Syntactic Items Research Articles

Schiffer on modes of presentation

Any attempt to explain intentional behaviour will face the problem of modes of presentation. What one does depends on what one thinks and desires. If Lois likes Clark Kent and believes that Clark Kent cannot fly, she would plead with him not to jump off a tall building. Though Lois also likes Superman, she would not plead with Superman not to jump off a tall building; but, of course, Clark Kent is Superman. So Lois must be thinking about the same individual under different modes of presentation. The way we think of modes is as syntactic items in the language of thought. These syntactic items, given a context, relate a believer to a proposition believed. One and the same proposition could be accepted and rejected without the believer being aware of this. Given this account of modes, there is a neat explanation of Lois's behaviour with regard to Clark Kent/Superman, which appeals neither to senses nor narrow content.' Any difference in Lois's behaviour will be explained as due to differences of syntactic items in her belief box2 (as it were). When Lois pleads with Clark Kent not to jump she does so because she believes the proposition (Clark Kent, non-flier), and she believes this because the syntactic string 'Clark Kent cannot fly' enters her belief box. When Lois does not plead with Superman not to jump, it is because she believes the proposition (Clark Kent, flier), and she believes this because the syntactic string 'Superman can fly' enters her belief box. In a number of recent writings3 Schiffer has proposed a roadblock to this neat explanation. Modes must relate believers to the same proposition in different ways. Schiffer attacks modes of presentation by saying that there exists nothing that is adequate to play this role. So there is nothing that

Modes of presentation?

man flies' and 'Superman doesn't fly'. Thus, Schiffer gives no reason to think that Floyd violates the principle of rationality that if one is disposed to think something of the form Sa and --Sb then one will be disposed to think -(a = b). Floyd does not have these syntactic strings in his belief box, so he does not flout this maxim. So the neat explanation that modes are syntactic items in a language of thought, survives Schiffer's objections. Armed with this, one can then go on to explain behaviour via the contents of thoughts (and desires). Elsewhere we have argued that this theory has great explanatory power: handles twin-earth problems, names puzzles, vacuous singular thoughts, opacity problems, identity puzzles, and a host of other traditional issues in the philosophy of mind and language. It's a good thing Schiffer is wrong!4

Using slots and modifiers in logic grammars for natural language

In this paper, ideas are presented for the expression of natural language grammars in clausal logic, following the work of Colmerauer, Kowalski, Dahl, Warren, and F. Pereira. A uniform format for syntactic structures is proposed, in which every syntactic item consists of a central predication, a cluster of modifiers, a list of features, and a determiner. The modifiers of a syntactic item are again syntactic items (of the same format), and a modifier's determiner shows its function in the semantic structure. Rules for semantic interpretation are given which include the determination of scoping of modifiers (with quantifier scoping as a special case). In the rules for syntax, the notions of slots and slot-filling play an important role, based on previous work by the author. The ideas have been tested in an English data base query system, implemented in Prolog.

Syntactic complexity and information transmission in first-graders: A cross-cultural study

Some differences between child and adult communication are due to general developmental immaturity and some to language-specific factors. The Piagetan concept of syncretism exemplifies an hypothecated universal of psycholinguistic development, and it results in child texts characterized by minimally structured temporal, causal, and logical connections. A different sort of problem is that, within a specific language, certain syntactic items may fail to mature in children at the expected rate, because of structural oddities of the constructions. English has several such constructions, generally peculiar in their conflict between surface- and deep-structure subject of the main verb. It is predictable that a syncretistic child attempting to deal with such items in a text will analyze them according to the surface-structure analogic method which defines verbal syncretism, and so will fail to make sense of them. Finally, cutting across these child language features are others peculiar to the language of specific groups of children, such as the putative communication impairment of the disadvantaged black child, whose language has been described by some researchers as less efficient and slower to mature than that of others. Clearly, if this is so, then black children's language should at any young age show more evidence of syncretistic communicative immaturity as well as slower development of adult syntactic patterns. The present paper, then, investigates on a cross-cultural basis the dual hypotheses of syncretism and faulty mastery of difficult syntax, by means of an experimental story-repeating format first used by Piaget. Hypotheses are examined for the cause of children's distinctive communication technique, and the whole question of the significance of black/white differences in communicative style and verbal maturity is discussed.

The predictability of words and their grammatical classes as a function of rate of deletion from a speech transcript

Summary The “cloze” procedure, which requires raters to fill in words deleted from a transcript and provides a measure of the predictability of speech, was used to study the predictability of the various grammatical classes and of specific items drawn from them, and changes in such predictability with systematic variation in rate of textual deletion (from every second item deleted to every sixth item deleted). A transcript of running speech elicited by TAT cards constituted the text and two measures were obtained indicating success in verbatim identification (V) and success in form-class identification (FC); the relation between these two measures was also examined. The main findings are (a) that success both in FC and V completion increases moderately with decreasing frequency of deletion, but that raters do fairly well, particularly for FC scores, even when every second item is deleted; (b) that there are considerable differences in performance between grammatical classes both for FC and V scores, these differences being less for the former scores than the latter; and (c) that within any given grammatical class there are still substantial differences among the items with regard to both verbatim and form-class predictability. It was argued that the determinants of FC and V predictability are rather different, FC predictability being more dependent upon the relatively close grammatical environment whereas V predictability depends more on both close and remote topical content or semantic features of discourse. It was also suggested that these determinants may vary with the particular grammatical class under consideration. While grammatical or form-class contraints are tighter than contraints on specific identification it was suggested that the V or V/FC measure provides an underestimate of the actual predictability of the sense of the discourse, and that the communicative significance of a particular level of V or V/FC success may vary with the grammatical class involved, being greater for semantic than for syntactic items.