Online research in philosophy

Binding relations are fimdamentally semantic in nature. They arise as relations that are established with an interpretation. This is most apparent with dynamic binding, of the kind found in Dynamic Predicate Logic. Here it is the runtime of the evaluation that may permit a binding relation, in..

avant propos This paper is basically Keenan (1992) augmented by some new types of properly polyadic quantification in natural language drawn from Moltmann (1992), Nam (1991) and Srivastav (1990). In addition I would draw the reader's attention to recent mathematical studies of polyadic quantiicationz Ben-Shalom (1992), Spaan (1992) and Westerstahl (1992). The first and third of these extend and generalize (in some cases considerably) the techniques and results in Keenan (1992). Finally I would like to acknowledge the stimulating and constructive (...) discussions ofthe earlier paper with many scholars, notably Dorit Ben-Shalom, Jaap van der Does, Hans Kamp, Uwe Mormich, Arnim von Stechow, Mats Rooth, and Ede Zimmermann. And I repeat here the acknowledgment in the earlier paper to Jim Lambek, Ed Stabler and two anonymous referees for Linguistics and Philosophy (the latter responsible for substantial improvements in the proofs - see footnote 10). (shrink)

Pursuing a study begun in (Keenan 2004) this note investigates inference patterns in natural language which proportionality quantifiers enter. We desire to identify such patterns and to isolate any such which are specific to proportionality quantifiers.

Grammatical categories of English expressions are shown to differ with regard to the freedom we have in semantically interpreting their lexical (= syntactically simplest) expressions. Section 1 reviews the categories of expression we consider. Section 2 empirically supports that certain of these categories are lexically free, a notion we formally define, in the sense that anything which is denotable by a complex expression in the category is available as a denotation for lexical expressions in the category. Other categories are shown (...) to be not lexically free. Thus for those categories the interpretation of lexical expressions is inherently constrained compared to the interpretation of the full class of expressions in the category. (shrink)

roots In the Lexicon of Malagasy we include an entry whose string part is vidy ('buy'). Its category is 'RT [AG, TH) ', indicating that it is a root and is associated with a two element set of theta roles, AGFNT and THEME. Semantically this entry is interpreted as a binary relation (= a two participant event), noted VIDY'.

In this chapter we shall examine the characteristic properties of a construction wide-spread in the world’s languages, the passive. In section 1 below we discuss defining characteristics of passives, contrasting them with other foregrounding and backgrounding constructions. In section 2 we present the common syntactic and semantic properties of the most wide-spread types of passives, and in section 3 we consider passives which differ in one or more ways from these. In section 4, we survey a variety of constructions that (...) resemble passive constructions in one way or another. In section 5, we briefly consider differences between languages with regard to the roles passives play in their grammars. Specifically, we show that passives are a more essential part of the grammars of some languages than of others. (shrink)

a transitive verb, Lt b) is its minimal correspondent built with a reciprocal verb.* (I) a. m+aN+enjika (Manenjika) an-dRabe Rakoto. pREs+AcT+cltase Acc-Rabe Rakoto..

We illustrate a novel conception of linguistic invariant which applies to grammars of different natural languages (English, Korean,...) even though they may use different categories and have difl'erent rules. We illustrate formally how semantically defined notions, such as "is an anaphor" may be invariant in all linguistically motivated grammars (the issue is an empirical one), and we show that individual morphemes, such as case markers, may be invariant in grammars that have them in exactly the same sense in which (...) properties, such as "is a Verb Phrase" or relations such as "is a constituent of". (shrink)

Linguists rely on intuitive conceptions of structure when comparing expressions and languages. In an algebraic presentation of a language, some natural notions of similarity can be rigorously defined (e.g. among elements of a language, equivalence w.r.t. isomorphisms of the language; and among languages, equivalence w.r.t. isomorphisms of symmetry groups), but it tums out that slightly more complex and nonstandard notions are needed to capture the kinds of comparisons linguists want to make. This paper identihes some of the important notions of (...) structural similarity, with attention to similarity claims that are prominent in the current linguistic tradition of transformational grammar. @ 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Erratum to: Stanley Peters and Dag Westerståhl: Quantifiers in language and logic Content Type Journal Article Category Erratum Pages 1-1 DOI 10.1007/s10988-011-9094-5 Authors Edward L. Keenan, Department of Linguistics, University of California at Los Angeles, 3125 Campbell Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543, USA Denis Paperno, Department of Linguistics, University of California at Los Angeles, 3125 Campbell Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543, USA Journal Linguistics and Philosophy Online ISSN 1573-0549 Print ISSN 0165-0157.

Recent work in natural language semantics leads to some new observations on generalized quantifiers. In § 1 we show that English quantifiers of type $ $ are booleanly generated by their generalized universal and generalized existential members. These two classes also constitute the sortally reducible members of this type. Section 2 presents our main result--the Generalized Prefix Theorem (GPT). This theorem characterizes the conditions under which formulas of the form Q1x 1⋯ Qnx nRx 1⋯ xn and q1x 1⋯ qnx nRx (...) 1⋯ xn are logically equivalent for arbitrary generalized quantifiers Qi, qi. GPT generalizes, perhaps in an unexpectedly strong form, the Linear Prefix Theorem (appropriately modified) of Keisler & Walkoe (1973). (shrink)

In sentences likeEvery teacher laughed we think ofevery teacher as aunary (=type ) quantifier — it expresses a property ofone place predicate denotations. In variable binding terms, unary quantifiers bind one variable. Two applications of unary quantifiers, as in the interpretation ofNo student likes every teacher, determine abinary (= (type ) quantifier; they express properties oftwo place predicate denotations. In variable binding terms they bind two variables. We call a binary quantifierFregean (orreducible) if it can in principle be expressed by (...) the iterated application of unary quantifiers.In this paper we present two mathematical properties which distinguish non-Fregean quantifiers from Fregean ones. Our results extend those of van Benthem (1989) and Keenan (1987a). We use them to show that English presents a large variety of non-Fregean quantifiers. Some are new here, others are familiar (though the proofs that they are non-Fregean are not). (shrink)