(1) is an example of an adjectival comparative. In it, the adjective important is flanked by more and a comparative clause headed by than. This article is a survey of recent ideas about the interpretation of comparatives, including (i) the underlying semantics based on the idea of a threshold; (ii) the interpretation of comparative clauses that include quantifiers (brighter than on many other days); (iii) remarks on differentials such as much in (1) above: what they do in the comparative and (...) what they do elsewhere in the language; (iv) the relationship between comparatives and other Degree constructions (e.g. as important, too impor- tant); and (v) the types of phrases in which comparatives are found (adjective: tighter versus noun: more water). Given the nature and purpose of this essay, I have tried not to presuppose background in formal semantics and I have departed from standard practice in journal articles by, as much as possible, not interrupting the flow with footnotes and references. There are two appendices. The first provides more analytical detail and there I do rely on formal techniques of natural language semantics. The second covers the sources for the ideas surveyed here. (shrink)

Culturally different connotations of basic concepts challenge the comparative study of religion. Do persons in Germany or in the United States refer to the same concepts when talking about ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’? Does it make a difference how they identify themselves? The Bielefeld-Chattanooga Cross-Cultural Study on ‘Spirituality’ includes a semantic differential approach for the comparison of self-identified “neither religious nor spiritual”, “religious”, and “spiritual” persons regarding semantic attributes attached to the concepts ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ in each research context. Results show (...) that ‘spirituality’ is used as a broader concept than ‘religion’. Regarding religion, semantics attributed by self-identified religious persons differ significantly from those of the spiritual persons. The ‘spiritual’ and the ‘religious’ groups agree on semantics attributed to spirituality but differ from the ‘neither spiritual nor religious’ group. Qualifications of differences and agreements become visible from the comparison between the United States and Germany. It is argued for the semantically sensitive study of culturally situated ‘spiritualities’. (shrink)

Culturally different connotations of basic concepts challenge the comparative study of religion. Do persons in Germany or in the United States refer to the same concepts when talking about ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’? Does it make a difference how they identify themselves? The Bielefeld-Chattanooga Cross-Cultural Study on ‘Spirituality’ includes a semantic differential approach for the comparison of self-identified “neither religious nor spiritual”, “religious”, and “spiritual” persons regarding semantic attributes attached to the concepts ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ in each research context. Results show (...) that ‘spirituality’ is used as a broader concept than ‘religion’. Regarding religion, semantics attributed by self-identified religious persons differ significantly from those of the spiritual persons. The ‘spiritual’ and the ‘religious’ groups agree on semantics attributed to spirituality but differ from the ‘neither spiritual nor religious’ group. Qualifications of differences and agreements become visible from the comparison between the United States and Germany. It is argued for the semantically sensitive study of culturally situated ‘spiritualities’. (shrink)

This study has two goals. First, we present much‐needed empirical linguistic data and systematic analyses on the spatial semantic systems in English and Korean, two languages that have been extensively compared to date in the debate on spatial language and spatial cognition. We conduct our linguistic investigation comprehensively, encompassing the domains of tight‐ and loose‐fit as well as containment and support relations. The current analysis reveals both cross‐linguistic commonalities and differences: From a common set of spatial features, each language highlights (...) a subset of those features for its principal categorization, and those primary features are importantly different between English and Korean: English speakers categorize events predominantly by containment and support relations (and do so with prepositions), whereas Korean speakers categorize them by tight‐fit and loose‐fit relations (and do so with verbs), with a further distinction of containment and support within the loose‐fit relation. The analysis also shows that the tight‐fit domain is more cross‐linguistically diverse in categorization than is the loose‐fit domain. Second, we test the language data against the nonlinguistic categorization results reported in Choi and Hattrup (2012). The results show a remarkable degree of convergence between the patterns predicted from the current linguistic analysis and those found in C&H's nonlinguistic study and thus provide empirical and strong evidence for an influence of language on nonlinguistic spatial cognition. At the same time, the study reveals areas where the two systems closely interact with each other as well as those where one is independent from the other. Taking both parts of the study together, we identify the specific roles that language and spatial perception/cognition play in spatial categorization. (shrink)

The importance of the comparative notion of versimilitude, or truthlikeness, for a realist conception of knowledge follows from two modest ‘realist’ assumptions, namely, that the aim of an enquiry, as an enquiry, is the truth of some matter; and that one false theory may realize this aim better than another. However, there seem to be two ways in which one (false) theory can realize this aim better than another. One (false) theory can be closer to the truth than another either (...) by being preponderantly more accurate in its predictions or by providing more comprehensive information about the system (or class of systems) at issue. This paper presents a model-theoretic approach to the analysis of the comprehensiveness-related component of the comparative notion of versimilitude. The machinery of the ‘semantic’ view of theories is applied to the problem of providing necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of sentences of the form, ‘B is truth-increasing with respect to A’, where A and B are taken to be sets of structures. (shrink)

We draw parallels between several closely related logics that combine — in different proportions — elements of game theory, computation tree logics, and epistemic logics to reason about agents and their abilities. These are: the coalition game logics CL and ECL introduced by Pauly 2000, the alternating-time temporal logic ATL developed by Alur, Henzinger and Kupferman between 1997 and 2002, and the alternating-time temporal epistemic logic ATEL by van der Hoek and Wooldridge (2002). In particular, we establish some subsumption and (...) equivalence results for their semantics, as well as interpretation of the alternating-time temporal epistemic logic into ATL. The focus in this paper is on models: alternating transition systems, multi-player game models (alias concurrent game structures) and coalition effectivity models turn out to be intimately related, while alternating epistemic transition systems share much of their philosophical and formal apparatus. Our approach is constructive: we present ways to transform between different types of models and languages. (shrink)

One of the two central suggestions put forth in Longobardi (1991, 1994) was that Romance/English differences in the syntax of proper names were parametrically connected to supposed differences in the semantics of bare (plural and mass) common nouns (BNs). The present article will pursue this line of investigation, trying to make precise such meaning differences and to understand the reason for their apparently surprising parametric association with the syntax of proper names.It will be shown that in most Romance varieties BNs, (...) unlike their English counterparts, distribute their existential and generic readings across all different contexts exactly like (Romance and English) overt indefinites. All the differences will be unified under the proposal that Romance BNs are nothing but a type of indefinites (variables, existentially or generically bound) in Kamp-Heim’s DRT sense, while English BNs are rather systematically ambiguous between this quantificational interpretation and a referential (i.e. directly kind-denoting, much in the spirit of Carlson 1977a, b) one, providing for another type of generic reading.The analysis will therefore crucially exploit and empirically support Gerstner and Krifka’s (1987) distinction between referential and quantificational genericity. On such grounds we will finally gain a conceptual understanding of the typological implication originally established in Longobardi (1991, 1994), thus confirming that the strategies of interpretation of nominals, whether proper or common nouns, are basically one and the same, though differently parametrized in different languages. This result, in turn, will shed some light on the question whether comparative semantics is possible and whether it can be singled out as a legitimate independent component of parametric theories of grammatical variation. (shrink)

L’incommensurabilité sémantique est comprise comme la non-traduisibilité de concepts appartenant à différentes théories. L’objectif de l’article est de proposer une reconstruction rationnelle de la notion d’incommensurabilité qui sous-tend les écrits de Feyerabend et du dernier Kuhn. L’incommensurabilité, prétend-on, peut être reconstruite sur cette base en tant que notion cohérente, et des exemples pertinents peuvent en être donnés. L’impossibilité de la traduction entre concepts incommensurables provient de l’impossibilité de satisfaire conjointement deux conditions d’adéquation que la théorie contextuelle de la signification impose (...) aux traductions. Les analogues conceptuels potentiels s’avèrent, soit ne pas préserver les conditions d’application, soit ne pas reproduire les relations inférentielles pertinentes. L’incommensurabilité est ainsi construite comme le résultat d’un type particulier de relations conceptuelles produit par l’incompatibilité des théories correspondantes. Ces relations conceptuelles sont suffisamment étroites pour rendre possible une comparaison empirique des assertions théoriques pertinentes. L’article s’efforce de rendre ces thèses plausibles en développant des exemples tirés de l’électrodynamique classique et de la relativité spéciale. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an analysis of metalinguistic comparatives (MCs) in Greek and Korean which combines an attitudinal semantics (Giannakidou and Stavrou 2008) with an expressive component. The comparative morpheme supplies the former, and the than-particle supplies the latter. Following Giannakidou and Stavrou, we assume that the MC involves the speaker’s attitude towards the than-proposition— which is deemed less appropriate or preferable— and we discuss novel data from Korean showing a two way distinction between “regular” MCs (signaled by the (...) particle kipota), and negative MCs (signaled by charari “rather” and the particle nuni). We argue that the use of MC than particles, in all variants, brings about an individual’s emotive state, and propose that the morphemes contain expressive indices in the sense of Potts 2007. Indices allow a range from mildly negative to very negative stance, so we capture the fact that expressive particles convey negativity, without positing negation in syntax— a result consistent with the fact that MC-than itself does not license strong NPIs that need negation. We further show that NPI sanctioning in comparatives is very limited, contrary to what is generally thought. Besides NPI-sanctioning, this analysis has two, we believe, important implications. First, it allows the generalization that metalinguistic functions in language are indeed part of the grammar as a combination of attitude semantics and expressivity. Additionally, our use of expressive indices supports Potts’s view of the expressive component as separate, but interacting, with the descriptive content. Finally, we show that the than particle is not vacuous (as is generally believed) but contentful: it is the locus of the interaction between descriptive and expressive meaning in the comparative. (shrink)

Split constructions are widespread in natural languages. The separation of the semantic restriction of a quantifier from that quantifier is a typical example of such a construction. This study addresses the problem that such discontinuous strings exhibit--namely, a number of locality constraints, including intervention effects. These are shown to follow from the interaction of a minimalist syntax with a semantics that directly assigns a model-theoretic interpretation to syntactic logical forms. The approach is shown to have wide empirical coverage and a (...) conceptual simplicity. The book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of syntax and semantics. (shrink)

The connection between logic programming and formal argumentation has been studied starting from the landmark 1995 paper of Dung. Subsequent work has identified a standard translation from logic programs to argumentation frameworks, under which pairwise correspondences hold between various logic programming semantics and various formal argumentation semantics. This includes the correspondence between 3-valued stable and complete semantics, between well-founded and grounded semantics and between 2-valued stable and stable semantics. In the current paper, we show that the existing translation is able (...) to yield the additional correspondence between ideal semantics for logic programming and ideal semantics for formal argumentation. We also show that correspondence does not hold between eager semantics for logic programming and eager semantics for formal argumentation, at least when translating from logic programming to formal argumentation. Overall, the current work should be seen as completing the analysis of correspondences between mainstream admissibility-based argumentation semantics and their logic programming counterparts. (shrink)

This article studies a type of comparative in Mandarin Chinese, which has rarely been discussed in the literature (Cheng 1966). I refer to them as Differential Verbal Comparatives (DVCs). I show that DVCs, unlike Chinese adjectival and adverbial comparatives, allow differentials that are definite DPs, for example, Jane Eyre he Pride and Prejudice ‘Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice’. Based on this fact and other empirical differences between DVCs and adjectival/adverbial comparatives in Mandarin Chinese, I motivate and develop a mapping-based (...) semantic analysis of DVCs and argue that this analysis fares better than a degree-based analysis. (shrink)

L’incommensurabilité sémantique est comprise comme la non-traduisibilité de concepts appartenant à différentes théories. L’objectif de l’article est de proposer une reconstruction rationnelle de la notion d’incommensurabilité qui sous-tend les écrits de Feyerabend et du dernier Kuhn. L’incommensurabilité, prétend-on, peut être reconstruite sur cette base en tant que notion cohérente, et des exemples pertinents peuvent en être donnés. L’impossibilité de la traduction entre concepts incommensurables provient de l’impossibilité de satisfaire conjointement deux conditions d’adéquation que la théorie contextuelle de la signification impose (...) aux traductions. Les analogues conceptuels potentiels s’avèrent, soit ne pas préserver les conditions d’application, soit ne pas reproduire les relations inférentielles pertinentes. L’incommensurabilité est ainsi construite comme le résultat d’un type particulier de relations conceptuelles produit par l’incompatibilité des théories correspondantes. Ces relations conceptuelles sont suffisamment étroites pour rendre possible une comparaison empirique des assertions théoriques pertinentes. L’article s’efforce de rendre ces thèses plausibles en développant des exemples tirés de l’électrodynamique classique et de la relativité spéciale. (shrink)

The sentence Irving was closer to me than he was to most of the others contains a quantifier, most of the other, in the scope a comparative. The first part of this paper explains the challenges presented by such cases to existing approaches to the semantics of the comparative. The second part presents a new analysis of comparatives based on intervals rather than points on a scale. This innovation is analogized to the move from moments to intervals in tense semantics. (...) The remainder of the paper is concerned with an interval-based semantics of degree in relation to issues other than the comparative proper. The paper begins with a discussion of the role negative polarity has played in studies on the semantics of comparatives. (shrink)

Abstract Since their inception, distributional models of semantics have been criticized as inadequate cognitive theories of human semantic learning and representation. A principal challenge is that the representations derived by distributional models are purely symbolic and are not grounded in perception and action; this challenge has led many to favor feature-based models of semantic representation. We argue that the amount of perceptual and other semantic information that can be learned from purely distributional statistics has been underappreciated. We compare the representations (...) of three feature-based and nine distributional models using a semantic clustering task. Several distributional models demonstrated semantic clustering comparable with clustering-based on feature-based representations. Furthermore, when trained on child-directed speech, the same distributional models perform as well as sensorimotor-based feature representations of children’s lexical semantic knowledge. These results suggest that, to a large extent, information relevant for extracting semantic categories is redundantly coded in perceptual and linguistic experience. Detailed analyses of the semantic clusters of the feature-based and distributional models also reveal that the models make use of complementary cues to semantic organization from the two data streams. Rather than conceptualizing feature-based and distributional models as competing theories, we argue that future focus should be on understanding the cognitive mechanisms humans use to integrate the two sources. (shrink)

This book explores a key issue in linguistic theory, the systematic variation in form between semantic equivalents across languages. Two contrasting views of the role of lexical meaning in the analysis of such variation can be found in the literature: (i) uniformity, whereby lexical meaning is universal, and variation arises from idiosyncratic differences in the inventory and phonological shape of language-particular functional material, and (ii) transparency, whereby systematic variation in form arises from systematic variation in the meaning of basic lexical (...) items. (shrink)

The main objective of this article is to provide a formal semantics of comparative correlatives of the form ‘ yuè …, yuè … ’ in Mandarin Chinese. A new analysis is proposed which treats the comparative correlatives as one which involves a quantificational tripartite structure and which derives all the meanings of the ‘ yuè …, yuè … ’ constructions through a comparison of degrees which relate to different or same individuals. The comparison of the same or different degrees of (...) a given property is shown to be the consequences of the general processing strategy for noun phrase interpretations suggested by Partee, as well as of the constituent structure of the sentence. It is also shown that the same semantics for Chinese yuè can be extended to the - er in English comparative conditionals, as well as to similar constructions in other languages. At the same time a superficial cross-linguistic variation from independent factors can also be derived. (shrink)

Conceptual primitives and semantic universals are the cornerstones of a semantic theory which Anna Wierzbicka has been developing for many years. Semantics: Primes and Universals is a major synthesis of her work, presenting a full and systematic exposition of that theory in a non-technical and readable way. It delineates a full set of universal concepts, as they have emerged from large-scale investigations across a wide range of languages undertaken by the author and her colleagues. On the basis of empirical cross-linguistic (...) studies it vindicates the old notion of the "psychic unity of mankind", while at the same time offering a framework for the rigorous description of different languages and cultures. (shrink)

: The semantic fields and root metaphors of "fate" in Classical Greece and pre-Buddhist China are surveyed here. The Chinese material focuses on the Warring States, the Han, and the reinvention of the earlier lexicon in contemporary Chinese terms for such concepts as risk, randomness, and (statistical) chance. The Greek study focuses on Homer, Parmenides, the problem of fate and necessity, Platonic daimons, and the "On Fate" topos in Hellenistic Greece. The study ends with a brief comparative metaphorology of metaphors (...) for the action of fate including command, division or allotment, and wheel or cycles of change. (shrink)

Introduction 1. Language and meaning Nothing is as easily overlooked, or as easily forgotten, as the most obvious truths. The tenet that language is a tool ...

v. 1. Meanings and representations -- v. 2. Discourse strategies.

Semantic Indexicality shows how a simple syntax can be combined with a propositional language at the level of logical analysis. It is the adoption of such a base language which has not been attempted before, and it is this which constitutes the originality of the book. Cresswell's simple and direct style makes this book accessible to a wider audience than the somewhat specialized subject matter might initially suggest.

This new and important study of semantic change examines how new meanings arise through language use, especially the various ways in which speakers and writers experiment with uses of words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees. In the last few decades there has been growing interest in exploring systemicities in semantic change from a number of perspectives including theories of metaphor, pragmatic inferencing, and grammaticalization. Like earlier studies, these have for the most part been based on (...) data taken out of context. This book is the first detailed examination of semantic change from the perspective of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis. Drawing on extensive corpus data from over a thousand years of English and Japanese textual history, Traugott and Dasher show that most changes in meaning originate in and are motivated by the associative flow of speech and conceptual metonymy. (shrink)

This book presents and exemplifies the theory of grammar called Semantic Syntax. The grammar, which offers a syntactic theory closely connected with semantic analyses, is a direct continuation of Generative Semantics; it will re-ignite interest in that framework which flourished and promised so much in the 1960s and 1970s.

This book, which can be read independently, deals with more specifically linguistic problems in semantics and contains substantial original material.

From Leibniz to Wierzbicka: The history and philosophy of nsm -- Semantic primes and their grammar -- Explicating emotion concepts across languages and cultures -- Wonderful, terrific, fabulous: English evaluational adjectives -- Semantic molecules and semantic complexity -- Words as carriers of cultural meaning -- English verb semantics: verbs of doing and saying -- English verb alternations and constructions -- Applications of NSM: minimal English, cultural scripts and language -- Teaching retrospect: nsm compared with other approaches to semantic analysis.

We offer a novel account of metalinguistic comparatives, such as 'Al is more wise than clever'. On our view, metalinguistic comparatives express comparative commitments to conventions. Thus, 'Al is more wise than clever' expresses that the speaker has a stronger commitment to a convention on which Al is wise than to a convention on which she is clever. This view avoids problems facing previous approaches to metalinguistic comparatives. It also fits within a broader framework—independently motivated by metalinguistic negotiations and convention-shiftingexpressions— (...) that gives linguistic conventions a role in the semantics. (shrink)

Currently, there is a great number of approaches to the semantics-pragmatics distinction on the market. This book is unique in that it offers a comprehensive overview, comparison and critical evaluation of these approaches. At the same time, it covers a wide range of the key current topics in semantics and pragmatics (e.g., the saying/meaning distinction, minimalism vs. contextualism, (generalised) conversational implicatures).

An analysis of the structural properties of collections or pluralities, homogeneous objects like water, and the semantics and philosophy of events.

This article concentrates on a couple of semiotic approaches working out, on the one hand, the mediated character of reducing interpretative trajectories to the actual translation into the language of narratives (A. J. Greimas) or the language of textuality (F. Rastier), and, on the other, the direct, apparently unmediated passage to the visceral physicality of the verbal signifying system, which make semantic and syntactic components perfunctory to interpretation in a way (J. Kristeva). Greimassian universal narrative grammar dismantles signifying units, navigating (...) in the network of narrative utterances. Rastier's approach structures textual artifacts by unearthing semantic constituents crucial for semiotic analysis. Kristeva examines what is behind the curtain instead of sorting out the significance of the text's content as a special category and the possibility of procedure allowing its interpretation. These three authors are compared in the context of two approaches that come to grips with the author/reader pair. (shrink)

The use of highly abstract mathematical frameworks is essential for building the sort of theoretical foundation for semantic integration needed to bring it to the level of a genuine engineering discipline. At the same time, much of the work that has been done by means of these frameworks assumes a certain amount of background knowledge in mathematics that a lot of people working in ontology, even at a fairly high theoretical level, lack. The major purpose of this short paper is (...) provide a (comparatively) simple model of semantic integration that remains within the friendlier confines of first-order languages and their usual classical semantics and logic. (shrink)

It is widely believed by historians of linguistics that the 19th-century was largely devoted to historical and comparative studies, with the main emphasis on the discovery of soundlaws. Syntax is typically portrayed as a mere sideline of these studies, while semantics is seldom even mentioned. If it comes into view at all, it is usually assumed to have been confined to diachronic lexical semantics and the construction of some (mostly ill-conceived) typologies of semantic change. This book aims to destroy some (...) of these prejudices and to show that in Europe semantics was an important, although controversial, area at that time. Synchronic mechanisms of semantic change were discovered and increasing attention was paid to the context of the sentence, to the speech situation and the users of the language. From being a semantics of transformations', a child of the biological-geological paradigm of historical linguistics with its close links to etymology and lexicography, the field matured into a semantics of comprehension and communication, set within a general linguistics and closely related to the emerging fields of psychology and sociology. (shrink)

During the last thirty years, most linguists and philosophers have assumed that meaning can be represented symbolically and that the mental processing of language involves the manipulation of symbols. Scholars have assembled strong evidence that there must be linguistic representations at several abstract levels--phonological, syntactic, and semantic--and that those representations are related by a describable system of rules. Because meaning is so complex, linguists often posit an equally complex relationship between semantic and other levels of grammar. The Semantics of Syntax (...) is an elegant and powerful analysis of the relationship between syntax and semantics. Noting that meaning is underdetermined by form even in simple cases, Denis Bouchard argues that it is impossible to build knowledge of the world into grammar and still have a describable grammar. He thus proposes simple semantic representations and simple rules to relate linguistic levels. Focusing on a class of French verbs, Bouchard shows how multiple senses can be accounted for by the assumption of a single abstract core meaning along with background information about how objects behave in the world. He demonstrates that this move simplifies the syntax at no cost to the descriptive power of the semantics. In two important final chapters, he examines the consequences of his approach for standard syntactic theories. (shrink)