In Kalaallisut (Eskimo-Aleut:Greenland) verbs inflect for illocutionary mood (declarative, interrogative, imperative, or optative). In addition, the language has an evidential (reportative) clitic which is compatible with all illocutionary moods and gives rise to a variety of readings. These lecture notes exemplify the attested combinations and readings by means of a representative sample of mini-discourses and mini-dialogs.

The paper presents a generalization of pregroup, by which a freely-generated pregroup is augmented with a finite set of commuting inequations, allowing limited commutativity and cancelability. It is shown that grammars based on the commutation-augmented pregroups generate mildly context-sensitive languages. A version of Lambek’s switching lemma is established for these pregroups. Polynomial parsability and semilinearity are shown for languages generated by these grammars.

Millikan contrasts her substance-based view of concepts with “descriptionism” according to which description determines what falls under a concept. Focusing on her discussion of the role of language in the acquisition of concepts, I argue that descriptions cannot be separated from perception in the ways Millikan's view requires.

Incommensurable theories are said to be both incompatible and incomparable. This is paradoxical, because, being incompatible, these theories must have the same subject-matter, yet incomparability implies that their subject-matter is different. This paper's proposed resolution of the paradox makes use of the distinction between internal subject-matter and external subject-matter for languages (frameworks) as outlined by W. Sellars. Incommensurability arises when two languages share the same external subject-matter but differ in internal subject-matter. When they share the same external subject-matter, they can (...) be inconsistent (hence incompatible), and yet incomparable (because they are about distinct internal subject-matter). A substantial part of the paper is devoted to the technical development of the notion of inconsistency as a relationship between languages in contrast to the traditional notion of inconsistency between statements. (shrink)

Mathematical models are an important tool in the development ofsoftware technology, including programming languages and algorithms.During the last few years, a new class of such models has beendeveloped based on the notion of a mathematical game that isespecially well-suited to address the interactions between thecomponents of a system. This paper gives an introduction to thesegame-semantical models of programming languages, concentrating onmotivating the basic intuitions and putting them into context.

An essential aspect of conceptual data modeling methodologies is the language’s expressiveness so as to represent the subject domain as precise as possible to obtain good quality models and, consequently, software. To gain better insight in the characteristics of the main conceptual modeling languages, we conducted a comparison between ORM, ORM2, UML, ER, and EER with the aid of Description Logic languages of the DLR family and the new formally defined generic conceptual data modeling language CMcom that is based on (...) DLRifd. ORM, ER, EER, and UML class diagrams are proper fragments of ORM2 and CMcom has the most expressive common denominator with these languages. CMcom simplifies prospects for automated, online, interoperability among the considered languages so that modelers not only can continue using their preferred modeling language yet be compatible with the other ones, but also have a common ground that eases database and software integration based on commonly used conceptual data models. (shrink)

Lautemann et al. (1995) gave a descriptive characterisation of the class of context-free languages, showing that a language is context-free iff it is definable as the set of words satisfying some sentence of a particular logic (fragment) over words. The present notes discuss how to specialise this result to the class of linear languages. Somewhat surprisingly, what would seem the most straightforward specialisation actually fails, due to the fact that linear grammars fail to admit a Greibach normal form. We identify (...) an alternative specialisation, based on an alternative characterisation of context-free languages, also noted by Lautemann et al. (1995). (shrink)

This paper argues for tlie claims that a) a natural language such as English is semanticaly closed b) semantic closure implies inconsistency. A corollary of these is that the semantics of English must be paraconsistent. The first part of the paper formulates a definition of semantic closure which applies to natural languages and shows that this implies inconsistency. The second section argues that English is semeantically closed. The preceding discussion is predicated on the assumption that there are no truth value (...) gaps. The next section of the paper considers whether the possibility of these makes any difference to the substantive conclusions of the previous sections, and argues that it does not. The crux of the preceding arguments is that none of the consistent semantical accounts that have been offered for solving the semantical paradoxes is a semantic ofEnglish. The final section of the paper produces a general argument as to why this must always be the case. (shrink)