Version Of Semantics Research Articles

Changing the Modal Context

Abstract:Conditionals that contain a modality in the consequent give rise to a particular semantic phenomenon whereby the antecedent of the conditional blocks possibilities when interpreting the modality in the consequent. This explains the puzzling logical behaviour of constructions like “If you don't buy a lottery ticket, you can't win”, “If you eat that poison, it is unlikely that you will survive the day” and “If you kill Harry, you ought to kill him gently”. In this paper it is argued that a semantic version of the Ramsey Test provides a key in the analysis of such constructions. The logic for this semantics is axiomatized and some examples are studied, among them a well‐known puzzle for contrary‐to‐duty obligations.

Demonstratives as individual concepts

Using a version of situation semantics, this article argues that bare and complex demonstratives are interpreted as individual concepts.

An ERP study of category priming: Evidence of early lexical semantic access

We investigated the effects of lexical semantic access on early components of high-density ERPs. Participants performed five blocks of a standard lexical decision (LD) task in which visually presented words were distinguished from nonwords (pseudowords) matched on word length. A second condition involved a lexical semantic (LS) version, in which the words (e.g., tiger) used in each block were selected from a single category (e.g., animals). ERP results indicated that (1) a main effect of lexicality occurred at 100 ms with P1 amplitude greater for words than for nonwords; (2) a task effect for both words and nonwords was also found in the P1 amplitude (larger for LS); (3) a lexicality × task interaction in the N1 amplitude indicated lexical semantic access by 168 ms; (4) semantic facilitation of response time to word–nonword judgment may be largely explained by P1 enhancement. Our findings of an early lexicality effect at 100 ms and of semantic access by 168 ms is in accordance with results of recent ERP and eye movement studies.

A Hierarchy of Behavioral Equivalences in the -calculus with Noisy Channels

The π-calculus is a process algebra where agents interact by sending communication links to each other via noiseless communication channels. Taking into account the reality of noisy channels, an extension of the π-calculus, called the πN-calculus, has been introduced recently. This paper presents an early transitional semantics of the πN-calculus, which is not a directly translated version of the late semantics of πN, and then extends six kinds of behavioral equivalences consisting of reduction bisimilarity, barbed bisimilarity, barbed equivalence, barbed congruence, bisimilarity and full bisimilarity into the πN-calculus. Such behavioral equivalences are cast in a hierarchy, which is helpful to verify behavioral equivalence of two agents. In particular, this paper shows that due to the noisy nature of channels, the coincidence of bisimilarity and barbed equivalence, as well as the coincidence of full bisimilarity and barbed congruence, in the π-calculus does not hold in πN.

What is Normativity?

Abstract The thesis that the concept of a reason is the fundamental normative concept is in the air. In this paper, I examine what it amounts to, how to formulate it, and how ambitious it should be. I distinguish a semantic version, according to which any normative predicate is definitionally reducible to a reason predicate, and a conceptual version, according to which the sole normative ingredient in any normative concept is the concept of a reason. Although I reject the semantic version, I examine its potential in some detail. And I claim that the conceptual version is plausible.

A framework for analyzing probabilistic protocols and its application to the Partial Secrets Exchange

We propose a probabilistic variant of the pi-calculus as a framework to specify randomized security protocols and their intended properties. In order to express and verify the correctness of the protocols, we develop a probabilistic version of the testing semantics. We then illustrate these concepts on an extended example: the Partial Secret Exchange, a protocol which uses a randomized primitive, the Oblivious Transfer, to achieve fairness of information exchange between two parties.

THE EXPRESSIVE ROLE OF TRUTH IN TRUTH-CONDITIONAL SEMANTICS

I define ‘skim semantics’ to be a Davidson-style truth-conditional semantics combined with a variety of deflationism about truth. The expressive role of truth in truth-conditional semantics precludes at least some kinds of skim semantics; thus I reject the idea that the challenge to skim semantics derives solely from Davidson's explanatory ambitions, and in particular from the ‘truth doctrine’, the view that the concept of truth plays a central explanatory role in Davidsonian theories of meaning for a language. The fate of skim semantics is not determined by the fate of the truth doctrine, so rejecting the truth doctrine does not in itself open the way to skim semantics. I establish my thesis by showing that some recently proposed versions of skim semantics fail because of truth's expressive role. I also discuss the conditions that might permit skim semantics.

The Ingredients of Reciprocity in Cuzco Quechua

In Cuzco Quechua, reciprocity is marked by means of two verbal suffixes, one of which is a marker of reflexivity, the other of which is a marker of pluractionality. The paper develops an analysis that composes reciprocity from these more basic notions. Two further ingredients that are needed will be argued to derive from independent principles: universal quantification over parts of the reciprocal plural agent derives from plural predication, as has been argued by other researchers for English reciprocity, and distinctness of the participants in the reciprocal subevents derives from a semantic version of Condition B. This way of composing reciprocity is not universal, and other languages have dedicated reciprocal markers or make other reciprocal ingredients overt. The compositional derivation of reciprocity is therefore a clear candidate for cross-linguistic semantic variation.

Prior’s Three-Valued Modal Logic <I>Q</I> and its Possible Applications

Prior proposed a three-valued modal logicQas a “correct” modal logic from his philosophical motivations. Unfortunately, Prior’sQand many-valued modal logic have been neglected in the tradition of many-valued and modal logic. In this paper, we introduce a version of three-valued Kripke semantics forQ, which aims to establish Prior’s ideas based on possible worlds. We investigate formal properties ofQand prove the completeness theorem ofQ. We also compare our approach with others and suggest possible applications.

Sequent Calculi for Branching Time Temporal Logics of Knowledge and Belief

In this paper we consider branching time temporal logics of knowledge and belief. These logics involve the discrete time linear temporal logic operators “next” and “until” with the branching temporal logic operator “on all paths”. The latter operator is interpreted with respect to a version of the bundle semantics. In addition the temporal logic of knowledge (belief) contains an indexed set of unary modal operators “agent i knows” (“agent i believes”) and it contains the modality of common knowledge (belief). For these logics we present sequent calculi with a restricted cut rule. Thus, we get proof systems where proof-search becomes decidable. The soundness and completeness for these calculi are proved.

Greek -ízo Derivatives: A Conceptual Analysis

This paper deals with the semantic structures of the Event -ízo derivatives in Modern Greek, appearing in the syntactic frames NPi __ NP and NP __ . The present analysis incorporates a version of Ray Jackendoff's conceptual semantics (1983, 1990, 1992). Special attention is paid to the semantic under-determination of word-formation rules. Semantic fields, conceptual functions, formation rules, and mechanisms/rules involved in -ízo derivation are presented. A principled account of various ambiguous structures is also provided. In the last part, the conceptual structures in -ízo derivation are finally laid down and the question of keeping these structures minimal while extending the semantic fields is once more addressed.

Reference and perspective in intuitionistic logics

What an intuitionist may refer to with respect to a given epistemic state depends not only on that epistemic state itself but on whether it is viewed concurrently from within, in the hindsight of some later state, or ideally from a standpoint "beyond" all epistemic states (though the latter perspective is no longer strictly intuitionistic). Each of these three perspectives has a different--and, in the last two cases, a novel--logic and semantics. This paper explains these logics and their semantics and provides soundness and completeness proofs. It provides, moreover, a critique of some common versions of Kripke semantics for intuitionistic logic and suggests ways of modifying them to take account of the perspective-relativity of reference.

Naming and Diagonalization, from Cantor to Godel to Kleene

We trace self-reference phenomena to the possibility of naming functions by names that belong to the domain over which the functions are defined. A naming system is a structure of the form (D, type( ),{ }), where D is a non-empty set; for every a∈ D, which is a name of a k-ary function, {a}: Dk → D is the function named by a, and type(a) is the type of a, which tells us if a is a name and, if it is, the arity of the named function. Under quite general conditions we get a fixed point theorem, whose special cases include the fixed point theorem underlying Gödel's proof, Kleene's recursion theorem and many other theorems of this nature, including the solution to simultaneous fixed point equations. Partial functions are accommodated by including “undefined” values; we investigate different systems arising out of different ways of dealing with them. Many-sorted naming systems are suggested as a natural approach to general computatability with many data types over arbitrary structures. The first part of the paper is a historical reconstruction of the way Gödel probably derived his proof from Cantor's diagonalization, through the semantic version of Richard. The incompleteness proof–including the fixed point construction–result from a natural line of thought, thereby dispelling the appearance of a “magic trick”. The analysis goes on to show how Kleene's recursion theorem is obtained along the same lines.

The Two-Dimensional Content of Consciousness

In this paper I put forward a representationalist theory of conscious experience based on Robert Stalnaker’s version of two-dimensional modal semantics. According to this theory the phenomenal character of an experience correlates with a content equivalent to what Stalnaker calls the diagonal proposition. I show that the theory is closely related both to functionalist theories of consciousness and to higher-order representational theories. It is also more compatible with an anti-Cartesian view of the mind than standard representationalist theories.

Between historical semantics and pragmatics

This paper discusses the methodology of conceptual history, a branch of the study of the history of political thought which focuses on the changing meanings of political concepts over the course of time. It is suggested here that methodological disputes among historians of political thought frequently arise out of differing theories of language and meaning and that historians should be more open-minded to the idea of combining various research strategies in their work. Conceptual history, for instance, can be viewed as the combination of historical versions of semantics and pragmatics. While the study of the macro-level semantic changes in the language of politics can reveal interesting long-term trends and innovative uses of language, a contextual analysis of speech acts is also needed when the rhetorical aspects of conceptual change are traced. This interaction of semantic and pragmatic analysis in conceptual history is illustrated by examples originating from eighteenth-century political preaching.

Finiteness spaces

We investigate a new denotational model of linear logic based on the purely relational model. In this semantics, webs are equipped with a notion of ‘finitary’ subsets satisfying a closure condition and proofs are interpreted as finitary sets. In spite of a formal similarity, this model is quite different from the usual models of linear logic (coherence semantics, hypercoherence semantics, the various existing game semantics…). In particular, the standard fix-point operators used for defining the general recursive functions are not finitary, although the primitive recursion operators are. This model can be considered as a discrete analogue of the Köthe space semantics introduced in a previous paper: we show how, given a field, each finiteness space gives rise to a vector space endowed with a linear topology, a notion introduced by Lefschetz in 1942, and we study the corresponding model where morphisms are linear continuous maps (a version of Girard's quantitative semantics with coefficients in the field). In this way we obtain a new model of the recently introduced differential lambda-calculus.

On the Lumping Semantics of Counterfactuals

Kratzer (1981) discussed a naïve premise semantics of counterfactual conditionals, pointed to an empirical inadequacy of this interpretation, and presented a modification—partition semantics—which Lewis (1981) proved equivalent to Pollock's (1976) version of his ordering semantics. Subsequently, Kratzer (1989) proposed lumping semantics, a different modification of premise semantics, and argued it remedies empirical failings of ordering semantics as well as of naïve premise semantics. We show that lumping semantics yields truth conditions for counterfactuals that are not only different from what she claims they are, but also inferior to those of the earlier versions of premise semantics.

Operational semantics for declarative multi-paradigm languages

Declarative multi-paradigm languages combine the most important features of functional, logic and concurrent programming. The computational model of such integrated languages is usually based on a combination of two different operational principles: narrowing and residuation. This work is motivated by the fact that a precise definition of an operational semantics including all aspects of modern multi-paradigm languages like laziness, sharing, non-determinism, equational constraints, external functions and concurrency does not exist. Therefore, in this article, we present the first rigorous operational description covering all the aforementioned features in a precise and understandable manner. We develop our operational semantics in several steps. First, we define a natural (big-step) semantics covering laziness, sharing and non-determinism. We also present an equivalent small-step semantics which additionally includes a number of practical features like equational constraints and external functions. Then, we introduce a deterministic version of the small-step semantics which makes the search strategy explicit; this is essential for profiling, tracing, debugging etc. Finally, the deterministic semantics is extended in order to cover the concurrent facilities of modern declarative multi-paradigm languages. The semantics developed provides an appropriate foundation for modeling actual declarative multi-paradigm languages like Curry. The complete operational semantics has been implemented and used with various programming tools.

Two-dimensional semantics and the articulation problem

David Chalmers's version of two-dimensional semantics is an attempt at setting up a unified semantic framework that would vindicate both the Fregean and the Kripkean semantic intuitions. I claim that there are three acceptable ways of carrying out such a project, and that Chalmers's theory does not coherently fit any of the three patterns. I suggest that the theory may be seen as pointing to the possibility of a double reading for many linguistic expressions (a double reading which, however, is not easily identified with straightforward semantic ambiguity).

Towards a Probabilistic Version of Bidirectional OT Syntax and Semantics

This paper argues that a purely probabilistic version of bidirectional Optimality-Theoretic syntax and semantics (Blutner 2000; Zeevat 2000) can make some significant contributions to the computational processing of natural language. The ideas outlined in this paper apply to interpretation as well as generation, but particular attention will be given to the question how bidirectionality can be put to use in Natural Language Generation. The paper sketches a number of different possible approaches, but one of them will be described in more detail, at the heart of which lies an empirically oriented notion of vicious ambiguity.