Semantic Contribution Research Articles

Verum in Gitksan

AbstractThis article provides an analysis of verum marking in the Tsimshianic language Gitksan. Original fieldwork data are provided to show that Gitksan verum is very similar in its distribution and discourse effects to English verum, but displays two interesting differences. First, Gitksan verum is not marked by focal stress, but by a dedicated particle (k'ap). Second, Gitksan verum does not require givenness of the core propositional material. I argue that when applied to a proposition p, k'ap is (a) disallowed discourse-initially or in answer to a wh-question; (b) felicitous when responding to a prior assertion or implication of ¬p; and (c) felicitous in other contexts only if there is prior controversy in the discourse about the truth of p. I show that the semantic contribution of the Gitksan verum particle can be captured by a discourse management analysis: verum(p) is licensed only when the speaker believes that some interlocutor is committed to ¬p.

Scalar Implicature, Hurford's Constraint, Contrastiveness and How They All Come Together

Disjunction with two scalar items, such assome or all of the books, has been regarded as evidence for the grammatical theory of scalar implicatures (e.g., Chierchia et al.,2012). Hurford's Constraint (Hurford,1974) provides that disjuncts are banned from having an entailing relation, and to make such a disjunction comply with Hurford's Constraint, the meaning ofsomemust be locally strengthened. Interestingly, however, the order of disjoined scalar items is not free, as noted by Singh (2008). The order in which a weaker scalar item comes first followed by its stronger scalar mate is better than the other order. I present an analysis of this ordering restriction based on the novel observation that the restriction is not only found in disjunction but in contrastive environments in general. I propose that contrasting a linguistic expression requires a “contrast antecedent,” which must elicit a set of mutually exclusive alternatives that includes the meaning of the contrasted expression. It will be demonstrated how the mutual exclusivity requirement presents a principled explanation for the ordering asymmetry as well as Hurford's Constraint itself, which indicates that the root of the constraint is not in disjunction but in contrastiveness. One of the indispensable ingredients in the proposal is the grammatical/conventional generation of scalar implicatures, as the strengthened meaning must be the basis of alternatives. The paper also provides a speculative analysis ofonly, in which I suggest that the process of exhaustification in the grammatical theory of scalar implicatures should not be characterized as the implicitonly, the semantic contributions of which are more different than commonly assumed.

Representing Knowledge

A speaker's use of a declarative sentence in a context has two effects: it expresses a proposition and represents the speaker as knowing that proposition. This article is about how to explain the second effect. The standard explanation is act-based. A speaker is represented as knowing because their use of a declarative in a context tokens the act-type of assertion and assertions represent knowledge in what's asserted. In this article, a semantic explanation is proposed according to which declaratives covertly host a know-parenthetical. A speaker is thereby represented as knowing the proposition expressed because that is the semantic contribution of the parenthetical. This view is called PARENTHETICALISM. The article contends that parentheticalism better explains knowledge representation than alternatives. As a consequence of outperforming assertoric explanations, parentheticalism opens the door to altogether eliminating the act-type of assertion from linguistic theorizing.

Sakha 'da(qany)': Negative Polarity, Conjunction, and Focus

This paper discusses the quantifier particle da(qany) in the Siberian Turkic language Sakha (also known as "Yakut"). Focusing on its distribution in negative polarity items (NPIs) and doubled coordination constructions, it is shown that it has a distribution which is far more restricted than similar elements in other languages. In order to account for the semantics of this element, it is argued in an exhaustification-based theory of polarity sensitivity, that da(qany)'s main semantic contribution is to mark the alternative of its host as obligatorily active.

Predicting the end: Epistemic change in Romance

This paper analyzes a verbal periphrasis in European Portuguese (EP) and Italian (I), formed by a verb meaning ‘to end’, a ‘by’-preposition and a verb in the infinitive form (V). We show that this periphrasis—for short, [end by V]—behaves differently from the aspectual terminative periphrasis formed with the verb end , by focusing on three semantic criteria. We argue that the meaning of [end by V] involves a specific type of epistemic modality related to expectation. We compare the periphrasis with the discourse particles afinal (EP) and alla fine (I), both etymologically related to a form meaning ‘end’, which can also express expectation-related modality and have been analyzed as epistemic modal operators sensitive to a temporal succession of epistemic states (Amaral and Del Prete 2016, 2017). To account for the semantic properties of [end by V], we propose a formal analysis of this periphrasis in which the ‘end’-verb, combined with the ‘by’-preposition, selects a property of eventualities P as argument and presupposes the existence of a sequence of events s →. The periphrasis makes a twofold semantic contribution: (i) it asserts that a P -eventuality occurs at the end of the sequence s →, and (ii) it implies that the occurrence of the P -eventuality at the end of s → is ranked below some alternative outcome on a likelihood/preference scale. We discuss the implications of our analysis for the study of epistemic modality. EARLY ACCESS

A constraint-based modeling of negative polarity items in result clause constructions in Romanian

SummaryThe paper discusses the occurrence of emphatic negative polarity items (NPIs) in high degree result clause constructions. We will identify four distributional patterns for Romanian emphatic NPIs. These will range from NPIs that only occur occasionally in result constructions to NPIs that are bound to such constructions and even do not show any truth-conditionally relevant semantic contribution. We reformulate a scalar, pragmatic theory of NPIs in a constraint-based, representational framework,Lexical Resource Semantics. We propose a scalar extension of a standard semantics of result clauses in order to capture the high degree, i.e. intensification readings. The constraint-based, representational perspective of this paper allows for an elegant modeling of the data: (i) We can capture the four distributional patterns as a lexical property of the discussed NPIs. (ii) The semantics and pragmatics of Romanian result clause constructions is accounted for by lexical properties of the result clause complementizers. (iii) A scalar analysis of emphatic NPIs can be applied in embedded clauses and even when the NPI itself does not contribute to the at-issue content of the overall utterance.

The existential/uniqueness presupposition of wh-complements projects from the answers

The projection pattern of the existential/uniqueness presupposition of a wh-complement varies depending on the predicate that embeds it. This variation poses problems for existing accounts that treat the presupposition as a semantic contribution of an operator merging with the wh-complement (Dayal in Locality in Wh-quantification: questions and relative clauses in Hindi. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1996) or of the embedding predicate (Uegaki in Interpreting questions under attitudes. Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD dissertation, Cambridge, 2015). I propose that the problems can be solved if the existential/uniqueness presupposition is contributed by the propositions corresponding to the answers of the embedded question, under the Hamblin/Karttunen semantics for questions.

Applied Objects and the Syntax–Semantics Interface

This paper investigates the syntax–semantics interface within the domain of the realization of applied objects in Bantu languages, and I argue that the syntactic structure and semantic contribution of a given argument-licensing functional head (here, the applicative) do not covary. Specifically, I show that in principle, both high and low applicatives can (and should) be available with any type of applicative and not tied to a specific semantics (such as transfer of possession) or thematic role, as proposed in earlier work. Furthermore, I reject the centrality of thematic roles as a component of grammar that determines the grammatical function of applied objects, and I propose instead a typology of Bantu applied objects based on their semantic and morphological properties. This approach makes several predictions about applied objects: (i) syntactic and semantic diagnostics for high and low applicatives need not pattern together, (ii) syntactic asymmetry (such as c-command) can arise for applied objects which pattern symmetrically with other diagnostics (such as passivization), and (iii) the type of an applied object does not universally capture symmetry properties cross-linguistically. The view put forward in this paper provides a framework that can better capture this type of variation with object symmetry in Bantu languages as well as language-internal facts about applied objects; more generally, this paper sheds light on the nature of the syntax–semantic interface by showing that the meaning of a functional head is not necessarily determined by its syntactic position.

Paul and Scripture

Paul and Scripture

Verbalizing nouns and adjectives: The case of behavior-related verbs

In languages such as French, it is possible to derive from nouns or adjectives unergative verbs that intuitively describe ways of behaving, for example, diplomatiser ‘behave like a diplomat’, or bêtifier ‘behave like an idiot’. In addition to their unergative use, a number of behavior-related verbs have formally identical counterparts that are causative, anticausative or transitive activity verbs. The availability of the additional uses depends on the morphological make-up of the verb. This paper provides a semantic analysis of each use of these verbs, which is derived in a compositional fashion from the meaning of their different morphological pieces. We focus on the semantic contribution of the incorporated noun or adjective, by looking at the entailment patterns between the verb (e.g., diplomatiser ‘behave like a diplomat’, bêtifier ‘behave like an idiot’) and the corresponding noun (e.g., être (un/une) diplomate ‘be a diplomat’) or adjective (e.g., être bête ‘be stupid’). We observe that the noun is (re)interpreted in the same way in both the behavior-related verb and the figurative reading of the indefinite NP. The analysis proposed explicitly captures this figurative reading of (e.g.) être un/une diplomate ‘be a diplomat’, the link between the meaning shift of N in this reading and in diplomatiser ‘behave like a diplomat’, the additional causative, anti-causative and non-causative transitive uses of the verbs at study, as well as the entailment patterns observed. We also account for the way the morphosyntactic makeup of the predicate restricts the range of available readings.

Trying to make it work: Compositional effects in the processing of compound "nonwords".

Speakers of languages with synchronically productive compounding systems, such as English, are likely to encounter new compounds on a daily basis. These can only be useful for communication if speakers are able to rapidly compose their meanings. However, while compositional meanings can be obtained for some novel compounds such as bridgemill, this is far harder for others such as radiosauce; accordingly, processing speed should be affected by the ease of such a compositional process. To rigorously test this hypothesis, we employed a fully implemented computational model based on distributional semantics to quantitatively measure the degree of semantic compositionality of novel compounds. In two large-scale studies, we collected timed sensibility judgements and lexical decisions for hundreds of morphologically structured nonwords in English. Response times were predicted by the constituents' semantic contribution to the compositional process, with slower rejections for more compositional nonwords. We found no indication of a difference in these compositional effects between the tasks, suggesting that speakers automatically engage in a compositional process whenever they encounter morphologically structured stimuli, even when it is not required by the task at hand. Such compositional effects in the processing of novel compounds have important implications for studies that employ such stimuli as filler material or "nonwords," as response times for these items can differ greatly depending on their compositionality.

An approach for measuring semantic similarity between Wikipedia concepts using multiple inheritances

Wikipedia provides a huge collaboratively made semi-structured taxonomy called Wikipedia category graph (WCG), which can be utilized as a Knowledge Graph (KG) to measure the semantic similarity (SS) between Wikipedia concepts. Previously, several Most Informative Common Ancestor-based (MICA-based) SS methods have been proposed by intrinsically manipulating the taxonomic structure of WCG. However, some basic structural issues in WCG such as huge size, branching factor and multiple inheritance relations hamper the applicability of traditional MICA-based and multiple inheritance-based approaches in it. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a solution to handle these structural issues and present a new multiple inheritance-based SS approach, called Neighborhood Ancestor Semantic Contribution (NASC). In this approach, firstly, we define the neighborhood of a category (a taxonomic concept in WCG) to define its semantic space. Secondly, we describe the semantic value of a category by aggregating the intrinsic IC-based semantic contribution weights of its semantically relevant multiple ancestors. Thirdly, based on our approach, we propose six different methods to compute the SS between Wikipedia concepts. Finally, we evaluate our methods on gold standard word similarity benchmarks for English, German, Spanish and French languages. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed NASC-based methods remarkably outperform traditional MICA-based and multiple inheritance-based approaches.

ЧАСТИЦЫ В ВОПРОСАХ С НАРЕЧИЯМИ ГДЕ, КУДА И ОТКУДА

The article describes the semantics of the particles еще , же , именно , ну , так , это in interrogative sentences with the adverbs где (where), куда (which way) and откуда (where from). The author aims to reveal the semantic contribution of these particles to the meaning of interrogative sentences with the adverbs где , куда and откуда and to identify their functions in sentences. For example, one possible function of these particles is to indicate the addition of new objects to those already in place and the particle же implies overcoming the situation of information inconsistency. The paper examines in detail the meanings of each of the mentioned particles, describes the conditions for realization of a certain function.

The Romance of Modal Superlatives as Degree Descriptions

In this paper, I present a novel compositional analysis of modal predicative superlatives, that is, predicative superlatives accompanied by modal adjectives such as possible, as that in (1). (1) Mary wanted to be the prettiest possible. I argue that they are elliptical bona fide degree-relative clauses denoting maximal degrees and whose semantic contribution is similar to that of Measure Phrases. This account will require a novel composition of the superlative which involves the formation of an ordered set and the selection of a maximal element. I argue that not only is this account able to derive their peculiar semantics (dispensing us from the ad hoc components that previous accounts posited), but it can also capture the morphosyntax of these constructions, especially in Romance languages, which turn out more informative than English in this respect.

The search for truth: Appositives weigh in

The semantic and pragmatic contribution of appositives to their containing sentence is a subject of continuing debate. While unidimensional semantic accounts propose that appositives contribute their truth conditions to their containing sentence, multidimensional accounts predict that they do not. In three experiments, we directly compared judgments of the truth of sentences containing appositives and sentences containing conjunctions. Our findings contribute both a method- ological and a theoretical point. First, we show that no conclusions about the truth-conditional contributions of appositives can be drawn from experimental work without further investigation of how participants provide truth value judgments for complex sentences. Second, we show that while appositives appear to contribute truth values to their containing sentences, participants are highly sensitive to task features when they compute the truth value of sentences with appositives and also, crucially, with conjunctions. Specifically, we show that both sentences containing appositives and those containing conjunctions can be judged true even when the appositive or one conjunct is patently false. We conclude that it is unlikely that these results reflect semantic judgments, and suggest that they reflect truth only at the speech-act level.

Reference in Fiction

Abstract Most discussions of proper names in fiction concern the names of fictional characters, such as ‘Clarissa Dalloway’ or ‘Lilliput.’ Less attention has been paid to referring names in fiction, such as ‘Napoleon’ (in Tolstoy’s War and Peace) or ‘London’ (in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). This is because many philosophers simply assume that such names are unproblematic; they refer in the usual way to their ordinary referents. The alternative position, dubbed Exceptionalism by Manuel García-Carpintero, maintains that referring names make a distinctive semantic contribution in fiction. In this paper I offer a positive argument for Non-Exceptionalism, relying on the claim that works of both fiction and non-fiction can express the same singular propositions. I go on to defend my account against García-Carpintero’s objections.

Per una semiotica della rima

Abstract The article, following a suggestion of Barthes, attempts to outline a semiotics of the technique of rhyming considered as a sub-code of poetic language, in order to better understand the important contribution provided by rhyme, on many levels, to the strategies of signification of the literary text. This semiotic approach is inscribed in a general theory of rhyme under development by the author, which aims at explaining the raison d’être and fortune of this poetic device in relation to its decisive contribution to the rhetorical and figurative elaboration of the poetic text. In a semiotic perspective, three fundamental levels of structuring rhyme as a sign can be distinguished: its signifier (the partial phonic identity which, in the current view, is considered to be rhyme’s exhaustive definition), its meaning (the semantic interference between rhyming words only) and its sense (the relation between rhyme’s meaning and context). A short reference is also made to further aspects of the the sub-code of rhyme, such as its syntax (strophic patterns) and the role of pools of rhymes. This leads to a reappraisal of some significant questions raised by the technique of rhyme, e. g. whether or not it always makes a semantic contribution, or what the interplay between its limitations to freedom of expression and its contribution to the expressiveness and poetic value of the text is. The theoretical tools are finally put to the test in a short analysis of the rhyme-words in the form of the sestine.

Learning chinese word embeddings from character structural information

Word embedding is a basic task in natural language processing area. Unlike English, Chinese subword units, such as characters, radicals, and components, contain rich semantic information which can be used to enhance word embeddings. However, existing methods neglect the semantic contribution of corresponding subword units to the word. In this work, we employ attention mechanism to capture the semantic structure of Chinese words and propose a novel framework, named Attention-based multi-Layer Word Embedding model(ALWE). We also design an asynchronous strategy for updating embedding and attention efficiently. Our model learns to share subword information between distinct words selectively and adaptively. Experimental results on the word similarity, word analogy, and text classification show that the proposed model outperforms all baselines, especially when words do not appear frequently. Qualitative analysis further demonstrates the superiority of ALWE.

Sobre o papel temático da preposição “com”

O artigo apresenta uma tentativa de análise unificada para o papel temático ou contribuição semântica fornecida pela preposição “com” em diversos contextos, incluindo os casos de predicados simétricos e não simétricos em que “com” expressa o mesmo papel semântico de um dos argumentos verbais. A hipótese é que a preposição “com” não expressa ou atribui diferentes papéis aos seus complementos, mas realiza sempre a mesma contribuição semântica, que pode ser caracterizada como a atribuição do traço de “participante do evento” (GOMES, 2017). As interpretações diversas que os complementos de “com” atualizam decorrem da interação entre o traço “participante do evento” e os traços semânticos inerentes ao DP complemento e ao predicado eventivo ao qual o PP está conectado, auxiliados por implicaturas conversacionais.

Gestural Cosuppositions within the Transparency Theory

Gestural Cosuppositions within the Transparency Theory