Relational Grammar (RG) was introduced in the 1970s as a theory of grammatical relations and relation change, for example, passivization, dative shift, and raising. Furthermore, the idea behind RG was that transformations as originally designed in generative grammar were unable to capture the common kernel of, e.g., passivization across languages. The researchconducted within RG has uncovered a wealth of phenomena for which it could produce a satisfactory analysis. Although the theory of Government and Binding has answered some (...) of the complaints, still it left many phenomena unaccounted for. Referent Systems (RSs) have been introduced by Vermeulen (1995) to overcome certain weaknesses of Dynamic Semantics. Their usefulness has not yet been realized in semantical theory. We shall show here that their significance cannot be overestimated. Namely, we will show in this paper that there exists a fundamental affinity to RG. Both handle the relation between an argument and a functor by means of a shared relational sign, which is unique for each argument. This assignment can be changed. What is interesting is that the notion of a chômeur, which is central to RG, finds a natural treatment in RSs. This coincidence is in our view not accidental but reveals some fundamental properties of the human language faculty. (shrink)

A major controversy in the study of the "Analects" has been over the relation between two central concepts, ren (humanity, human excellence) and li (rites, rituals of propriety). Confucius seems to have said inconsistent things about this relation. Some passages appear to suggest that ren is more fundamental than li, while others seem to imply the contrary. It is therefore not surprising that there have been different interpretations and characterizations of this relation. Using the analogy of language grammar and (...) mastery of a language, it is proposed here that we should understand li as a cultural grammar and ren as the mastery of a culture. In this account, society cultivates its members through li toward the goal of ren, and persons of ren manifest their human excellence through their practice of li. (shrink)

Stojnić (2021) argues that the content of linguistic utterances is determined by the rules of natural language grammar more stringently than what is generally assumed. She proposes specifically that coherence relations are encoded by the linguistic structures and determine what individuals count as most prominent, thereby serving as the referents of free (“demonstrative”) pronouns. In this paper, I take a close look at the empirical evidence from English and Serbian that she offers in support of this position. Considering these (...) data points in connection with additional linguistic data (also from German and Japanese), I argue that there is no compelling evidence for the assumption that coherence relations directly determine the resolution of pronouns. Instead, grammatical restrictions imposed by different types of pronouns and tenses have a larger impact on the meaning conventionally expressed by complex utterances than what is generally assumed in the literature on coherence relations. (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays, weaving together cognitive psychology, psycho-linguistics, developmental psychology, modern philosophy and behavioural sciences. It raises the question, how grammar relates to our remarkable ability to cooperate for future needs and how our thought process is related to grammatical parameters.

Cognitive Grammar offers a radical alternative to mainstream linguistic theories. This book introduces the theory in clear, non-technical language, relates it to current debates about the nature of linguistic knowledge, and applies it to in-depth analyses of a range of topics in semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology. Study questions and suggestions for further reading accompany each of the main chapters.

A well‐established principle of language is that there is a preference for closely related words to be close together in the sentence. This can be expressed as a preference for dependency length minimization (DLM). In this study, we explore quantitatively the degree to which natural languages reflect DLM. We extract the dependencies from natural language text and reorder the words in such a way as to minimize dependency length. Comparing the original text with these optimal linearizations (and also with random (...) linearizations) reveals the degree to which natural language minimizes dependency length. Tests on English data show that English shows a strong effect of DLM, with dependency length much closer to optimal than to random; the optimal English grammar also has many specific features in common with English. In German, too, dependency length is significantly less than random, but the effect is much weaker than in English. We conclude by speculating about some possible reasons for this difference between English and German. (shrink)

The paper proposes a semantics for contextual (i.e., Temporal and Locative) Prepositional Phrases (CPPs) like during every meeting, in the garden, when Harry met Sally and where I’m calling from. The semantics is embodied in a multi-modal extension of Combinatory Categoral Grammar (CCG). The grammar allows the strictly monotonic compositional derivation of multiple correct interpretations for “stacked” or multiple CPPs, including interpretations whose scope relations are not what would be expected on standard assumptions about surfacesyntactic command and monotonic (...) derivation. A type-hierarchy of functional modalities plays a crucial role in the specification of the fragment. (shrink)

Many variants of categorial grammar assume an underlying logic which is associative and linear. In relation to left extraction, the former property is challenged by island domains, which involve nonassociativity, and the latter property is challenged by parasitic gaps, which involve nonlinearity. We present a version of type logical grammar including ‘structural inhibition’ for nonassociativity and ‘structural facilitation’ for nonlinearity and we give an account of relativisation including islands and parasitic gaps and their interaction.

Like proper names, demonstratives, and definite descriptions, pronouns have referential uses. These can be 'essentially indexical' in the sense that they cannot be replaced by non-pronominal forms of reference. Here we show that the grammar of pronouns in such occurrences is systematically different from that of other referential expressions, in a way that illuminates the differences in reference in question. We specifically illustrate, in the domain of Romance clitics and pronouns, a hierarchy of referentiality, as related to the topology (...) of the grammatical phase. Our explanation is based on extending the 'Topological Mapping Hypotheses' of Longobardi and Sheehan & Hinzen. The extended topology covers the full range of interpretations, from purely predicative to quantificational, to referential and deictic. Along this scale, grammatical complexity increases, and none of these forms of reference is lexical. This provides evidence for the foundational conclusion that the source of essential indexicality is grammatical rather than lexical, semantic or pragmatic. (shrink)

Can music be considered a language of the emotions? The most common view today is that this is nothing but a Romantic cliché. Mainstream philosophy seems to view the claim that 'Music is the language of the emotions' as a slogan that was once vaguely defended by Rousseau, Goethe, or Kant, but that cannot be understood literally when one takes into consideration last century’s theories of language, such as Chomsky's on syntax or Tarski's on semantics (Scruton 1997: ch. 7, see (...) also Davies 2003: ch. 8, and Kania 2012). In this chapter, I will show why this common view is unwarranted, and thus go against nowadays philosophical mainstream by defending what I call the musicalanguage hypothesis. In Section 1, I will introduce the musicalanguage hypothesis and present, based on empirical evidence, some of the many similarities between language and music and explain why we should take them seriously. I will introduce a framework that aims to explain the communicative power of music using what we already know about linguistic communication (1.1). I will then outline several working hypotheses about musical grammar, musical meaning, and affective meaning (1.2), and thus defend that music is indeed very close to literally be a language of the emotions. In Section 2, I will detail some of the methodology, expectations, and preliminary results of a cross-cultural study on musical grammar that I am presently conducting between South India (Chennai) and Switzerland (Geneva and Lausanne)4. This empirical study focuses on two musical idioms and their grammatical features: Western classical music of the Common Period (ca. 1600-1900) and South Indian classical music (also know as Carnatic music). The main hypothesis of this study is that you need to master the grammar of a musical idiom in order to properly understand its musical meanings. (shrink)

This essay focuses on Charles S. Peirce’s grammar of representation and its relevance for a logical conception of scientific inquiry. Closely relying on Peirce’s writings, one of his important trichotomies of signs will be discussed in particular: that distinguishing between substitutive signs, or “semes”, informational signs, or “phemes”, and persuasive signs, or “delomes”. According to Peirce, these three categories of signs result from an extension of the traditional division between “terms”, “propositions”, and “arguments” to all signs, understood as the (...) foundational elements with and on which the scientific mind operates. It is shown that such an extended view of logic, conceived as a “semiotic”, or general doctrine of signs, is consistent with Peirce’s metaphysical views on truth and reality. Logic-as-semiotic, and its three corresponding branches of stecheotic, critic, and methodeutic, is thus conceived as a requisite normative trivium for the practice of scientific inquiry, whose purpose is to represent reality truthfully. In the end, we aim to remind that Peirce’s semiotic epistemology must necessarily be contextualized within the frame of his comprehensive philosophy of the scientific “settlement of opinion”. (shrink)

Grammar is a word associated with the rules that govern language and its related pedagogy for articulating types of declarative knowledge. It can also refer to the organizational structure of practices and their related forms of knowledge, as described here by Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Essence is expressed in grammar.... Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar.)”1 Wittgenstein’s remark about theology can be generalized to visual art, and, by extension, to the grammatical structure (...) of art education. The grammar of creative practices is described by George Steiner as the “articulate organisation of perception, reflection and experience, the nerve structure of consciousness when.. (shrink)

There are two rival conceptions of power in modern sociopolitical thought. According to one, all social power reduces to power-over-others. According to another, the core notion is power-to-effect-outcomes, to which even power-over reduces. This article defends seven theses. First, agential social power consists in a relation between agent and outcomes (power-to). Second, not all social power reduces to power-over and, third, the contrary view stems from conflating power-over with a distinct notion: power-despite-resistance. Fourth, the widespread assumption that social power presupposes (...) the capacity to overcome resistance is false: social power includes the capacity to effect outcomes with others’ assistance. Fifth, power-with can be exercised via joint intentional action, strategic coordination and non-strategic coordination. Sixth, agential social power is best analysed as a capacity to effect outcomes, with the assistance of others, despite the resistance of yet others. Seventh, power-over and power-with are not mutually exclusive: each can ground the other. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out to show that the relationships between individuals, including the intersubjectivity inherent to the body politic, are also affective relationships, so as to reconstruct Spinoza’s minimalist theory of tolerance. According to Spinoza’s concept of affectivity and bodily life, affection refers to a state of the affected body and implies the presence of the affecting body, while affect refers to the transition from one state to another, taking into account the correlative variation of affective bodies, that (...) is, the affect is always a passage or variation in the intensity of our power to exist and act — the increase or decrease, the favoring or the restraint of our power to exist and act. We argue that Spinoza’s geometry of affective relations decisively contributes to a political theory of democracy, insofar as it anticipates modern, liberal conceptions of tolerance. (shrink)

Adolescents, as active online searchers, have easy access to health information. Much health information they encounter online is of poor quality and even contains potentially harmful health information. The ability to identify the quality of health messages disseminated via online technologies is needed in terms of health attitudes and behaviors. This study aims to understand how different ways of editing health-related messages affect their credibility among adolescents and what impact this may have on the content or format of health information. (...) The sample consisted of 300 secondary school students. To examine the effects of manipulating editorial elements, we used seven short messages about the health-promoting effects of different fruits and vegetables. Participants were then asked to rate the message’s trustworthiness with a single question. We calculated second-order variable sensitivity as the derivative of the trustworthiness of a fake message from the trustworthiness of a true neutral message. We also controlled for participants’ scientific reasoning, cognitive reflection, and media literacy. Adolescents were able to distinguish overtly fake health messages from true health messages. True messages with and without editorial elements were perceived as equally trustworthy, except for news with clickbait headlines, which were less trustworthy than other true messages. The results were also the same when scientific reasoning, analytical reasoning, and media literacy were considered. Adolescents should be well trained to recognize online health messages with editorial elements characteristic of low-quality content. They should also be trained on how to evaluate these messages. (shrink)

Husserl’s Logical Grammar is intended to explain how complex expressions can be constructed out of simple ones so that their meaning turns out to be determined by the meanings of their constituent parts and the way they are put together. Meanings are thus understood as structured contents and classified into formal categories to the effect that the logical properties of expressions reflect their grammatical properties. As long as linguistic meaning reduces to the intentional content of pre-linguistic representations, however, it (...) is not trivial to account for how semantics relates to syntax in this context. In this paper, I analyze Husserl’s Logical Grammar as a system of recursive rules operating on representations and suggest that the syntactic form of representations contributes to their semantics because it carries information about semantic role. I further discuss Husserl’s syntactic account of the unity of propositions and argue that, on this account, logical form supervenes on syntactic form. In the last section I draw some implications for the phenomenology of thought and conjecture that the structural features it displays are likely to convey the syntactic structures of an underlying language-like representational system. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out to show that the relationships between individuals, including the intersubjectivity inherent to the body politic, are also affective relationships, so as to reconstruct Spinoza’s minimalist theory of tolerance. According to Spinoza’s concept of affectivity and bodily life, affection refers to a state of the affected body and implies the presence of the affecting body, while affect refers to the transition from one state to another, taking into account the correlative variation of affective bodies, that (...) is, the affect is always a passage or variation in the intensity of our power to exist and act—the increase or decrease, the favoring or the restraint of our power to exist and act. We argue that Spinoza’s geometry of affective relations decisively contributes to a political theory of democracy, insofar as it anticipates modern, liberal conceptions of tolerance. (shrink)

In just a few years, children achieve a stable state of linguistic competence, making them effectively adults with respect to: understanding novel sentences, discerning relations of paraphrase and entailment, acceptability judgments, etc. One familiar account of the language acquisition process treats it as an induction problem of the sort that arises in any domain where the knowledge achieved is logically underdetermined by experience. This view highlights the cues that are available in the input to children, as well as childrens skills (...) in extracting relevant information and forming generalizations on the basis of the data they receive. Nativists, on the other hand, contend that language-learners project beyond their experience in ways that the input does not even suggest. Instead of viewing language acqusition as a special case of theory induction, nativists posit a Universal Grammar, with innately specified linguistic principles of grammar formation. The nature versus nurture debate continues, as various poverty of stimulus arguments are challenged or supported by developments in linguistic theory and by findings from psycholinguistic investigations of child language. In light of some recent challenges to nativism, we rehearse old poverty-of stimulus arguments, and supplement them by drawing on more recent work in linguistic theory and studies of child language. (shrink)

What is common to all languages is notation, so Universal Grammar can be understood as a system of notational types. Given that infants acquire language, it can be assumed to arise from some a priori mental structure. Viewing language as having the two layers of calculus and protocol, we can set aside the communicative habits of speakers. Accordingly, an analysis of notation results in the three types of Identifier, Modifier and Connective. Modifiers are further interpreted as Quantifiers and Qualifiers. (...) The resulting four notational types constitute the categories of Universal Grammar. Its ontology is argued to consist in the underlying cognitive schema of Essence, Quantity, Quality and Relation. The four categories of Universal Grammar are structured as polysemous fields and are each constituted as a radial network centred on some root concept which, however, need not be lexicalized. The branches spread out along troponymic vectors and together map out all possible lexemes. The notational typology of Universal Grammar is applied in a linguistic analysis of the ‘parts of speech’ using the English language. The analysis constitutes a ‘proof of concept’ in (1) showing how the schema of Universal Grammar is capable of classifying the so-called ‘parts of speech’, (2) presenting a coherent analysis of the verb, and (3) showing how the underlying cognitive schema allows for a sub-classification of the auxiliaries. (shrink)

Traditional spatial enabled grammars lack flexibility in specifying the spatial semantics of graphs. This paper describes a new graph grammar formalism called the multigranularity Coordinate Graph Grammar (mgCGG) for spatial graphs. Based on the Coordinate Graph Grammar (CGG), the mgCGG divides coordinates into two categories, physical coordinates and grammatical coordinates, where physical coordinates are the common coordinates in the real world, and grammatical coordinates describe the restrictions on the spatial semantics. In the derivation and reduction of the (...) mgCGG, the spatial matching conditions between nodes are evaluated on the basis of the grammatical coordinates, which can be obtained by the specified granularities. By adjusting the granularities, both qualitative and quantitative analyses for spatial semantics can be obtained, including the transition states between them. In addition, a new redex searching algorithm with polynomial time complexity is designed for the mgCGG. A running example of drawing a flowchart is given to illustrate a practical application of the mgCGG. Through a detailed comparison with related spatial-enabled grammars, it is found that the mgCGG has good performance in four critical aspects—the semantics processing mechanism, fault-tolerance, redex searching algorithm, and practical application—providing a flexible yet uniform way to specify spatial graphs and building a bridge between nonspatial and spatial grammars. (shrink)

Sound and Grammar: A Neo-Sapirian Theory of Language by Susan F. Schmerling offers an original overall linguistic theory based on the work of the early American linguist Edward Sapir, supplemented with ideas from the philosopher-logicians Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Richard Montague and the linguist Elisabeth Selkirk. The theory yields an improved understanding of interactions among different aspects of linguistic structure, resolving notorious issues directly inherited by current theory from (post- ) Bloomfieldian linguistics. In the theory presented here, syntax is a (...) filter on a phonological algebra, not a linguistic level; linguistic expressions are phonological structures, and syntax is semantically relevant relations among phonological structures. The book shows how Neo-Sapirian grammar sheds new light on syntax-phonology interactions in English, German, French, and Spanish. (shrink)

According to Quine, the linguist qua grammarian does not know what he is talking about. The goal of this essay is to tell him. My aim is to provide an account of what the grammarian is saying of an expression when he says it is grammatical, or a noun phrase, or ambiguous, or the subject of a certain sentence. More generally, I want to give an account of the nature of a generative grammatical theory of a language – of the (...) data for such a theory, the relation between the theory and the data, and the relation between the theory and a speaker of the language. (shrink)

Traditional grammar and current theoretical approaches towards modelling grammatical knowledge ignore language in interaction: that is, words such as huh, eh, yup or yessssss. This groundbreaking book addresses this gap by providing the first in-depth overview of approaches towards interactional language across different frameworks and linguistic sub-disciplines. Based on the insights that emerge, a formal framework is developed to discover and compare language in interaction across different languages: the interactional spine hypothesis. Two case-studies are presented: confirmationals and response markers, (...) both of which show evidence for systematic grammatical knowledge. Assuming that language in interaction is regulated by grammatical knowledge sheds new light on old questions concerning the relation between language and thought and the relation between language and communication. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the relation between language, cognition and social interaction. (shrink)

In recent years, multiple researchers working on the evolution of language have put forward the idea that the theoretical framework of usage-based approaches and Construction Grammar is highly suitable for modelling the emergence of human language from pre-linguistic or proto-linguistic communication systems. This also raises the question of whether usage-based and constructionist approaches can be integrated with the analysis of animal communication systems. In this paper, we review possible avenues where usage-based, constructionist approaches can make contact with animal communication (...) research, which in turn also has implications for theories of language evolution. To this end, we first give an overview of key assumptions of usage-based and constructionist approaches before reviewing some key issues in animal communication research through the lens of usage-based, constructionist approaches. Specifically, we will discuss how research on alarm calls, gestural communication and symbol-trained animals can be brought into contact with usage-based, constructionist theorizing. We argue that a constructionist view of animal communication can yield new perspectives on its relation to human language, which in turn has important implications regarding the evolution of language. Importantly, this theoretical approach also generates hypotheses that have the potential of complementing and extending results from the more formalist approaches that often underlie current animal communication research. (shrink)

The Compendium of Grammar of the Hebrew Language (CGH) is arguably Spinoza's least known work. The CGH appears as an annex at the very end of the first volume, and with an independent pagination from the rest of the volume. Spinoza expresses twice in CGH the need to write a grammar of the Hebrew language, and not of the language of Scripture, as presumably all earlier grammarians of Hebrew had done. According to Jelles, the CGH comprised two parts: (...) one on “etymology,” and one on syntax. Spinoza discusses the Masoretic system of signs that indicates the vocalization, intonation, punctuation, and cantillation of the biblical text. The main question that scholars have pondered regarding CGH is its relation to Spinoza's philosophy. The affirmation that all Hebrew words are basically nouns has led some scholars to posit a relationship between Spinoza's monistic ontology and his self‐professed noun‐based grammar of Hebrew. (shrink)

Words have meaning. Sentences also have meaning, but their meaning is different in kind from any collection of the meanings of the words they contain. I discuss two puzzles related to this difference. The first is how the meanings of the parts of a sentence combine to give rise to a unified sentential meaning, as opposed to a mere collection of disparate meanings (UP1). The second is why the formal ontology of linguistic meaning changes when grammatical structure is built up (...) (UP2). For example, the meaning of a sentence is a proposition evaluable for truth and falsity. In contrast, a collection of the meanings of its parts does not constitute a proposition and is not evaluable for truth. These two puzzles are closely related, since change in formal ontology is the clearest sign of the unity of meaning. The most popular strategy for answering them is taking the meanings of the parts as abstractions from primitive sentence meanings. However, I argue that, given plausible psychological constraints, sentence meanings cannot be taken as explanatory primitives. Drawing on recent work in Generative Grammar and its philosophy, I suggest that the key to both unity questions is to distinguish strictly between lexical and grammatical meaning. The latter is irreducible and determines how lexical content is used in referential acts. I argue that these referential properties determine a formal ontology, which explains why and how formal ontology changes when grammatical structure is built up (UP2). As for UP1, I suggest that, strictly speaking, lexical meanings never combine. Instead, whenever grammar specifies a formal ontology for the lexical meanings entering a grammatical derivation, further lexical (or phrasal) meanings can only specify aspects of this recursive grammatical process. In this way, contemporary grammatical theory can be used to address old philosophical problems. (shrink)

This volume covers a broad spectrum of research into the role of events in grammar. It addresses event arguments and thematic argument structure, the role of events in verbal aspectual distinctions, events and the distinction between stage and individual level predicates, and the role of events in the analysis of plurality and scope relations. It is of interest to scholars and students of theoretical linguistics, philosophers of language, computational linguists, and computer scientists.

This article aims to be what Jasbir Puar referred to as ‘an unfolding archive’. It makes a critical intervention at a historical crisis point as it is unfolding. It sets out to examine the logic that writes the relations between bodies, borders and kin during the political crisis that transpired at the border of Belarus and Poland in 2021. I think of this logic in terms of a ‘grammar’, drawing on the idea articulated by Hortense J. Spillers, where ‘American (...) grammar’ fleshes out the connection between slavery, kinship, nation-building and the processes of gendering. I examine the rubrics of the hegemonic national grammatics in contemporary Poland, which establishes who counts as kin and who belongs to the nation in the context of the border crisis. I offer the concept of ‘declining’ kinship to seek generative (im)possibilities to articulate affinities and solidarities running against the dominant system of reproductive nationalism. (shrink)

This paper takes distances from two influential images of Wittgenstein's philosophy: the image of a primarily ethical philosopher defended by the so-called «resolute» interpreters and that of an ascetically "analytical" philosopher transmitted by the standard interpretation. Instead of contrasting images (that of Wittgenstein as an "aesthetic" philosopher and that of the "ethical" Wittgenstein), this paper focuses on the analysis of the fractures and tensions characterizing not only the relationship between Wittgenstein's philosophy and aesthetics, but also the very style of Wittgenstein's (...) thought. Addressing a specific issue from a conceptual and textual standpoint (the unity of Ethics and Aesthetics in the Tractatus) seems to the author to be a fruitful strategy that allows us not only to understand whether and how determinant and central the aesthetic problem is for Wittgenstein, but also to see how aesthetics itself can be radically reshaped through the filter offered by his thought. In the first place, then, it is clarified what the Tractatus claim that ethics and aesthetics «sind eins» might entail. Secondly, it is checked if and how the conceptual consistency of the «being one» of ethics and aesthetics is transformed during the 1930s, to the point that it requires a different configuration: the metamor¬phosis of the logical unity between the two conceptual fields into an analogical affinity. Analyzing this conceptual metamorphosis the paper considers also the idea of an asymmetry of the aesthetic over the ethical as already evident, despite appearances, in the 1929 Lecture on Ethics. This asymmetry is then developed focusing the image of grammatical mechanism with its degrees of freedom of which Wittgensteins writes from 1930. In connection with this image the author outlines finally the idea of an aesthetic mechanism arising from primitive reactions and strictly related with the genesis of language games. (shrink)

Discourse and grammar often complement each other, each imposing a different set of constraints on speakers' utterances. Discourse constraints are global, pertaining to text coherence, and/or to interpersonal relations. Grammatical constraints are local, pertaining to possible versus impossible structures. Yet, the two must meet in natural discourse. At every point during interaction speakers must simultaneously satisfy both types of constraints in order to communicate properly. It is also during conversational interaction that language change somehow takes place. This overview first (...) explains and exemplifies how discourse constraints guide addressees in selecting specific grammatical forms at different points in the interaction. It then examines the relationship between discourse and grammar from a grammaticization point of view, demonstrating how a subset of discourse patterns turn grammatical. The central theme is then that discourse depends on grammar, which in turn depends on discourse. (shrink)

This chapter explores parsing and grammar in children, with an emphasis on how children resolve sentences with ambiguous scope. It focuses on an ambiguity involving the universal quantifier every in subject position along with a negated main predicate, as in the sentence “Every horse didn’t jump over the fence.” One interpretation of this sentence is the “surface-scope” interpretation, which views the expression every horse as a reference to all the horses in the set; thus, each horse in the set (...) did not jump over the fence. Another interpretation is the “inverse-scope” interpretation, whereby some horses jumped over the fence while others did not. The chapter presents evidence suggesting that children tend to prefer the surface-scope interpretation and cannot obtain the inverse-scope interpretation. In other words, children systematically use the surface position of the relevant quantificational elements to determine scope relations. The chapter also discusses negation and quantified noun phrases, along with isomorphism. Finally, it discusses the implications of these findings for language development and sentence processing. (shrink)

This book addresses fundamental issues in linguistic theory, including the relation between formal and cognitive approaches, the autonomy of syntax, the content of universal grammar, and the value of generative and functional approaches to grammar. It focuses on the grammar of case relations, signalled by morphological case, prepositions, and word order. Part I offers a critical history of modern grammars of case, focussing on the last four decades and setting this in the context of earlier, including ancient, (...) developments. The subjects considered include the evolution of ideas concerning deep structure and semantic and grammatical relations, and arguments for the maintenance of the traditional central position of case in the grammar. In parts II and III Professor Anderson examines the category of case and central unresolved issues in the grammar of case. The latter include questions relating to the idea of an ontologically-based grammar, particularly the degree to which syntactic categories and relationships are grounded in meaning, and the notion of linguistic creativity. This involves a consideration of the way in which cases may be identified and whether their distribution is determined through semantics. The book sheds new light on the interactions between meaning and grammar and on the structure and development of lexical and grammatical systems. The argument and its far-reaching consequences will be of wide interest to linguists, philosophers and others seeking to understand the workings of language. (shrink)

Natural languages are riddled with context-sensitivity. One and the same string of words can express many different meanings on occasion of use, and yet we understand one another effortlessly, on the fly. How do we do so? What fixes the meaning of context-sensitive expressions, and how are we able to recover the meaning so effortlessly? -/- This book offers a novel response: we can do so because we draw on a broad array of subtle linguistic conventions that determine the interpretation (...) of context-sensitive items. Contrary to the dominant tradition, which maintains that the meaning of context-sensitive language is underspecified by grammar and that interpretation relies on non-linguistic cues and speakers' intentions, this book argues that meaning is determined entirely by discourse conventions, rules of language that have largely been missed and the effects of which have been mistaken for extra-linguistic effects of an utterance situation on meaning. The linguistic account of context developed here sheds new light on the nature of linguistic content and the interaction between content and context. At the same time, it provides a novel model of context that should constrain and help evaluate debates across many subfields of philosophy where appeal to context has been common, often leading to surprising conclusions such as epistemology, ethics, value theory, metaphysics, metaethics, and logic. (shrink)

1 Recognition Device . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2 Classical Categorial Grammar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3 (...) Classical Categorial Grammar. Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4 Logic Grammar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 5 Lambek calculus. Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 6 Lambek calculus. Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 7 Lambek calculus. Advantages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 8 Derivations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 9 Residuated and Galois Connected Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 10 Interpretation of the Constants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 11 Nonveridical Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 12 Dutch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 13 Classification of NPIs in Dutch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 14 Antilicensing Relation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20.. (shrink)

Unification grammars are widely accepted as an expressive means for describing the structure of natural languages. In general, the recognition problem is undecidable for unification grammars. Even with restricted variants of the formalism, off-line parsable grammars, the problem is computationally hard. We present two natural constraints on unification grammars which limit their expressivity and allow for efficient processing. We first show that non-reentrant unification grammars generate exactly the class of context-free languages. We then relax the constraint and show that one-reentrant (...) unification grammars generate exactly the class of mildly context-sensitive languages. We thus relate the commonly used and linguistically motivated formalism of unification grammars to more restricted, computationally tractable classes of languages. (shrink)

What is common to all languages is notation, so Universal Grammar can be understood as a system of notational types. Given that infants acquire language, it can be assumed to arise from some a priori mental structure. Viewing language as having the two layers of calculus and protocol, we can set aside the communicative habits of speakers. Accordingly, an analysis of notation results in the three types of Identifier, Modifier and Connective. Modifiers are further interpreted as Quantifiers and Qualifiers. (...) The resulting four notational types constitute the categories of Universal Grammar. Its ontology is argued to consist in the underlying cognitive schema of Essence, Quantity, Quality and Relation. The four categories of Universal Grammar are structured as polysemous fields and are each constituted as a radial network centred on some root concept which, however, need not be lexicalized. The branches spread out along troponymic vectors and together map out all possible lexemes. The notational typology of Universal Grammar is applied in a linguistic analysis of the ‘parts of speech’ using the English language. The analysis constitutes a ‘proof of concept’ in (1) showing how the schema of Universal Grammar is capable of classifying the so-called ‘parts of speech’, (2) presenting a coherent analysis of the verb, and (3) showing how the underlying cognitive schema allows for a sub-classification of the auxiliaries. (shrink)

Jackendoff's account of relating linguistic structure and brain structure is too restricted in concentrating on formal features of computational requirements, neglecting the achievements of various types of neuroscientific modelling. My own approaches to neuronal models of syntactic organization show how these requirements could be met. The book's lack of discussion of a sound philosophy of the relation is briefly mentioned.