In this essay I use my Non-Monotonic account of “Only Proper Noun” sentences to challenge the Standard Views on the Downard Monotonicity of “Few N” Quantifier sentences. I also review the history of the L. Horn – J.D. Atlas Debate on ‘Only Proper Noun’ sentences and its implications for quantifier noun phrases like “Few N”, and I assess the promise of L. Horn’s Pragmatic Theory of Negative Polarity Item Licensing.

Here, we used event-related potentials to test the predictions of two prominent accounts of code-switching in bilinguals: The Matrix Language Framework (MLF; Myers-Scotton, 1993) and an application of the Minimalist Program (MP; Cantone & MacSwan, 2009). We focused on the relative order of the noun with respect to the adjective in mixed Welsh-English nominal constructions given the clear contrast between pre- and post-nominal adjective position between Welsh and English. MP would predict that the language of the adjective should determine felicitous (...) word order (i.e., English adjectives should appear pre-nominally and Welsh adjectives post-nominally). In contrast, MLF contends that it is the language of the finite verb inflection rather than that of a particular word that governs felicitous word order. To assess the predictions of the two models, we constructed sentences featuring a code-switch between the adjective and the noun, that complied with either English or Welsh word-order. Highly proficient Welsh-English bilinguals made semantic acceptability judgements upon reading the last word of sentences which could violate MP assumptions, MLF assumptions, both assumptions, or neither. Behaviourally, MP violations had no significant effect, whereas MLF violations induced an average drop of 11% in acceptability judgements. Neurophysiologically, MP violations elicited a significant Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) modulation, whereas MLF violations modulated both P600 and LAN mean amplitudes. In addition, there was a significant interaction between MP and MLF status in the P600 range: When MP was violated, MLF status did not matter, and when MP criteria were met, MLF violations resulted in a P600 modulation. This interaction possibly reflects a general preference for noun over adjective insertions, and may provide support for MLF over MP at a global sentence processing level. Model predictions also manifested differently in each of the matrix languages: When the matrix language was Welsh, MP and MLF violations elicited greater P600 mean amplitudes than MP and MLF adherences, however this pattern was not observed when the matrix language was English. We discuss methodological considerations relating to the neuroscientific study of code-switching, and the extent to which our results shed light on adjective-noun code-switching beyond findings from production and experimental-behavioural studies. (shrink)

Negative Concord (NC) constructions such as the news anchor didn’t warn nobody about the floods (meaning ‘the news anchor warned nobody’), in which two syntactic negations contribute a single semantic one, are stigmatized in English, while their Negative Polarity Item (NPI) variants, such as the news anchor didn’t warn anybody about the floods, are prescriptively correct. Equating acceptability with grammaticality, this pattern has led linguists to treat NC as ungrammatical in “Standard” or standardized English (SE). However, it is (...) possible that SE grammars do generate NC sentences, and their low incidence and acceptability is instead due to social factors. To explore this question, and the relationship between NC and NPI constructions, we compared the acceptability of overtly negative noun phrases (e.g. nobody), NPIs (e.g. anybody), and bare plurals (e.g. people), in negative contexts and in conditionals. Negative items were followed by a consequence which supported their single negative meaning, while conditional items were followed by a consequence compatible with the NPI and the bare plural but not the negative noun phrase. Acceptability ratings of the critical NC sentences were reliably lower than constructions with NPIs and bare plurals, but the consequences for all three of these sentence types were rated highly. This reflects an asymmetry in participants’ acceptance of NC and their readiness to interpret it in context. A follow-up study with only conditionals revealed that speakers can also find NPIs infelicitous in conditional contexts with consequences that are compatible with a negative interpretation of the NPI, and that negative arguments are felicitous in these same contexts. Taken together, the results support the hypothesis that speakers who do not accept NC have grammars that generate both NC and NPI constructions, and further, that these speakers have two underlying structures for any-NPIs in English. (shrink)

The concept of the universal was born in the lands we now call Europe, yet it is precisely the universal that is Europe's undoing. All European politics is caught in a tension: to assert a European identity is to be open to multiplicity, but this very openness could dissolve Europe as such. This book reflects on Europe and its changing boundaries over the span of twenty centuries. A work of philosophy, it consistently draws on concrete events. From ancient Greece and (...) Rome, to Christianity, to the Reformation, to the national revolutions of the twentieth century, what we today call "Europe" has been a succession of projects in the name of ecclesia or community. Empire, Church, and EU: all have been constructed in contrast to an Oriental "other." The stakes of Europe, then, are as much metaphysical as political. Redefining a series of key concepts such as world, place, transportation, and the common, this book sheds light on Europe as process by engaging with the most significant philosophical debates on the subject, including the work of Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, Patocka, and Nancy. (shrink)

Abstract Kung?sun Lung's thesis on ?White Horse [is] not Horse? has been solved by A. C. Graham on the basis of a part/whole logic and by Chad Hansen on that and a ?mass?noun? hypothesis. We present it as a case of reducing White Horse to its two most telling marks and then, on the basis of the good Sense (instead of Reference) in a Negative Logic?the pragmatics of locating X as the remainder left over when all non?X's have been (...) removed?show how a stable hand, receiving an order for White Horse would scan first for Horse by removing all non?horse shapes and then for White by removing all colours except White. This way we can prove how indeed ?A request for White Horse cannot be satisfied by Black and Brown that fills an order for Horse... (because) to exclude some colour [in the second scan] is not the same as to exclude yet no colour [in the first scan].? No part/whole or mass?sum is presumed. The whole discussion is set in the context of shifting criteria for judging name from Confucius to Hsun?tzu. (shrink)

Guerzoni and Sharvit (Linguistics and Philosophy 30:361–391, 2007) provide an argument that plural, but not singular, wh-phrases may contain a negative polarity item in their restriction, and connect this with the semantic property of exhaustivity. I will show that this claim is factually incorrect, and that the theory of negative polarity licensing does not need to be complicated by taking number distinctions into account. In addition, I will argue that number distinctions do not appear to be relevant for (...) polarity items in the restriction of definite noun phrases either. (shrink)

The formalisation of Natural Language arguments in a formal language close to it in syntax has been a central aim of Moss’s Natural Logic. I examine how the Quantified Argument Calculus (Quarc) can handle the inferences Moss has considered. I show that they can be incorporated in existing versions of Quarc or in straightforward extensions of it, all within sound and complete systems. Moreover, Quarc is closer in some respects to Natural Language than are Moss’s systems – for instance, is (...) does not use negative nouns. The process also sheds light on formal properties and presuppositions of some inferences it formalises. Directions for future work are outlined. (shrink)

Contents \t\t\t\t\t \tTRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION \t\t1 \t \tNOTE ON THE TRANSLATION \t\t39 \t OBSERVATIONS ON THE FEELING OF THE BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME \t\t\t\t\t \tSECTION ONE: \t\t\t\t \t\tOf the Distinct Objects of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime \t\t45 \tSECTION TWO: \t\t\t\t \t\tOf the Attributes of the Beautiful and Sublime.

This paper sets forth a new theory of quantifiers and term connectives, called shadow theory , which should help simplify various semantic theories of natural language by greatly reducing the need of Montagovian proper names, type-shifting, and λ-conversion. According to shadow theory, conjunctive, disjunctive, and negative noun phrases such as John and Mary , John or Mary , and not both John and Mary , as well as determiner phrases such as every man , some woman , and the (...) boys , are all of semantic type e and denote individual-like objects, called shadows — conjunctive , disjunctive , or negative shadows, such as John-and-Mary, John-or-Mary, and not-(John-and-Mary). There is no essential difference between quantification and denotation: quantification is nothing but denotation of shadows. Individuals and shadows constitute a Boolean structure. Formal language LSD (Language for Shadows with Distributivity), which takes compound terms to denote shadows, is investigated. Expansions and enrichments of LSD are also considered toward the end of the paper. (shrink)

In everyday language, concepts appear alongside related concepts. Societal biases often emerge in these collocations; e.g., female names collocate with art- related concepts, and African American names collocate with negative concepts. It is unknown whether such collocations merely reflect societal biases or contribute to them. Concepts that are themselves neutral in valence but nevertheless collocate with valenced concepts provide a unique opportunity to address this question. For example, when asked, most people evaluate the concept “cause” as neutral, but “cause” (...) is frequently followed by negative concepts. We use such semantically prosodic concepts to test the influence of collocation on the emergence of implicit bias: do neutral concepts that frequently collocate with valenced concepts have corresponding implicit bias? In evaluative priming tasks, participants evaluated positive/negative nouns or pictures after seeing verb primes that were strongly valenced, neutral in valence but collocated with valenced concepts in corpora, or neutral in valence and not collocated with valenced concepts in corpora. Throughout, neutral primes with positive collocates facilitated the evaluation of positive targets much like strongly valenced primes, whereas neutral primes without valenced collocates did not. That neutral concepts with valenced collocates parallel the influence of valenced concepts suggests that their collocations in natural language may be sufficient for fostering implicit bias. Societal implications of the causal embedding hypothesis are discussed. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to propose a unified approach to the split scope readings of negative indefinites, comparative quantifiers, and numerals. There are two main observations that justify this approach. First, split scope shows the same kinds of restrictions across these different quantifiers. Second, split scope always involves low existential force. In our approach, following Sauerland, natural language determiner quantifiers are quantifiers over choice functions, of type <<,t>,t>. In split readings, the quantifier over choice functions scopes above (...) other operators (such as intensional verbs like must or can). Determiner quantifiers leave a choice-function trace when they move and this trace combines with the noun restriction, which is interpreted low. That split scope always involves low existential force is derived, without stipulation, from Kratzer’s idea that low existential force can be achieved via binding (into the noun restriction). (shrink)

We investigate adverbial agreement in Sandəmarkesə (S. Marco in Lamis, Apulia) proposing phase-bound, local agreement relations, reducible to coordination, as in past and absolute participial constructions, suggesting a copulaless analysis where arguments are subjects in a small clause. With disjunct nominals with matching φ-features, the adverb agrees separately with each part in the set, otherwise resulting in ‘non-agreeing’ forms, which we test also with negative polarity items (niʃun-, ‘nobody’ and nentə, ‘nothing’). With fragment answers, the negation scopes over adverbs (...) agreeing with the two proposed topics: matching of the φ-features of both nouns values the negative operator with the same features. In fronted adverbs, agreement occurs when the question contains overt coordinated arguments, elements continuing a chain, and if coordinated arguments have matching φ-features. In agreement in topical contexts with fronted adverbs, agreement occurs with the aboutness-shift topic closely preceding them, rather than with the embedded direct object. (shrink)

The article explores the comprehensibility of court forms by providing a quantitative overview and a qualitative analysis of such syntactic characteristics as length and structure of sentences and noun phrases. The analysis is viewed in the broader context of genre characteristics of court forms, their role within legal proceedings, and their function for eliciting narratives from court users. The findings show that while the elicitation strategies are not always coherently aligned with the guidance sections, the guidance itself condenses legal and (...) procedural information into overly complex and verbose syntactic constructions. Comprehensibility barriers are thus created through breaks in information flow, ambiguous syntactic constructions, missing information and misalignment between questions and guidance. Such comprehension challenges have a negative impact on the potential of court users to effectively engage with legal proceedings. (shrink)

Dummett defines a ‘predicate’ as that which combines with one or more singular terms to form a sentence. His account of ‘singular term’ is syntactical, involving three necessary conditions. He discusses a fourth, ‘Aristotelian’, criterion before propounding a criterion of predicate quantification which he claims to be superior to it. He tentatively proposes that the three necessary conditions plus the criterion of predicate quantification yield sufficient conditions for being a singular term. I show that Dummett’s necessary conditions fail with regard (...) to referentially opaque contexts, negative existentials and wide-scope negations, and that he overlooks an important class of predicative expressions that satisfy his three supposedly necessary conditions for singular terms, namely, those that may appear either as adjectives or as nouns. I argue that Dummett cannot use the ‘Aristotelian’ criterion without circularity; and that, in any case, the ‘Aristotelian’ criterion fails dramatically. I also show that his criterion of predicate quantification fails with regard to expressions for colours. I end by casting doubts on the adequacy of any purely syntactical approach. (shrink)

There have been some studies about spoken natural language dialog,and most of them have successfully been developed within the speci ed task domains. However,current human-computer interfaces only get the data to process their programs.If the dialog processing has emotion comprehensive faculties, it should lead us to more human-like performance.In this paper,we present a method for constructing an emotion-handling dialog system in order to facilitate more confortable interaction with the users. We describe how to calculate emotions from the utterances,focusing on the (...) similarities between the grammar structures and the semantic structures within the case frame.We made emotion generating calculationsto generate pleasure/displeasure emotion from an event.We also calculate the degree of the pleasure/displeasure from an opposite angle's length of the rectangular parallelepiped consisting of the all the terms in the EGC.EGC uses 8 type calculations for 12 event classi ed type by Okada. Word impressions about like/dislike are used for their calculations.Furthermore,we apply these calculations to the negatives and the noun phrases.To verify the e ectiveness of the proposed method,we tested some conversations using WWW-based health service system for elderly. We applied our method to 80 event in the conversations and calculated emotions almost corresponded to human-generating emotions. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an essentialist model of the semantics of slurs. I defend the view that slurs are a species of kind terms: Slur concepts encode mini-theories which represent an essence-like element that is causally connected to a set of negatively-valenced stereotypical features of a social group. The truth-conditional contribution of slur nouns can then be captured by the following schema: For a given slur S of a social group G and a person P, S is true (...) of P iff P bears the “essence” of G—whatever this essence is—which is causally responsible for stereotypical negative features associated with G and predicted of P. Since there is no essence that is causally responsible for stereotypical negative features of a social group, slurs have null-extension, and consequently, many sentences containing them are either meaningless or false. After giving a detailed outline of my theory, I show that it receives strong linguistic support. In particular, it can account for a wide range of linguistic cases that are regarded as challenging, central data for any theory of slurs. Finally, I show that my theory also receives convergent support from cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. (shrink)

In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in (...) a new way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection. (shrink)

Some demonstrative expressions, those we might term ‘bare demonstratives’, appear without any appended descriptive content (e.g. occurrences of ‘this’ or ‘that’ simpliciter). However, it seems that the majority of demonstrative occurrences do not follow this model. ‘Complex demonstratives’ is the collective term I shall use for phrases formed by adjoining one or more common nouns to a demonstrative expression (e.g. ‘that cat’, ‘this happy man’) and I will call the combination of predicates immediately concatenated with the demonstrative in such (...) phrases the ‘matrix’ of the expression. The question, then, is how we should construe the logical form of such expressions within a semantic theory for our language; and I wish to suggest that some recent answers to this question are, in fact, mistaken. The structure of the paper is as follows: first, I wish to highlight two (often underlying) assumptions about the nature of noun phrases in general, and suggest that, if they are both adopted, they apparently constrain the possible accounts of the logical form of complex demonstratives to just three options. The second and third parts of the paper will be concerned with expanding these options and arguing that none of them are adequate; thus the major part of the paper is concerned with the negative claim that the most obvious moves to make in this area must actually fail on closer inspection. The fourth and final section will then (very briefly) sketch the positive thesis of the paper: that we can deliver a clear and cohesive account of complex demonstratives, armed simply with elements which we will draw from David Kaplan’s theory of demonstratives, but only at the cost of rejecting (or at least refining) one assumption we recognised initially. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce anaffective variant of the Simon paradigm. Three experiments are reported in which nouns and adjectives with a positive, negative, or neutral affective meaning were used as stimuli. Depending on the grammatical category of the presented word (i.e. noun or adjective), participants had to respond as fast as possible by saying a predetermined positive or negative word. In Experiments 1 and 2, the words POSITIVE and NEGATIVE were required as responses, in Experiment (...) 3, FLOWER and CANCER were used as response words. Despite the fact that participants were explicitly instructed to ignore the affective meaning of the presented words, reaction times were faster when the affective connotation of the presented word and the correct response was the same than when it differed. The results lendfurther support tothe hypothesis that stimulus valence can be processed automatically. We also argue that the affective Simon paradigm can be used as a flexible tool for the study of affective-processing and discuss how other variants of the Simon paradigm can be developed to stimulate research on other aspects of information-processing. (shrink)

This paper addresses two puzzles in the semantics of connected exceptive phrases (EP): (i) the compatibility of EPs modifying noun phrases headed by the negative polarity item (NPI) determiner any and (ii) the ability of a negative universal quantifier modified by an EP to license strong NPIs. Previous analyses of EPs are shown to fail to solve these puzzles. A new unified solution to the two puzzles is proposed. The crucial insight of the analysis is to allow von (...) Fintel’s (Natural Language Semantics 1: 123–148, 1993; Restrictions on quantifier domains, PhD dissertation, 1994) leastness condition on EPs to be imposed at scopes non-local to the surface position of the EP. A general result is derived concerning the truth conditions of sentences in which an existential modified by an EP occurs in the scope of a downward entailing operator. The distribution of EPs is argued to depend on how the leastness condition interacts with other pragmatic strengthening conditions, such as the one imposed on any by Kadmon and Landman (Linguistics and Philosophy 16: 353–422, 1993). (shrink)

Anaphoric deflationism is a prosententialist account of the use of “true.” Prosentences are, for sentences, the equivalent of what pronouns are for nouns: as pronouns refer to previously introduced nouns, so prosentences like “that’s true” inherit their content from previously introduced sentences. This kind of deflationism concerning the use of “true” (especially in Brandom’s version) is an explanation in terms of anaphora; the prosentence depends anaphorically on the sentence providing its content. A relevant implication of this theory is (...) that “true” is not understood as a predicate and that truth is not a property. Primitivism, defended by Frege, Moore, and Davidson, is associated with two ideas: (1) that truth is a primitive and central trait of our conceptual system and (2) that truth, as such, cannot be defined. This second claim can be called “negative primitivism,” and it especially points out the facts about the “indefinability” of truth generally advocated by primitivists. In what follows, a connection is established between the deflationist’s rejection of the predicate and of the property and facts (and primitivist ideas) about the indefinability of truth. This connection establishes a common framework to lend further explanatory power to both options. According to the resulting view, this indefinability can explain the appeal and soundness of a deflationist dismissal of predicates and properties dealing with truth. (shrink)

The automated parsing of 130,213 news articles about the 2012 US presidential elections produces a network formed by the key political actors and issues, which were linked by relations of support and opposition. The nodes are formed by noun phrases and links by verbs, directly expressing the action of one node upon the other. This network is studied by applying insights from several theories and techniques, and by combining existing tools in an innovative way, including: graph partitioning, centrality, assortativity, hierarchy (...) and structural balance. The analysis yields various patterns. First, we observe that the fundamental split between the Republican and Democrat camps can be easily detected by network partitioning, which provides a strong validation check of the approach adopted, as well as a sound way to assign actors and topics to one of the two camps. Second, we identify the most central nodes of the political camps. We also learnt that Clinton played a more central role than Biden in the Democrat camp; the overall campaign was much focused on economy and rights; the Republican Party is the most divisive subject in the campaign, and is portrayed more negatively than the Democrats; and, overall, the media reported positive statements more frequently for the Democrats than the Republicans. This is the first study in which political positions are automatically extracted and derived from a very large corpus of online news, generating a network that goes well beyond traditional word-association networks by means of richer linguistic analysis of texts. (shrink)

We recorded Event-Related Potentials to investigate differences in the use of gender information during the processing of reflexive pronouns. Pronouns either matched the gender provided by role nouns (such as “king” or “engineer”) or did not. We compared two types of gender information, definitional information, which is semantic in nature (a mother is female), or stereotypical (a nurse is likely to be female). When they followed definitional role-nouns, gender-mismatching pronouns elicited a P600 effect reflecting a failure in the (...) agreement process. When instead the gender violation occurred after stereotypical role-nouns the Event Related Potential response was biphasic, being positive in parietal electrodes and negative in anterior left electrodes. The use of a correlational approach showed that those participants with more “feminine” or “expressive” self sex-role descriptions showed a P600 response for stereotype violations, suggesting that they experienced the mismatch as an agreement violation; whereas less “expressive” participants showed an Nref effect, indicating more effort spent in linking the pronouns with the possible, although less likely, counter-stereotypical referent. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that language comprehenders resolve reference quickly and incrementally, but not much is known about the neural processes and representations that are involved. Studies of visual short-term memory suggest that access to the representation of an item from a previously seen display is associated with a negative evoked potential at posterior electrodes contralateral to the spatial location of that item in the display. In this paper we demonstrate that resolving the reference of a noun phrase in (...) a recently seen visual display is associated with an event-related potential that is analogous to this effect. Our design was adapted from the visual world paradigm: in each trial, participants saw a display containing three simple objects, followed by a question about the objects, such as Was the pink fish next to a boat?, presented word by word. Questions differed in whether the color adjective allowed the reader to identify the referent of the noun phrase or not (i.e., whether one or more objects of the named color were present). Consistent with our hypothesis, we observed that reference resolution by the adjective was associated with a negative evoked potential at posterior electrodes contralateral to spatial location of the referent, starting approximately 333 ms after the onset of the adjective. The fact that the laterality of the effect depended upon the location of the referent within the display suggests that reference resolution in visual domains involves, at some level, a modality-specific representation. In addition, the effect gives us an estimate of the time course of processing from perception of the written word to the point at which its meaning is brought into correspondence with the referential domain. (shrink)

The concept of polarity is pervasive in natural language. It relates syntax, semantics and pragmatics narrowly, Semantics: an international handbook of natural language meaning, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, 2011; Israel in The grammar of polarity: pragmatics, sensitivity, and the logic of scales, Cambridge studies in linguistics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014), it refers to items of many syntactic categories such as nouns, verbs and adverbs. Neutral polarity items appear in affirmative and negative sentences, negative polarity items cannot (...) appear in affirmative sentences, and positive polarity items cannot appear in negative sentences. A way of reasoning in Natural Language is through Natural Logic. This logic is based on the concept of polarity in order to make the meaning of a sentence weaker o stronger without changing its truth value. There exist many proposals to compute polarity in the Natural Logic context, the most widely known are the ones by: van Benthem, Sánchez-Valencia, Dowty, and van Eijck, 6th international Tbilisi symposium on logic, language, and computation, Batumi, Georgia, Springer, 2007). If Natural Logic is going to be used, as an inferential mechanism between text fragments, in Natural Language Processing applications such as text summarization, question answering, and information extraction, it is a priority to know what the existing relationship among the aforementioned algorithms is; for example, to implement the most general. We show in this paper the equivalence among the analyzed algorithms, filling a gap in Natural Logic research, particularly in computing polarity, and the soundness of their algorithms. (shrink)

Conversational negation often behaves differently from negation as a logical operator: when rejecting a state of affairs, it does not present all members of the complement set as equally plausible alternatives, but it rather suggests some of them as more plausible than others (e.g., “This is not a dog, it is a wolf/*screwdriver”). Entities that are semantically similar to a negated entity tend to be judged as better alternatives (Kruszewski et al., 2016). In fact, Kruszewski et al. (2016) show that (...) the cosine similarity scores between the distributional semantics representations of a negated noun and its potential alternatives are highly correlated with the negated noun-alternatives human plausibility ratings. In a series of cloze tasks, we show that negation likewise restricts the production of plausible alternatives to similar entities. Furthermore, completions to negative sentences appear to be even more restricted than completions to an affirmative conjunctive context, hinting at a peculiarity of negation. (shrink)

The language comprehension system preferentially assumes that agents come first during incremental processing. While this might reflect a biologically fixed bias, shared with other domains and other species, the evidence is limited to languages that place agents first, and so the bias could also be learned from usage frequency. Here, we probe the bias with electroencephalography (EEG) in Äiwoo, a language that by default places patients first, but where sentence-initial nouns are still locally ambiguous between patient or agent roles. (...) Comprehenders transiently interpreted nonhuman nouns as patients, eliciting a negativity when disambiguation was toward the less common agent-initial order. By contrast and against frequencies, human nouns were transiently interpreted as agents, eliciting an N400-like negativity when the disambiguation was toward patient-initial order. Consistent with the notion of a fixed property, the agent bias is robust against usage frequency for human referents. However, this bias can be reversed by frequency experience for nonhuman referents. (shrink)

Funerals are a reflective practice to bid farewell to the departed soul. Different religions, cultural traditions, rituals, and social beliefs guide how funeral practices take place. Family and friends gather together to support each other in times of grief. However, during the coronavirus pandemic, the way funerals are taking place is affected by the country's rules and region to avoid the spread of infection. The present study explores the media portrayal of public sentiments over funerals. In particular, the present study (...) tried to identify linguistic dimensions associated with lexical components of social processes, affective processes, fear, and disgust. An exhaustive search of newspaper coverage of funeral and related articles was made for a specific corona period. After an initial screening for the details and language used, a total of 46 newspaper articles on funerals were finalized for the analysis. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software was used to determine the association between linguistic dimensions of function words and words related to social and affective processes, as presented in the newspaper articles. Sentiment Analysis and Cognition Engine (SEANCE) was applied for the analysis of sentiment, social cognition, and social order. Bayesian correlation analysis and regression revealed positive and significant associations between function words and affective processes, between pronouns and social processes, and between negative adjectives and psychological processes of fear and disgust. Also, significant negative associations were found between polarity nouns and psychological processes of fear and disgust and between polarity verbs and psychological processes of fear and disgust. Bayes factor 10 provides strong evidence in favor of the study hypotheses. The media is influenced by the prevailing sentiments in society and reflects their perception of the current social order and beliefs. The findings provide a glimpse into the prevailing sentiment of society through the lens of media coverage. These understandings are expected to enhance our observations of how people express their feelings over the loss of their loved ones and help mental health professionals develop their therapeutic protocols to treat the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)-affected population. (shrink)

: This paper deals with the subject of mushākala, ta'rīz, kināya and ijāz in terms of language andthe using of Qur’ān's verb and noun forms, human genre and adjective nouns in terms of style and someother related problems. The punishment or retribution from Allāh (Makr) as mushākala form, whichsometimes occurs at the level of a gradual diminution or collapse, is a punishment that gradually destroysthe sinner without his realizing it. However, it is possible to say that there is another (...) dimension inMüshākala, destiny, and the formula of the working mechanism of destiny. According to this formula, it isunderstood that whatever behavior a person exhibits, Allah responds with a similar behavior. Based onthis dimension of destiny, it is understood that in one aspect (with the exception of Allah's will), mandetermines his own destiny relatively, and that his destiny is shaped as a result of his own actions. Some(Ta’rīd) verses and expressions with indirect narrative content were misinterpreted by some peoplebecause they implied something too deep to understand by human beings and had a profundity ofmeanings as well as secret wisdom. The fact is that about the 6th verse of the chapter of al-Mâida: "O youwho have believed, when you rise to (perform) prayer, wash your faces and your fore arms to the elbowsand your heads too." Shiites misunderstand Ibn Abbas's statement pointed out as "I can find nothing butwiping the feet in Allah's book, but they did not accept anything but washing", and their anointing of theirfeet is due to such a misunderstanding. In the Qur’ān, indirect expression is used in places that mentionabout the adab of maram (private) affairs in marital relationships; and that which should not be saidopenly. With such a form of expression, the Qur’ān is descended upon human beings from Allah to beexpressed in indirect expressions in situations where it is not welcome to express clearly. In the same way,it can be said that when the Qur’ān mentions a negative situation, it refers to it with closed expressions,and It can also be said that it uses Kinâya as a politeness and courtesy style. However, in any case, thecustomary usage should not be ignored while giving meaning to the verse expressions with allusions. Inexpressions of the Qur’ān, ijāz is used extensively; It is possible to say that a large part of the ijāz is theeliminate of words in expressions. For this reason it should not be overlooked that in some verses thatare not understood, some part of it may be deleted for ijāz. In terms of the style of the Qur’ān in thearticle, there are important points in terms of rhetoric in the use of verb and noun form, which is one ofthe topics discussed. (shrink)

: This paper deals with the subject of mushākala, ta'rīz, kināya and ijāz in terms of language and the using of Qur’ān's verb and noun forms, human genre and adjective nouns in terms of style and some other related problems. The punishment or retribution from Allāh as mushākala form, which sometimes occurs at the level of a gradual diminution or collapse, is a punishment that gradually destroys the sinner without his realizing it. However, it is possible to say that (...) there is another dimension in Müshākala, destiny, and the formula of the working mechanism of destiny. According to this formula, it is understood that whatever behavior a person exhibits, Allah responds with a similar behavior. Based on this dimension of destiny, it is understood that in one aspect, man determines his own destiny relatively, and that his destiny is shaped as a result of his own actions. Some verses and expressions with indirect narrative content were misinterpreted by some people because they implied something too deep to understand by human beings and had a profundity of meanings as well as secret wisdom. The fact is that about the 6th verse of the chapter of al-Mâida: "O you who have believed, when you rise to prayer, wash your faces and your fore arms to the elbows and your heads too." Shiites misunderstand Ibn Abbas's statement pointed out as "I can find nothing but wiping the feet in Allah's book, but they did not accept anything but washing", and their anointing of their feet is due to such a misunderstanding. In the Qur’ān, indirect expression is used in places that mention about the adab of maram affairs in marital relationships; and that which should not be said openly. With such a form of expression, the Qur’ān is descended upon human beings from Allah to be expressed in indirect expressions in situations where it is not welcome to express clearly. In the same way, it can be said that when the Qur’ān mentions a negative situation, it refers to it with closed expressions, and It can also be said that it uses Kinâya as a politeness and courtesy style. However, in any case, the customary usage should not be ignored while giving meaning to the verse expressions with allusions. In expressions of the Qur’ān, ijāz is used extensively; It is possible to say that a large part of the ijāz is the eliminate of words in expressions. For this reason it should not be overlooked that in some verses that are not understood, some part of it may be deleted for ijāz. In terms of the style of the Qur’ān in the article, there are important points in terms of rhetoric in the use of verb and noun form, which is one of the topics discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 417-418 [Access article in PDF] Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman, editors. Jewish Themes in Spinoza's Philosophy. Albany: The State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. ix + 290. Cloth, $78.50. Paper, $26.95.The current anthology presents an important contribution to the study of Spinoza's relation to Jewish philosophy as well as to contemporary scholarship of Spinoza's metaphysics and political (...) theory.In the opening essay, Lenn Goodman takes upon himself the ambitious task of evaluating Spinoza's positions as to several central disputes throughout the history of philosophy. In this rich and extensive essay Goodman argues that Spinoza's radical rationalism makes him pursue syntheses between traditionally opposed poles. Lee Rice's article, "Love of God in Spinoza," carefully analyzes Spinoza's concept of love and suggests the existence of three kinds of love parallel to the three kinds of knowledge. Warren Montag addresses the unresolved issue of Spinoza's relation to the Kabbalah. Montag sides with Deleuze against the association of Spinozism with the Neo-Platonic theory of emanation, arguing that unlike the Neo-Platonists and Kabbalists, Spinoza's view of God rules out any hierarchy, and does not assume a descent from primal simplicity into complexity. Edwin Curley contributes a beautiful reading of the story of Job and of Maimonides' interpretation of the story. Curley follows Maimonides' discussion of the various positions regarding the question of divine providence and his attempt to identify the speeches of the characters of the book of Job with each of these positions. Following a sensitive consideration of various attempts to [End Page 417] recover Maimonides' own rather concealed view about providence, Curley concludes that "[W]hatever you think Maimonides' final word on Job is, our examination of him certainly supports [Spinoza's] claim that [Maimonides] reads Scripture in terms of Platonic or Aristotelian speculations" (170).Warren Zev Harvey's essay addresses Spinoza's most neglected work, the Compendium of the Grammar of the Hebrew Language. Apart from providing an outline of Spinoza's work as a Hebrew grammarian ("a noun-intoxicated grammarian") and pointing out some of Spinoza's more eccentric views about the nature of the Hebrew language, Harvey makes a compelling case for the importance of the book for the study of Spinoza's metaphysics. He points out a fascinating analogy which Spinoza draws between the parts of speech: (proper) noun, adjectives, and participles, and Spinoza's key metaphysical terms: substance, attributes, and modes. (Think about the weighty implications of this analogy for Curley's interpretation of the substance-mode relation.) According to Harvey, Spinoza's claim that all Hebrew words are derived from nouns is a linguistic parallel to Spinoza's pivotal metaphysical doctrine which makes all things be in the substance (or God). Kenneth Seeskin's article discusses the views of Maimonides and Spinoza on the question of creation and God's relation to the world. Seeskin reconstructs an interesting critical dialogue between these two philosophers. According to Seeskin, both philosophers held that an effect must be similar to its cause. Maimonides' commitment to Negative Theology and to the denial of any common measure between God and finite things forced him to deny causal or explanatory relation between God and the world. What Maimonides can suggest instead is rather to prove that the emergence of the world ex nihilo and according to the divine will, is possible, and even likely given certain astronomical facts of medieval science. Thus, Maimonides would hold that "although we have grounds for believing that creation occurred, we will never be in a position to say how" (120). For Spinoza, such a view constitutes nothing but a "sanctuary of ignorance." Thus, according to Seeskin, Spinoza affirms a clear causal relation between God and the world of finite things insofar as God is said to explain the world. While I tend to agree with most aspects of this analysis, it is important to note that Spinoza also claims that "between the finite and infinite there is no relation" (Letter 54). This... (shrink)

Despite being often criticized, the notion of face has recently begun to be applied in diachronic pragmatic investigations on directives, requests, apologies, and terms of address. The present study also uses the notion of face to investigate the use of Dank ‘thanks’, Dankbarkeit ‘thankfulness’, and danken ‘to thank’ in expressions of gratitude in Old Saxon and Old High German, laying the foundations to a better understanding of the speech act of thanking in the history of German. The data suggest that, (...) although the manifestation of gratitude was common, the expressions containing Dank, Dankbarkeit, and danken could mostly be found when the addresser was in a lower social position than the addressee. The same situation was observed when these nouns and verbs were used with the meaning of “to reward” and “to praise.” These findings provide evidence to the claim that the effects of a speech act on the speaker’s or hearer’s face are mostly situational rather than being an intrinsic property. They also suggest that, in strictly hierarchical societies such as the Old Saxon and Old High German ones, addressers would threaten their own negative face only if they were in a lower social position than the addressees. (shrink)

Students of classical Chinese philosophy are quite justly puzzled by the debates and paradoxes in the "School of Names" and the extant logico-semantic texts of the Later Mohists. The latter has received an incisive and extensive treatment in A. C. Graham's Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science. Thus far, no larger systematic work on Chinese logic and philosophy of language is available in English. Hansen's book is a good attempt to deal in the large scale with classical Chinese philosophy of (...) language. This book consists of five carefully written chapters. The first expounds a methodology which starts from the premise that interpretation is a theory--"an attempt to explain a text--to render it understandable. As such it is inescapably relative to the intended audience, and appropriately wedded to the critical, rational, logical evaluation procedures appropriate to other theories. The main evaluative features on which we have concentrated is the coherence of the theory." The text at issue is that ascribed to Kung-sun Lung discussed in chapter 5. In terms of its announced aim, it succeeds well in rendering a plausible though by no means uncontroversial explication of the text. The attempted explication is, however, mediated by a number of chapters which raise interesting philosophical issues that repay closer examination by students and philosophical scholars of Chinese philosophy of language. Chapter 2, for example, proposes a bold hypothesis on Chinese philosophy in terms of the logic of mass nouns. It is claimed that a "stuff-like ontology and semantics were implicitly operating as a background assumption behind pre-Han philosophy," and a negative corrollary: "an hypothesis that an abstract or mentalistic ontology and semantics of the type common to Western thinkers were not implicit assumptions behind pre-Han philosophy." For the reviewer, the negative thesis is highly plausible independently of the adequacy of the first. (shrink)

Erikson is Professor of Human Development at Harvard, a psychoanalyst, and the author of the widely influential books, Young Man Luther, and Childhood and Society. What is the relevance of his latest book to philosophy? One answer is that Erikson deals with several concepts of personal identity which philosophers will recognize as corresponding to historical philosophic positions. He does not choose between these disparate views, but correlates them, treating each as partial, and learning about his complex subject from the habits (...) of syntax appropriate to each. Erikson divides personal identity into the "I," the "selves," and the "ego," on the grounds that these terms provide a way to distinguish roles and "counterplayers" of various functionings of human personality. We need these various terms to designate identity as viewed from without and from within. Erikson's "selves" are what the "I" reflects on when it views the body, the personality, or the social roles to which it is attached. The counterplayers of the "selves" are the "others" of Existentialism. Erikson's reflective "I," like the subject of Descartes' cogito, is "the center of awareness in a universe of experience in which I have a coherent identity... am in possession of my wits and able to say what I see and think." With Descartes, Erikson finds the unique counterplayer to the "I" in the Deity; the repository of the vitality which is being affirmed of itself in each awareness of the "I." Erikson's "ego" corresponds to the Self of Hume's Treatise, undiscoverable beneath its particular perceptions. The "ego" is necessarily unconscious; we are aware of its work but never of it. As of Hume's self, we can say of it that it has the task of turning passive into active, screening and organizing the impositions of the internal and external environment in such a way that they bring about volitions. Like Hume, Erikson feels philosophers and psychologists have "created nouns such as the 'I' or the 'self', making imaginary entities out of a manner of speaking" and that we would be mistaken to give ontological status to these particles. Perhaps Erikson would accept a statement of the contemporary philosophical form: "The several designations of 'selves', etc., are instrumental in explaining complex personal identity feelings or events." In other parts of the book Erikson uses William James as an example of creative identity, discusses the concept of "negative identity", and in the last three chapters discusses aspects of personal identity in the disequilibrium of the young, the races, and women. The book contains Erikson's writings on identity over a twenty-year period. However, in areas of common interest to psychoanalytic theory and philosophy, the requirements of Erikson's clinical work have suggested relationships between concepts different from the relationships often assumed by philosophers. Thus, on personal identity, criteria of ideological soundness of a society, and the determinants of empirical perception, the addition of Erikson's insights may give the philosopher a multidimensional glimpse of the field wherein he labors.--M. B. M. (shrink)

A formal, computational, semantically clean representation of natural language is presented. This representation captures the fact that logical inferences in natural language crucially depend on the semantic relation of entailment between sentential constituents such as determiner, noun, adjective, adverb, preposition, and verb phrases.The representation parallels natural language in that it accounts for human intuition about entailment of sentences, it preserves its structure, it reflects the semantics of different syntactic categories, it simulates conjunction, disjunction, and negation in natural language by computable (...) operations with provable mathematical properties, and it allows one to represent coordination on different syntactic levels. (shrink)

This dissertation is an experiment: what happens if we treat proper names as anaphoric expressions on a par with pronouns? The first thing to notice is that a name's 'antecedent' can occur in a discourse prior to the one containing the name. An individual may be introduced and tagged with a name in one context, and then retrieved using the name in a later context. To allow for discourse crossing anaphora, in addition to the usual cross-sentential anaphora, a revision of (...) discourse semantics is in order. Essentially, we must countenance discourse referents that span contexts, and think of contexts, not as islands, but as nodes connected to each other by the discourse referents they share. Discourse semantics gives rise to a new notion of content determined by discourse reference rather than pure reference. In a space of contexts structured by shared discourse referents, discourse content becomes transmissable. For a piece of content may be sent from one context to another whenever the discourse referents bundled up in the content are held in common by the two contexts. The final step is to treat the cognitive state of an agent as just another kind of context, and so a potential recipient of discourse content. Discourse content is more fine-grained than traditional 'singular' content, and so is a better fit for our pretheoretic intuitions about communication and attitude reporting. This is illustrated by applying the theory to Frege's puzzle, a puzzle of Loar's about communication, Kripke's puzzle about belief, Geach's intentional identity and new breed of 'mixed' de re-de dicto sentence. (shrink)

Gain a deeper understanding of essential research on the semantics of noun phrases and verb phrases. Clear explanations of significant recent research bring complex issues to life, with expert guidance on topics of debate within the field. The book gives readers valuable insights into topics such as definiteness, specificity, genericity aspect, aktionsart and mood. It also discusses directions for future research. Written by a world-class team of authors, these highly cited articles are here in paperback for the first time since (...) their original publication. An essential reference for researchers in the area. (shrink)

A dilemma put forward by Schein (1993) and Rayo (2002) suggests that, in order to characterize the semantics of plurals, we should not use predicate logic, but non-singular logic, a formal language whose terms may refer to several things at once. We show that a similar dilemma applies to mass nouns. If we use predicate logic and sets, we arrive at a Russellian paradox when characterizing the semantics of mass nouns. Likewise, a semantics of mass nouns based (...) upon predicate logic and mereological sums is too weak, since it cannot characterize the “intermediary” construals that sentences containing mass nouns may receive. We then develop an account where mass nouns are treated as non-singular terms, which may refer to several things at once. This semantics is faithful to the intuition that, if there are eight pieces of silverware on a table, the speaker refers to eight things at once when he says: “The silverware that is on the table comes from Italy”. We show that this account provides a satisfactory semantics for a wide range of sentences, including cases often seen as difficult, like “The gold on the table weighs seven ounces” (Bunt 1985) and “All phosphorus is either red or black” (Roeper 1983). (shrink)

Introduction Introducing Accessibility theory 0.1 On the role of context Utterances cannot be processed and interpreted on their own. ...

A dilemma put forward by Schein (1993) and Rayo (2002) suggests that, in order to characterize the semantics of plurals, we should not use predicate logic, but plural logic, a formal language whose terms may refer to several things at once. We show that a similar dilemma applies to mass nouns. If we use predicate logic and sets when characterizing their semantics, we arrive at a Russellian paradox. And if we use predicate logic and mereoogical ums, the semantics turns (...) out to be too weak. We then develop an account where mass nouns are treated as non-singular terms. This semantics is faithful to the intuition that, if there are eight pieces of silverware on a table, the speaker refers to eight things at once when he says: "The silverware that is on the table comes from Italy." We show that this account provides a satisfactory semantics for a wide range of sentences. (shrink)