bare nouns have free access to syntax. Bare nouns are given a restrictive definition: only nouns appearing in their root form, i.e. not marked for number, are considered bare. Kriyol is thus different from Portuguese or English insofar as so-called bare nouns in these languages must be pluralized. Another distinctive feature of Kriyol is the absence of a definite determiner analogous to English the. The conjunction of these features – bare nouns unmarked for number, no overt definite determiner – makes the interpretation of Kriyol noun phrases appear problematic in many cases. The aim of this article is to show that, once semantic (does the noun refer to a person or not?) and syntactic (is the noun a subject or an object?) factors have been taken into account, Kriyol actually is no more ambiguous in this domain than natural languages normally are.

No abstract.

Preface. Introduction. A Note on Quantification and Blankets in Haisla E. Bach. On the Absence of Certain Quantifiers in Mohawk M. Baker. Quantification in Eskimo: a Challenge for Compositional Semantics M. Bittner. Remarks on Definiteness in Warlpiri M. Bittner, K. Hale. The Variability of Impersonal Subjects G. Chierchia. On Quantifier Strength I. Comorovski. Quantification on Correlatives V.S. Dayal. A-Quantifiers and Scope in Mayali N. Evans. Towards a Typology of Natural Logic L. Faltz. Universal Quantifiers and Distributivity D. Gil. Diachronic Sources of 'All' and 'Every' M. Haspelmath. Mass and Count Quantifiers J. Higginbotham. On the Characterization of the Weak--Strong Distinction H. de Hoop. On the Quantificational Force of English Free Relatives P. Jacobson. Quantification in Straits Salish E. Jelinek. Quantificational Structures and Compositionality B.H. Partee. Bare Noun Phrases, Verbs, and Quantification in ASL K. Petronio. Quantification, Events and Gerunds P. Portner. Domain Restriction in Dynamic Semantics C. Roberts. The Expression of Quantificational Notions in Asurini do Trocara M. Damasco Vieira.

\n Esta tese investiga a denotação dos nomes comuns nas línguas naturais. De forma mais específica enfoca a denotação dos nomes comuns no português brasileiro (PB). O objetivo é investigar os mecanismos que licenciam contabilidade no PB. Primeiramente investiga-se a denotação dos nomes no PB frente à proposta de Borer (2005). A autora defende que interpretações contáveis são licenciadas estruturalmente, mas que interpretações massivas não, e, nesse sentido, interpretações massivas são default. Segundo Borer (2005), o plural, em línguas como o inglês, e os classificadores, em línguas como o chinês, são sintagmas de classificação que originam interpretações contáveis, cujo núcleo tem um valor aberto div, onde DIV é um operador de divisão. A ausência desses sintagmas confere uma interpretação massiva aos nomes. Diferentemente da maioria das línguas germânicas e românicas que permitem a ocorrência do plural nu, mas não permitem a ocorrência do singular nu, no PB, o singular nu é extremamente produtivo. Assim, se Borer (2005) estiver certa, no PB os nomes são massivos, pois os nomes nessa língua podem ocorrer sem nenhuma estrutura que os divida, denotando uma massa amorfa, sem divisão. No entanto, a análise dos dados do PB mostra, contra as previsões de Borer (2005), que a denotação default dos nomes, independentemente de ser indeterminada para número, pode ser massiva ou contável e que tais nomes já vêm com essa denotação marcada do léxico. Em segundo lugar, investiga-se a denotação dos nomes lexicalmente contáveis em estruturas não marcadas para contabilidade. Como Rullmann e You (2003) defendem para o chinês, o PB é uma língua em que os nomes possuem número geral, isto é, não são singular nem plural, são neutros para número, como defendem Müller (2001) e Schmitt e Munn (1999, 2002) para o PB. Línguas que possuem número geral geralmente não possuem morfologia de número, entretanto, o PB é um exemplo de língua que possui número geral, classificação e morfologia de número. Em terceiro lugar, investiga-se a denotação dos nomes segundo a proposta de Rothstein (2007). A autora defende que interpretações contáveis são licenciadas por um mecanismo de contabilidade gramatical. Segundo Rothstein (2007), o singular em línguas como o inglês e os classificadores numéricos em línguas como o chinês são operações gramaticais que licenciam interpretações contáveis. Como o PB é uma língua que possui número geral, classificadores numéricos e morfologia de número, defende-se a tese de que nessa língua o que licencia contabilidade são as operações de número e de classificação.\n

The international cooperation research program between Brazil and France, CAPES/COFECUB, entitled “Bare Nouns in Brazilian Portuguese: the Syntax-Semantics Interface” (2009), coordinated by Roberta Pires de Oliveira (UFSC/CNPq) and Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin (CNRS-LLF, Paris 7), aims at a deep understanding of the syntax and semantics of bare noun phrases in natural languages, and of Brazilian Portuguese (BrP henceforth) in particular.

This paper investigates three puzzles concerning scalar nu‐V constructions in Taiwan Mandarin: (a) a scalar nu‐V construction is incompatible with state/achievement verbs, irrespective of the presence of a quantity phrase; (b) when combined with activity verbs, the inclusion of a quantity phrase appears obligatory for scalar nu‐V constructions in an out‐of‐the‐blue context; (c) under appropriate contextual support, bare nouns and demonstrative phrases can replace the typically obligatory quantity phrases to form a grammatical scalar nu‐V construction with an activity verb. We argue that the solutions to these puzzles lie in three core meaning components of scalar nu‐V constructions: (a) scalar presupposition; (b) association with focus; (c) volitional requirement. Specifically, we propose that (a) scalar nu is a scalar verbal modifier that forms a verbal compound with its following verb; (b) scalar nu introduces a scalar presupposition (based on the scalar associate) and the volitional requirement in scalar nu‐V constructions. If our analysis is correct, it suggests that the scalarity of a construction may come from a verbal modifier (e.g., scalar nu) in the formation of a compound verb, thereby enhancing our understanding of the compositionality of compound verbs in natural language.

This study examines the convergence of conversational artificial intelligence and spreadsheet-based data management systems, presenting a novel framework for enhancing organizational data accessibility. The research introduces an architectural approach that bridges natural language processing capabilities with tabular data structures, facilitating intuitive human-computer interactions in enterprise environments. The proposed system employs a three-tier architecture: a persistent data integration framework that maintains bidirectional communication with spreadsheet repositories, a semantic processing engine that translates conversational queries into structured data operations, and an adaptive response mechanism that synthesizes analytical outputs into natural language dialogue. Empirical observations demonstrate that this integration paradigm significantly streamlines workflow automation and cross-platform data orchestration, while enhancing real-time analytical capabilities. The findings suggest that this unified approach to conversational data management represents a fundamental shift in how organizations can leverage their existing data infrastructure through natural language interfaces. This research contributes to the growing body of literature on human-centred computing and business process automation by presenting a scalable methodology for implementing conversational interfaces in enterprise data environments

Spatial language, despite decades of research, still poses substantial challenges for automated systems, for instance in geographic information retrieval or human-robot interaction. We describe an approach to building a corpus of natural language expressions extracted from web documents for analyzing and modeling spatial relational expressions (SRE). The unique characteristic of this corpus is that it is built around georeferenced triplets, with each triplet containing two entities (including their latitude/longitude coordinates) related by a spatial expression such as near. While the approach is still experimental, our first results are promising, in that we believe they will form the foundation for a comprehensive contextualized model for interpreting spatial natural language expressions. For the time being, we are focusing on a single domain, hotel reviews. This domain restriction allowed us to implement a proof-of-concept that this approach, with advances in natural language technologies, will indeed deliver a comprehensive corpus. The potential to collect larger corpora, and associated challenges, is discussed.

In natural language, quantification is normally restricted quantification. Since Aristotle, the tripartite nature of quantifiers and other operators has been recognized, as given schematically in (1): (1)[Operator, Restriction, Nuclear Scope].KeywordsCommon GroundApple TreeState SwitcherDomain RestrictionDynamic SemanticThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This chapter proposes a new account of the semantics of vague expressions in natural language. It assumes that vague expressions are semantically tolerant. It is observed that the intuitive statement of tolerance corresponds to two different first-order formalizations. Both yield the Sorites contradiction for domains that contain a Sorites sequence of object with respect to some predicate /F/ in the language. But suppose there is a /significant central gap/, i.e. an area in the scale that is larger than the tolerance margin (in the context of use) such that objects with measures above the gap satisfy /F/ and objects with measures below that gap do not, while no object has a measure in the gap. Then one of the two tolerance principles is false. The other is true, but does not induce a Sorites contradiction. The main idea of the proposal is to use the idea of /domain restriction/ so that utterances are interpreted as concerning domains of object so restricted that they contain central gaps. This allows us to retain tolerance, consistency, and bivalence.

Understanding the relationship between nature and the divine in the second half of the sixteenth century in Europe was a spiritual imperative mired in epistemological uncertainty. Benito Arias Montano (c.1525–1598) is an important, if largely forgotten, figure in such debates as to the relationship between word and world. His contributions can now be assessed by English-speaking readers thanks to this latest monograph by María M. Portuondo. A historian of science, Portuondo’s prior book, Secret Science (U of Chicago P, 2009), revealed the long obscured contributions of Spanish cosmographers to the development of novel methodologies for the study of the natural world. Spanish cosmographers pioneered empirical methodologies for the study of American flora and fauna, Portuondo revealed, which put further into question the commonplace account of a Scientific Revolution centered on Protestant Europe. In her latest book, Portuondo demonstrates how textual hermeneutics and empirical observation were wedded together in the biblical natural philosophy of Benito Arias Montano. The book offers a biography of the life and times of Arias Montano as well as a critical analysis of his major published works on natural philosophy and their relation to his labors as a Hebrew philologist.Best known for his role as Philip II’s librero mayor at the royal library of El Escorial and for his editorial contribution to the Antwerp Polyglot Bible, Arias Montano also cultivated throughout his life an interest in nature that intersected in curious ways with his philological studies. Dissatisfied with the natural philosophies of his day, as Portuondo shows us, Arias Montano developed an idiosyncratic program of reform in which “piety and natural philosophy could be reconciled based on the authority of the Bible,” as the revealed Word served as “a font of knowledge about the natural world” (79). Trained as a Christian Hebraist at the University of Alcalá, he dedicated his life to the study of Hebrew, which he believed was “a natural language that reflected the true nature of things” (60). Unraveling the etymology of Hebrew words was the cornerstone of both his approach to biblical philology and natural philosophy. As Portuondo shows, what distinguished Arias Montano’s approach to the study of nature from the hexameral commentaries and natural theology of earlier Christian thinkers was his novel valuation of empirical methodologies. His biblical natural philosophy thus reflected “the empiricist approach characteristic of his Sevillian milieu as well as the disquiet of the broader community of European philosophers who questioned the ability of ancient natural philosophies to interpret nature” (154). This latter phenomenon, which Portuondo labels a “Spanish disquiet,” reflected a dissatisfaction with two prominent approaches to the study of nature: on the one hand, “a natural theological approach to the study of nature popular in sixteenth-century Spain,” and, on the other hand, “a purely empirical methodology and didactic organization of knowledge that seemed to grow increasingly disconnected from philosophy and theology” (31). She argues that Arias Montano responded to this disquiet by attempting to harmonize these two approaches. Dissatisfied with the natural historical debates of his day, he dedicated his life to distilling from the Hebrew Bible a series of metaphysical principles verifiable by empirical observation that could harmonize humanity’s understanding of the world with the revealed Word.The fruits of Arias Montano’s labors in reconciling the Bible with nature resulted in a magnum opus that comprised three parts. Only the first two parts made it to print: the Book of the Generation and Regeneration of Adam, or Anima (1593), and the History of Nature, or Corpus (1601). The final part, entitled the Vestis, was unpublished and is perhaps now lost or was never written (15). The seeds of this project appear in Arias Montano’s earlier work as principal editor of the Antwerp Polyglot. Charged by Philip II to guide this monumental scholarly undertaking through the theologically and politically fraught waters of Post-Reformation, Post-Tridentine Europe, Arias Montano included among the many appendices of the Antwerp Polyglot a treatise on the interpretation of Hebrew etymologies. Entitled De arcano sermone, Portuondo shows how this appendix, which poses as a glossary of biblical terms in Hebrew, “is informed by the notion that biblical Hebrew—properly deciphered—reveals the arcane and occult properties of things and their natures and forces” (107). Arias Montano first articulated in the sermone the central intellectual preoccupation of his later life: to recover “the relation between word and things that existed when the Bible was written” (113). What Arias Montano produced was “a comprehensive and non-Aristotelian/Ptolemaic cosmology” based primarily on his philological analysis of the Hebrew text of Genesis in conjunction with his empirical studies. While conventional in many respects—his insistence on the Earth being at the center of the universe being a case in point—Arias Montano argued in favor of some radical propositions. For example, he “did away with the notion of an unbreachable boundary between the different parts of the heavens and between the heavens and the earth, [and] reduced matter to a single liquid with a dual nature” (245). Arguing against the long-held conviction that the planets and stars were incorruptible entities, Arias Montano argued for their fundamental materiality. The planets and stars, like every earthbound entity, were composed of varying degrees of two primordial liquids that accounted for the distinctive properties of plants, animals, metals, and waters. While his methodology was unconventional from the perspective of the New Sciences, he shared with thinkers like Bacon and Galileo a dissatisfaction with the prevailing systems of natural philosophy that merited the need for serious reform.Portuondo’s study is an invaluable guide for those interested in exploring the great diversity of approaches to the study of nature at play in the sixteenth century. She paints a detailed panorama of competing systems that deftly differentiates between natural theology and natural philosophy, empiricism and Aristotelian-Thomism, hexameral commentary and cosmography. Perhaps Portuondo’s greatest contribution is arguing for Arias Montano and his syncretic methodology to be included as part of a larger reform movement within natural philosophy alongside the more famous proponents of the New Sciences. “Only when we divest ourselves of the notion that the triumph of the New Sciences was inevitable,” Portuondo argues, “can we appreciate the variety and richness of these system builders’ projects and appreciate the uncertainty of the whole enterprise” (52). Nevertheless, Portuondo’s focus on Arias Montano’s commitment to empirical methodologies downplays his links to the esoteric culture of the late Renaissance that developed around the Hermetic Corpus and the Orphic Hymnes (235). While there are key differences, both Arias Montano’s alchemical knowledge as well as his methodological valuation of textual hermeneutics point to a productive convergence of seemingly contradictory approaches to the study of nature in the period. While textual hermeneutics is no longer permitted today as a methodology in the natural sciences, hermeneutics in the time of Arias Montano was fruitfully cultivated by natural historians of all stripes. This is precisely the angle that brings literary historians to the work of Arias Montano. To draw lines in the sand differentiating the more esoteric beliefs of the sixteenth century from Arias Montano’s biblical natural philosophy risks perpetuating the blind spots of a traditional historiography of the Scientific Revolution that largely ignored approaches to the study of nature that did not feed into later developments in the natural sciences. This is nevertheless a magisterial study and a touchstone for understanding how science and faith converged productively in sixteenth-century Spain.

Philosophy of the Art of Science. Historical Remarks on the Significance of Rules in Scientific Language. This paper undertakes first steps toward a ‘Philosophy of the Art of Science’ from a History of Science and Philosophy of Language perspective. Traditionally it is understood that Philosophy of Science assesses science as to the validity of its methods and to the question of how it is that we hold its claims to be true. However, the range of presuppositions here is considerable: Roughly, it spans from Gottlob Frege's ‘The True’ (das Wahre) as the aim of scientific inquiry on the one end, to Paul Feyerabend's pluralistic understanding of science in a democratic society on the other. Despite this profound difference, however, we can nonetheless detect some similarity between them. Both hold science to be a normative endeavor: Frege thinks we ought to strive for true thoughts as somewhat independent ontological entities; Feyerabend thinks we ought to strive for a pragmatic humanism that takes the historicity of our knowledge into account. But while Frege ventured to show that natural language can benefit from insights drawn from the normative logic of formalized languages, Feyerabend discounted the idea of formalized language altogether, but with no less normative verve in regard to our scientific concept formation. Hence the combining question is whether scientific concept formation is indeed a rule‐governed behavior, or, put more generally, whether semantic content as such is normative. Guided by this question, the present paper draws a line from Frege through Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Quine, to those authors who follow or refute Saul Kripke's Wittgensteinian notion of semantic normativity in the most recent discussion of today. However, the paper does not proceed chronologically, but rather thematically along the major lines of argument. Hence after a brief survey of Feyerabend's philosophy of scientific concept formation (I), we explore Frege and his legacy on semantic normativity (II), and investigate the route that eventually led to present day semantic rule‐skepticism (III). We conclude with Carnap's ‘Principle of Tolerance’ combined with Feyerabend's notion of Science as an Art, parallels of which we can even find in Kant's third Critique (IV).

Within formal semantics, research on the expression of modality in natural language has traditionally focused on verbs. This book brings together novel work on the semantics and pragmatics of some nominal expressions that also convey modality. The book focuses on indefinites that can convey ignorance on the part of the speaker with respect to which individual satisfies the existential claim that they make. Despite the fact that epistemic indefinites have attracted some attention in the recent semantics literature, we still do not have a good understanding of the phenomenon: there is currently no agreement as to what the source of their epistemic component is, we lack sufficient cross-linguistic data to develop a semantic typology of these items, and the parallelisms and differences between epistemic indefinites and other expressions that convey epistemic modality have not been explored in depth. In this volume, the reader will find novel empirical observations on and important theoretical insights into epistemic indefinites, together with discussions of related topics (e.g. modal free relatives, modified numerals, and epistemic modals). This brings us one step closer to developing a semantic typology of epistemic indefinites that explores the place of these expressions within a general typology of modal items.

There are many studies that show using class-based features improves the performance of natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as syntactic part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing, sentiment analysis, and slot filling in natural language understanding (NLU), but not much has been reported on the underlying reasons for the performance improvements. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the word class-based features for the exponential family of models specifically focusing on NLU tasks, and demonstrate that the performance improvements could be attributed to the regularization effect of the class-based features on the underlying model. Our hypothesis is based on empirical observation that shrinking the sum of parameter magnitudes in an exponential model tends to improve performance. We show on several semantic tagging tasks that there is a positive correlation between the model size reduction by the addition of the class-based features and the model performance on a held-out dataset. We also demonstrate that class-based features extracted from different data sources using alternate word clustering methods can individually contribute to the performance gain. Since the proposed features are generated in an unsupervised manner without significant computational overhead, the improvements in performance largely come for free and we show that such features provide gains for a wide range of tasks from semantic classification and slot tagging in NLU to named entity recognition (NER).

Empirical support for the laws of software evolution cannot be rigorously tested as long as they are stated in natural language [1, 2]. Let’s consider the laws that directly relate to measurable phenomena (law 1 to 7) the eighth law “feedback system” is for the moment excluded of this discussion. Let’s assume that sufficient empirical data is available. One approach that has been used to assess the empirical support for the first seven laws uses quantitative models that are consistent with the laws. One fits such models to the empirical data and assesses the magnitude of the residuals. If these are small, the law will be supported by the data. If not, the law will remain unsupported. To illustrate this approach, let’s consider the 6th law “continuing growth”, which states that “the functional capability of E-type systems must be continually increased to maintain user satisfaction over the system lifetime”. Possible formal models of the law include the following: S(i) = a.i+b Eq. 1 S(i) = S(i-1)+e/[S(i-1)] Eq. 2 S(t) = t Eq. 3 where S represents the size of a system measured, for example, in number of modules, t is the age of the system, and i is the release sequence number. a, b, g, and e are parameters suitably chosen to minimise the fitting error. Eqs. 1-3 provide models of system growth. In fact, Eq. 1 replicates the linear growth pattern of OS 360 (rsn 1-19). Eqs. 2 and 3 replicate within segments the growth of systems studied in FEAST [3, 4]. However, Eqs. 1-3 imply additional detail than that in the statement of the 6 law. Each model prescribes a particular type of growth trajectory. The law prescribes none. For this reason none of the models in isolation will be sufficient if used with the sole purpose of testing the 6th law. Data suggesting a trajectory, different than that of Eqs. 1-3, as for example in [5], is still supportive of the law. Models such as those of Eqs. 1-3 in isolation are not proper tests. A workaround to this problem uses a formalism that considers the phenomenon at a higher level of abstraction than that implied by conventional quantitative modelling, such as qualitative differential equations (QDE) [6]. For example, the 6th law can be expressed in QDE form as: dS/dt = M(t) Eq. 4 M represents any monotonically increasing function. A simple test based on Eq. 4 evaluates S(t) – S(t-1) over the whole data set and checks whether they are greater than zero. If so, the data supports the law. Since a superimposed ripple have been observed in growth patterns [1], data smoothing techniques may have to be applied before the test. However, the fuller potential of the qualitative simulation techniques becomes apparent if one considers that the laws are interrelated. The combined action of the forces implied by the laws may lead to more complex behaviours than monotonic increase or decrease. In order to address this, one can write several QDEs formalising several “measurable” laws. The resulting system of QDEs can be simulated [6, 7] and the outputs compared with that implied by empirical observations. This qualitative simulation approach accounts in a natural way for the fact that the laws are interrelated. Eq. 2 and 3 illustrate interrelationship to some extent. They imply positive but decreasing growth rate and in doing so are consistent with both the 2nd law “increasing complexity” and the 6th law. In applying the conventional quantitative approach, one requires the ingenuity of the model builders for identification of models that acknowledge more than one law. This is not simple. The use of qualitative simulation techniques, a topic for further research [7], are likely to facilitate assessment of joint support in a systematic way and at a higher level of abstraction. The eighth law has been justified based on several observations [1, 2]. Unfortunately, a direct rigorous test of its empirical support is difficult to achieve since the behaviours of even simple feedback systems have not been fully codified [8]. The first seven laws can be rationalised in terms of feedback loop structures in the total E-type evolution process [2]. Hence, positive support to any of the first seven laws provides a degree of support to the eighth law.