Quantification is a topic which brings together linguistics, logic, and philosophy. Quantifiers are the essential tools with which, in language or logic, we refer to quantity of things or amount of stuff. In English they include such expressions as no, some, all, both, many. Peters and Westerstahl present the definitive interdisciplinary exploration of how they work - their syntax, semantics, and inferential role.

Quantification is a topic which brings together linguistics, logic, and philosophy. Quantifiers are the essential tools with which, in language or logic, we refer to quantity of things or amount of stuff. In English they include such expressions as no, some, all, both, many. Peters and Westerstahl present the definitive interdisciplinary exploration of how they work - their syntax, semantics, and inferential role.

INTRODUCTION Linguists who work within the tradition of transformational generative grammar tend to regard semantics as an intractable, perhaps ultimately ...

A principal goal of this book is to develop and apply the Situation Semantics framework. Jean Mark Gawron and Stanley Peters adopt a version of the theory in which meanings are built up via syntactically driven semantic composition rules. They provide a substantial treatment of English incorporating treatments of pronomial anaphora, quantification, donkey anaphora, and tense. The book focuses on the semantics of pronomial anaphora and quantification. The authors argue that the ambiguities of sentences with pronouns cannot be adequately accounted (...) for with a theory that represents anaphoric relations only syntactically; their relational framework uniformly deals with anaphoric relations as relations between utterances in context. They argue that there is no need for a syntactic representation of anaphoric relations, or for a theory that accounts for anaphoric ambiguities by resorting to two or more kinds of anaphora. Quantifier scope ambiguities are handled analogously to anaphoric ambiguities. This treatment integrates the Cooper Store mechanism with a theory of meaning that provides both a natural setting for it and a convincing account of what, semantically, is going on. Jean Mark Gawron is a researcher for Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto. Stanley Peters is professor of linguistics and symbolic systems at Stanford University and is director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information. (shrink)

Karttunen's seminal 1973 article Presuppositions of compound sentences, lays the groundwork for the elegant and fruitful theory of this subject which he subsequently presented in (1974). In (1973, pp. 185–8), however, he fallaciously argued that the regularities he discovered concerning the behavior of and, or, and if ... then in English cannot be embodied in any three-valued logic giving a truth-functional interpretation to these connectives. The present paper refutes Karttunen's argument by exhibiting an interpretation with the desired properties, and shows (...) further how the full articulation of his 1974 system can be developed naturally within a truth-conditional semantics for English if bivalence is abandoned — contrary to what Karttunen expected. (shrink)

Situation Theory and Its Applications, Vol. 1 . Robin Cooper, Kuniaki Mukai, and John Perry (Eds.). Lecture Notes No. 22. ...

This paper gives a uniform account of the meaning of generalizations with explicit exceptions that employ the prepositions “but”, “except”, and “except for”. Our theory is that exceptives depend on generalizations, which can but need not be universal, whose generality they limit, and some of whose exceptions they comment on. Every generalization intrinsically partitions its domain of applicability into regular cases, which are as it says to expect, and exceptions, which are not. A generalization’s exceptions are instances that falsify it (...) if sufficiently prevalent. These two facts underpin the meaning of exceptives as combining a _generality claim_ with an _exception claim_, giving correct truth conditions for the several ways the three exceptive prepositions are used, and significantly improving on existing semantic accounts in the literature. We support this by analyzing a wide range of examples. The analysis applies whether or not the phrase following the exceptive preposition is a DP, and whether or not the generalization is expressed with a quantifier. We further argue that these exceptive prepositions are synonymous, contrary to the widely held view that a difference in meaning explains their different syntactic distributions. (shrink)

Situation theory is the result of an interdisciplinary effort to create a full-fledged theory of information. Created by scholars and scientists from cognitive science, computer science and AI, linguistics, logic, philosophy, and mathematics, it aims to provide a common set of tools for the analysis of phenomena from all these fields. Unlike Shannon-Weaver type theories of information, which are purely quantitative theories, situation theory aims at providing tools for the analysis of the specific content of a situation. The question addressed (...) is not how much information is carried, but what information is carried. (shrink)

SECTION I In 1972, Donald Davison and Gilbert Hannan wrote in the introduction to the volume Semantics of Natural Language: "The success of linguistics in treating natural languages as formal ~yntactic systems has aroused the interest of a number of linguists in a parallel or related development of semantics. For the most part quite independently, many philosophers and logicians have recently been applying formal semantic methods to structures increasingly like natural languages. While differences in training, method and vocabulary tend to (...) veil the fact, philosophers and linguists are converging, it seems, on a common set of interrelated problems. " Davidson and Harman called for an interdisciplinary dialogue of linguists, philosophers and logicians on the semantics of natural language, and during the last ten years such an enterprise has proved extremely fruitful. Thanks to the cooperative effort in these several fields, the last decade has brought about striking progress in our understanding of the semantics of natural language. This work on semantics has typically paid little attention to psychological aspects of meaning. Thus, psychologists or computer scientists working on artificial intelligence were not invited to join the forces in the influential introduction of Semantics of Natural Language. No doubt it was felt that while psychological aspects of language are important in their own right, they are not relevant to our immediate semantic concerns. In the last few years, several linguists and logicians have come to question the fundamental anti-psychological assumptions underlying their theorizing. (shrink)