An important part of textual inference is making deductions involving monotonicity, that is, determining whether a given assertion entails restrictions or relaxations of that assertion. For instance, the statement ‘We know the epidemic spread quickly ’ does not entail ‘We know the epidemic spread quickly via fleas’, but ‘We doubt the epidemic spread quickly’ entails ‘We doubt the epidemic spread quickly via fleas’. Here, we present the first algorithm for the challenging lexical-semantics problem of learning linguistic constructions that, like ‘doubt’, are downward entailing (DE). Our algorithm is unsupervised, resource-lean, and effective, accurately recovering many DE operators that are missing from the handconstructed lists that textual-inference systems currently use. 1

A central question in online human sentence comprehension is: how are linguistic relations established between different parts of a sentence? Previous work has shown that this dependency resolution process can be computationally expensive, but the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. We argue that dependency resolution is mediated by cue-based retrieval, constrained by independently motivated working memory principles defined in a cognitive architecture (ACT-R). To demonstrate this, we investigate an unusual instance of dependency resolution, the processing of negative and positive polarity items, and confirm a surprising prediction of the cue-based retrieval model: partial cue-matches—which constitute a kind of similarity-based interference—can give rise to the intrusion of ungrammatical retrieval candidates, leading to both processing slow-downs and even errors of judgment that take the form of illusions of grammaticality in patently ungrammatical structures. A notable achievement is that good quantitative fits are achieved without adjusting the key model parameters.

This paper presents some arguments against a unilateral account of numerically quantified noun phrases and for a bilateral account of such expressions. It is proposed that where numerically quantified noun phrases give rise to ‘at least ’ readings, this is the result of one of two forms of pragmatic reasoning. To that end, the paper develops an independently motivated account of specificity and existential closure involving diagonalisation.

This article examines idiomatic expressions as sources of both regularity and irregularity in language. Some morphological, lexical, syntactical, and semantical characteristics of idioms are discussed. It is shown how a lexical licensing mechanism, which is formulated within a formal grammar framework, can deal with the data. After that, this proposal is extended to the phenomenon of negative polarity.

Abstract. The Japanese focus particle mo (‘also’), attached to indeterminates or NP, has been known to form a negative polarity item (NPI) (Kato 1985, among others) or a negative concord item (Watanabe 2004). In this paper, I introduce a kind of mo with NP which requires an adversative predicate or a weak negative environment, but does not coincide with the overt negative. This is reminiscent of bipolar items in Dutch, Serbo-Croatian (van der Wouden 1994, 1997) and Hungarian. It has been believed that Japanese NPIs call for the strongest negative context (Nam 1994). However, the present paper shows that this is not the case. 1 The Third Mo and Negative Implicature It has been known that the Japanese focus particle mo (‘also’) forms NPIs with indeterminates (wh-words): (1) Dare-mo ko-nai. who-mo come-Neg ‘Nobody comes’

In Danish embedded clauses sentential negation occupies a position to the left of the VP, i.e. after the subject immediately preceding the finite verb (1a). Even inherently negated indefinite complements are attracted to this position as in (1b) ([Sells, 2000]). However, in certain non-veridical contexts sentential negation may also appear between the complementizer and the subject (1c). I will refer to this as preposed negation. Note that the negation

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on negative polarity items (npis) has been dominated by two fundamental assumptions about the licensing contexts of npis and their inherent semantic-pragmatic properties. The contexts in which npis may occur felicitously are said to have the semantic property

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Our paper aims at capturing the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs) within lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG). The condition under which an NPI can occur in a sentence is for it to be in the scope of a negation with no quantifiers scopally intervening. We model this restriction within a recent framework for LTAG semantics based on semantic unification. The proposed analysis provides features that signal the presence of a negation in the semantics and that specify its scope. We extend our analysis to modelling the interaction of NPI licensing and neg raising constructions.