Implicit Argument Research Articles

Responses to Speaks, Stojnić and Szabó

Consider the class of contextually sensitive expressions whose context invariant meanings arguably do not suffice to secure semantic values in context. Demonstratives and demonstrative pronouns are the examples of such expressions that have received the most attention from philosophers. However, arguably this class of contextually sensitive expressions includes among other expressions modals, conditionals, tense, gradable adjectives, possessives, ‘only’, quantifiers, and expressions that take implicit arguments (e.g. ‘ready’ in sentences like ‘Molly is ready.’). Most theorists, including me, think that since the context invariant meanings of such expressions do not by themselves secure semantic values in context for these expressions, they must be supplemented in some way in context in order to secure semantic values in context. For this reason, I call these expressions supplementives. I just said that supplementives need some sort of supplementation to secure semantic values in context. Of course, the question of what form the supplementation in context takes is controversial. For example, ever since Kaplan claimed that the semantic value of a demonstrative or demonstrative pronoun in context is the demonstratum of its associated demonstration, there has been a lively controversy over whether that or some other account is the correct one. Call an account of how a given supplementive secures a semantic value in context a metasemantics for the supplementive. In King [2018] I argue that all supplementives have felicitous uses in which they haven’t been assigned unique semantic values in context. This conclusion is somewhat surprising, since many uses of supplementives in which they have not been assigned unique semantic values in context are quite infelicitous. I call felicitous uses of supplementives in which they haven’t been assigned unique semantic values in context instances of felicitous underspecification. The central idea is that in cases of felicitous underspecification, supplementives get assigned a range of candidates for being their semantic values in contexts rather than being assigned unique semantic values in contexts. Consider an example. Glenn and I are out surfing at Lost Winds beach. There are some surfers to our south stretching a quarter mile or so down the beach. I notice that some surfers in an ill-defined group to our immediate south are getting incredible rides. I say to Glenn looking south toward them ‘Those guys are good.’ It seems easy to imagine that nothing in the context of utterance determines a unique group of surfers as the semantic value in context of ‘Those guys’. For example, it is easy to imagine that I didn’t intend any specific, unique group to be the semantic value in context. Instead, there is a range of overlapping groups that are legitimate candidates for being the semantic value in context of ‘Those guys’. Nonetheless, my utterance is felicitous: Glenn had no qualms about my utterance and took it to be impeccably acceptable. So this is an instance of felicitous underspecification. As its title suggests, felicitous underspecification is the main topic of the present book. Here is a summary of what is in each chapter. Chapter 1 provides examples of felicitous underspecification for a variety of supplementives. In each case of felicitous underspecification considered in Chap. 1, I say how I think conversational participants update the Stalnakerian common ground after accepting the utterance of the sentence containing a felicitous underspecified use of a supplementive. I do so without there formulating a principle that determines the updates in question. In Chap. 2, I formulate such a principle and illustrate its predictions with some of the cases of felicitous underspecification considered in Chap. 1. I claim the principle correctly predicts the updates discussed in Chap. 1. In Chap. 3, I consider and discuss the mechanism that I claim associates ranges of candidate semantic values in context with felicitous underspecified uses of supplementives. In Chap. 4, I discuss cases in which felicitous underspecified uses of supplementives are embedded in certain ways: under negation, and under ‘believes’ and ‘doubts’. In Chap. 5 I take up I take up the question of why sentences containing felicitous underspecified uses of supplementives are felicitous in the contexts in which they are uttered. In particular, I formulate a notion of a context being appropriate for an LF, where an LF is felicitous in a context only if the context is appropriate for the LF. In particular, an LF ϕ containing a use of an underspecified supplementive in a context c will be felicitous only if c is appropriate for ϕ. In Chap. 6, I take up some problems that arise with underspecified uses of pronouns, demonstratives and possessives and consider revising the appropriateness condition of Chap. 5.

On the Representation of Implicit Arguments in Child Grammar: Short Passives in Mandarin and English

On the Representation of Implicit Arguments in Child Grammar: Short Passives in Mandarin and English

A graph propagation model with rich event structures for joint event relation extraction

The task of event relation extraction (ERE) aims to organize multiple events and their relations as a directed graph. However, existing ERE methods exhibit two limitations: (1) Events in a document are typically expressed with merely a trigger word or phrase neglecting the rich semantic structure of event arguments and roles. (2) Various event relations such as coreference, temporal, causal, and subevent relations are correlated with each other, while little work has explored the benefits of extracting all relations in a joint manner. In this work, we investigate an event-relation graph propagation network and a novel document-level semantically-enriched event representation for joint ERE. First, we address the lack of event argument annotations by extracting cross-sentence implicit arguments based on the AMR graph. Then triggers and argument roles are aggregated with a structure-aware encoder. Second, based on the rich event information, event relation interactions are incorporated with a subgraph propagation and aggregation mechanism. During training, we further develop a novel triadic contrastive loss to capture high-order event pair relationships. We conduct experiments based on the public MAVEN-ERE benchmark and the results show that our model achieves 60.7%, 37.4%, 32.9% F1-scores on temporal, causal and subevent relations, and 86.1% MUC-score on coreferences, outperforming the current joint models by a large margin. Further in-depth analysis shows the effectiveness of our model in capturing event-event dependencies in document context. The proposed model can be used for event graph construction and storyline understanding.

Bessarion on the Value of Oral Teaching and the Rule of Secrecy

Cardinal Bessarion (1408–1472), in the second chapter of the first book of his influential work In calumniatorem Platonis, attempted to reply to Georgios Trapezuntios’ (1396–1474) criticism against Plato in the Comparatio Philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis. Bessarion investigates why the Athenian philosopher maintained, in several dialogues, that the sacred truths should not be communicated to the general public and argued in favor of the value of oral transmission of knowledge, largely based on his theory about the cognitive processes. Recently, Fr. Bessarion Kouotsis has argued that Cardinal Bessarion’s reasoning draws primarily on the “Disciplina Arcani”, i.e., the rule of secrecy, which was an established practice of the Early Christian Church, aimed at protecting and preserving the core elements of the religion from outsiders. While I find Kouotsis’ approach interesting and thought-provoking—for instance, the idea that Bessarion’s argumentation was likely influenced by Eastern Christian views on the rule of secrecy—I intend, first of all, to discuss why Bessarion did not explicitly mention it. Moreover, I would like to argue that Bessarion’s good knowledge of the long Platonic tradition and Eastern mysticism, encompassing both pagan and Christian elements, should also be considered a significant source. Furthermore, I would like to question Kouotsis’ implicit argument that Bessarion’s views were dominated by his training in Orthodox theology and discuss the possibility that Pletho’s (1355–1454) teaching was the obvious influence for Bessarion’s defense of secrecy. After all, we should bear in mind that Anastos has already pointed out Pletho’s reverence for the rule of secrecy. Finally, I would like to support that Bessarion, in the specific text, focused predominantly on the epistemological and cognitive aspects of oral teaching, resorting to the rule of secrecy only to enhance his views.

Defining media speech effectiveness: A case of Ukrainian president Zelenskyy's addresses to national parliaments

The paper argues that effectiveness of media speeches, i.e., their ability to influence the addressees, largely rests on national prototypes, representing cultural entities and historic events. The national prototypes are clear and accessible, resonating with the addressees' values, attitudes, and beliefs. The article analyzes rhetorical effectiveness of Ukrainian president's addresses delivered at the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian full-scale war to parliaments of seven states: Poland, USA, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan and Greece. Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeals to the target audiences' national prototypes representing events or cultural entities correlating with Ukraine's current plight. It is found that with respect to the similarity to the national prototypes of other countries the arguments employed in Zelenskyy’s speeches fall into three types: direct, implicit, and gradual. The most effective is direct reference to prototypes at the global or national levels of the listeners' worldviews. Less effective are implicit arguments left for the addressee to be inferred like any other implicature. The least effective are gradual arguments based on presuppositions about some commonly shared information: they modify the existing national prototypes with reference to the present or future which is not always accepted by the audience.

Passive without morphology

Abstract This paper examines the syntax of a novel construction I call Passive without Morphology (PwM) constructions in Bùlì and the question of whether they have projected external arguments. The main proposal that I argue for is that PwM constructions in all their occurrences possess projected implicit external arguments. The discussions presented in the paper provide empirical as well as theoretical support for the classification of passives (Keenan and Dryer 2007) and a theory of passives and implicit arguments (Collins 2021). This paper argues that the internal argument moves to Spec,TP in two steps: first, the VP moves into Spec, VoiceP and from there the internal argument raises to Spec,TP (Collins 2005, 2021).

Wawasan Kebangsaan Perspektif Islam: Konsepsi Nasionalisme Dalam Al-Qur’an

Currently, the Indonesian people are quite friendly with conflicts and social problems. Poverty, corruption, weak cultural resilience as well as inter-ethnic conflicts and conflicts in the name of religion are rife as challenges that directly or indirectly affect the size of nationalism and love for the homeland among Indonesian people. As a country with a large Muslim population, Indonesia should be based on Islamic values ​​in the order of life. Islam as a universal religion, has regulated various aspects of human life, including the values ​​of nationalism and love for the homeland. This paper was written as an effort to explore the scientific treasures of the national argument in an Islamic perspective, namely to dig deeper into the relationship between Islam and the spirit of nationalism and love for the homeland. The approach used in this paper is library research. The results of the study indicate that the implicit arguments for nationalism and love for the homeland can be found in the Qur'an and the hadith of the Prophet. Nationalism which is affirmed in the Qur'an is nationalism in the broad sense or the spirit of nationalism. Meanwhile, in the perspective of the Prophet's history, the events leading up to the Prophet's migration and the Medina Charter are a concrete form of nationalism that has been exemplified by the Prophet Muhammad.

The -eci Syncretism in Korean: Implications for the Theory of v and Voice

Abstract This paper investigates the syncretism exhibited by the Korean verbal suffix -eci. In addition to its widely known appearance in the passive construction, -eci can also be used to derive verbs expressing potentiality. In this paper, I show that two independently motivated theoretical tools — (i) the articulated verbal structure with root, verbalizer, and Voice; and (ii) the assumption that morphological identity signifies the morpheme's realization of an identical syntactic head — accurately explain the passive-potential syncretism in Korean. Specifically, I argue that -eci realizes a syntactic head that the passive and potential structures have in common: vGO, the verbalizer marking the eventuality of ‘change’. I attribute the systematic morpho-syntactic and semantic contrasts between passives and potentials to the (non)existence of VoicePASS, the projection introducing an implicit external argument. The analysis successfully captures the properties of the other constructions formed upon -eci — namely, derived change-of-state and lexical inchoative predicates.

Ellipsis, contradiction and voice mismatch

Previous research has attributed differences in the acceptability of verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) with voice mismatches to processing effects (Arregui et al. 2006, Grant et al. 2012). This paper argues that they can instead be accounted for in terms of a standard, focus-based condition on ellipsis (Rooth 1992a,b), supplemented with the principle that accommodated antecedents cannot contradict an elliptical sentence. This perspective is compatible with voice mismatched VPE being fundamentally grammatical (Merchant 2013, cf. Hardt 1993) rather than ungrammatical (e.g. Kim & Runner 2018). It also encompasses other focus-based factors modulating voice mismatches, which in turn reveal that implicit arguments do not count for contrast in VPE (cf. Overfelt to appear). The account here aligns with a reappraisal of the ‘mismatch asymmetry’ (Arregui et al. 2006) as being driven by a penalty against passive ellipsis in subject focus environments (Poppels & Kehler 2019).

Review of Ahmed Fal Sbai’s The Authenticity Dilemma in the Arab Pragmatic Discourse:

This book is a compelling contribution to modern criticism, and critical discourse analysis in particular. The book itself is a critique of the Arab pragmatic discourse, wherein A. F. Sbai (PhD.) lays great emphasis on wider developments and intervening factors, taking T. Abdel Rahman’s published works as a focal case for study to support his central implicit argument and intentions: the deconstruction of the entire Abdel Rahman-based discourse community and the introduction of his project of Islamic pragmatics. This review focuses mainly on the deconstructionism in action of primary sources, which is the critical approach Sbai adopts to arrive at his revolutionary findings successfully.

The antipassive in Kirundi

The Kirundi verbal suffix -an is notably polysemous with three possible meanings: reciprocal, associative, and antipassive. The contexts in which the antipassive is ambiguous or distinct raise questions for -an’s syntactic and semantic analysis. In this paper, I examine new data which demonstrate that -an’s primary function is to add a relation between the verb and an implicit argument. These data support an analysis where -an is a specialized high applicative head (ApplREL) which adds the semantics of such a relation. The distribution of the different meanings is then accounted for by differential semantic selection and binding. This analysis thereby simplifies -an to its relational role and accounts for the ambiguous and non-ambiguous contexts that characterize the suffix. Additionally, this paper addresses various questions about -an’s antipassive status and potential issues with the applicative approach.

Implicit Event Argument Extraction With Argument-Argument Relational Knowledge

As a challenging sub-task of event argument extraction, implicit event argument extraction seeks to identify document-level arguments that play direct or implicit roles in a given event. Prior work mainly focuses on capturing direct relations between arguments and the event trigger; however, the lack of reasoning ability imposes limitations to the extraction of implicit arguments. In this work, we propose an <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">A</b> rgument-argument <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">R</b> elation-enhanced <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">E</b> vent <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">A</b> rgument extraction (AREA) learning framework to tackle this issue through reasoning in event frame-level scope. The proposed method leverages related arguments of the expected one as clues, and utilizes such argument-argument dependencies to guide the reasoning process. To bridge the distribution gap between oracle knowledge used in the training phase and the imperfect related arguments in the test stage, we introduce a conventional knowledge distillation strategy to drive a final model that can work without extra inputs by mimicking the behaviour of a well-informed teacher model. In addition, considering that conventional knowledge distillation methods transfer knowledge individually, we integrate it with a novel relational knowledge distillation mechanism to explicitly capture the structural mutual argument-argument relation. Moreover, since the training process is not compatible with the real situation, a curriculum learning method is further introduced to make the training process smoother. Experimental results demonstrate that the learning framework obtains state-of-the-art performance on the RAMS and Wikievents datasets. Ablation study and further discussion also show it could handle long-range dependency and implicit argument problems effectively.

Did dawkins recant his selfish gene argument against group selection?

In 2007, David S. Wilson and Edward O. Wilson (27) pointed out that, Richard Dawkins had admitted that, contrary to what he had claimed in his book The Selfish Gene (1976) (7), the idea that only the gene is a fundamental unit of selection cannot be used as an argument against the notion of group selection. This elicited a sharp denial from Dawkins (30), which was followed by an explanatory reply by Wilson and Wilson (33) and another vehement denial by Dawkins (34). I analyse the prehistory of this surprisingly complex and convoluted dispute and subsequently disentangle it. My conclusion is that much of it is based on a series of misunderstandings. First, Wilson's and Wilson's (27) original interpretation of Dawkins' selfish gene argument was incorrect. Second, in their explanatory reply (33), they distinguished between two kinds of group selection: the idea that groups can be units of selection (theoretical group selection) and the idea that group selection plays a functional role in evolution (functional group selection). They clarified that their claim concerned theoretical group selection, not functional group selection. Third, that clarified claim was correct and not correct. It was incorrect because Dawkins has never explicitly acknowledged that he had erred by developing his selfish gene theory as an implicit argument against this kind of group selection. However, the distinction that he made, by 1978, between two kinds of unit of selection, replicators (genes) and vehicles (somas), does imply such an acknowledgment since it holds that groups can be units of selection (vehicles). In this important sense, Wilson's and Wilson's clarified claim (33) was correct. Fourth, Dawkins' second denial (34) concerned functional group selection, not theoretical group selection.

Traveling wave solutions to the inclined or periodic free boundary incompressible Navier-Stokes equations

This paper concerns the construction of traveling wave solutions to the free boundary incompressible Navier-Stokes system. We study a single layer of viscous fluid in a strip-like domain that is bounded below by a flat rigid surface and above by a moving surface. The fluid is acted upon by a bulk force and a surface stress that are stationary in a coordinate system moving parallel to the fluid bottom. We also assume that the fluid is subject to a uniform gravitational force that can be resolved into a sum of a vertical component and a component lying in the direction of the traveling wave velocity. This configuration arises, for instance, in the modeling of fluid flow down an inclined plane. We also study the effect of periodicity by allowing the fluid cross section to be periodic in various directions. The horizontal component of the gravitational field gives rise to stationary solutions that are pure shear flows, and we construct our solutions as perturbations of these by means of an implicit function argument. An essential component of our analysis is the development of some new functional analytic properties of a scale of anisotropic Sobolev spaces, including that these spaces are an algebra in the supercritical regime, which may be of independent interest.

The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico

The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico

Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies by Molly P. Rozum

Reviewed by: Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies by Molly P. Rozum Tracy Sanford Tucker Molly P. Rozum, Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. 474 pp. Hardcover, $75; paper, $35; e-book, $35. The development of an identity of place—and the interplay between place and regional or national identities—is the focus of Molly P. Rozum’s examination of the northern Great Plains. Crucially, Rozum’s scope includes the entirety of the northern Great Plains ecological region, introducing a helpful transnational perspective that is too often missing in our study of the culture and people of the Plains. Grasslands Grown examines the words and works of a number of writers, artists, ethnologists, journalists, politicians, and others as they reflect on their formative experiences on the land. Rozum assesses the ways that childhood nature play and exploration in particular helped children of new settlers to forge strong connections to local place. These highly personal and imaginative episodes involving animals, plants, and the earth itself created, in Rozum’s words, a “‘small world’ [of] wonderment, producing feelings and sensitivities that remained powerful for lifetimes” (94). These natural rhythms of the wild Plains shaped but were distinct from the rhythms of settler colonial agriculture, just as the mythology of the pioneer underpinned an evolving, deepening sense of place. Inversely, Indigenous children, subject to removal and assimilation at distant boarding schools, experienced a near-total disruption of these physical experiences with place, contributing to their dislocation from place and culture. But for the children of settlers on the northern Plains, “shared educational aspirations” inspired these young adults to travel and study at normal schools and universities, adding to their knowledge of “their” place as they learned of and experienced other similar places in the region, the nation, and the world (165). In so doing, Rozum says, they “recrafted” their versions of the [End Page 423] home place. Memories of childhood, selected and reframed by a mature understanding of geography, science, industrialization, and nationalism, permitted this generation to “overlay the ecological North American northern grasslands” with regional identity rooted in settler society (174). One of Rozum’s most intriguing chapters, “‘Old Woman Who Never Dies’ and Old Man’s Garden,” charts several important ways that the first generation of children in this settler society interacted with Indigenous people and culture. The children of settlers often made “an implicit argument that they had a claim equivalent to Indigenous peoples” borne of the very physical experiences discussed above; in other cases, they adopted their parents’ firsthand acquaintances with Indigenous people as their own in the selection of memories and crafting of their own identities (176). Though often sympathetic to Native people, the first generation of settler children still “revealed racial hierarchical thinking” that excused any appropriation of Indigenous knowledge and culture and denied the continuing damage done by colonialism (216). The literature ultimately created by this generation of children of the Northern Plains “conveyed a sense of place . . . by mixing memories and settler-society social experiences,” just as Willa Cather had done for the central plains of Nebraska earlier in the century (260). However, Rozum has identified a distinct ecological transnational region that functions and feels separate from Cather’s principally American Great Plains, despite the many commonalities between Rozum’s artists and writers and Cather’s own upbringing and childhood experiences. This useful analysis of place-making on the Great Plains helps to answer the question: when—and how— does one become local? [End Page 424] Tracy Sanford Tucker National Willa Cather Center Copyright © 2023 Western Literature Association ...

Another reason academic libraries should love the NEH: Or what I did last summer

This essay is an implicit argument for academic librarians to seek out and participate in National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Seminars and Institutes for Academic Faculty. It takes the form of my account of the NEH Seminar that I attended for four weeks in July 2022. The seminar was called Printing and the Book During the Reformation: 1450–1650, and it was aimed at higher education faculty. Since attending my first NEH Summer Institute in 2007, I’ve felt like this is a scholarly activity that librarians have not pursued as readily as others in the academic community, almost certainly because of the amount of time it takes, which is admittedly a challenge. Nevertheless, the payoff is worth it for participants and their organizations, especially for the three reasons I mention at the end. This seminar took place at The Ohio State University and consisted of 16 participants from colleges and universities across the United States. With only a couple exceptions, all of our seminar activities took place in the Thompson Library and mostly in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library (RBML), or the glass-fronted classroom at the opposite end of the first floor.

Look: How a Highly Influential Magazine Helped Define Mid-Twentieth Century America

Look: How a Highly Influential Magazine Helped Define Mid-Twentieth Century America

Linearly qualified types: generic inference for capabilities and uniqueness

A linear parameter must be consumed exactly once in the body of its function. When declaring resources such as file handles and manually managed memory as linear arguments, a linear type system can verify that these resources are used safely. However, writing code with explicit linear arguments requires bureaucracy. This paper presents linear constraints, a front-end feature for linear typing that decreases the bureaucracy of working with linear types. Linear constraints are implicit linear arguments that are filled in automatically by the compiler. We present linear constraints as a qualified type system,together with an inference algorithm which extends GHC's existing constraint solver algorithm. Soundness of linear constraints is ensured by the fact that they desugar into Linear Haskell.

Wages for Housework: The Marxist-Feminist Case for Basic Income

This article explores the Marxist-feminist critique of capitalism of the International Feminist Collective (IFC) of the1970s and its Wages for Housework (WfH) campaign. WfH theorists, including Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici, Marie Mies and Claudia von Werlhof, combine Marxist and feminist perspectives to articulate a compelling critique of capitalism designed to unite the entire working class, including both waged and unwaged workers. I argue that, despite the movement’s seemingly narrower slogan, the WfH demand was an implicit argument for an unconditional, individual, and universal basic income. Like other historical precedents of contemporary basic income movements, the WfH campaign was unsuccessful in achieving its policy goal. Despite its failure, its identification of unwaged housewives as workers, its extension of the concept of the housewife to precarious workers in the globalized economy, and its identification of the strategic deficiencies of mainstream working class and feminist movements are critical to contextualizing contemporary debates on basic income and to the development of successful strategies for contemporary working class movements.