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One type of lexical knowledge which is useful for many natural language (NL) tasks is the semantic re-In this paper we present a method to group adjectives latedness between words of the same or different syn-according to their meaning, as a first step towards the tactic categories. Semantic relatedness subsumes automatic identification of adjectival scales. We discuss the properties of adjectival scales and of groups of semantically related adjectives and how they imply sources of linguistic knowledge in text corpora. We describe how our system exploits this linguistic knowledge to compute a measure of similarity between two adjectives, using statistical techniques and without having access to any semantic infor-mation about the adjectives. We also show how a clustering algorithm can use these similarities to produce the groups of adjectives, and we present results produced by our sys-tem for a sample set of adjectives. We conclude by present-ing evaluation methods for the task at hand, and analyzing the significance of the results obtained. hyponymy, synonymy, and antonymy-incompatibility. Special forms of relatedness are represented in the lexical entries of the WordNet lex-ical database (Miller et al., 1990). Paradigmatic semantic relations in WordNet have been used for diverse NL problems, including disambiguation of syntactic structure (Resnik, 1993) and semiautomatic construction of a large-scale ontology for machine translation (Knight, 1993). In this paper, we focus on a particular case of semantic relatedness: relatedness between adjectives which describe the same property. We describe a technique for automatically grouping adjectives ac-cording to their meaning based on a given text corpus, so that all adjectives placed in one group 1.

In this article we present two sets of experiments designed to investigate the acquisition of scalar implicatures. Scalar implicatures arise in examples like Some profissors are famous where the speaker's use of some typically indicates that s/he had reasons not to use a more informative term, e.g. all. Someprofissors are famous therefore gives rise to the implicature that not all professors are famous. Recent studies on the development of pragmatics suggest that preschool children are often insensitive to such implicatures when they interpret scalar terms (Noveck 2001 for terms like might and some; Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini and Meroni 2001 for or). This conclusion raises two important questions: a) are all scalar terms treated in the same way by young children?, and b) does the child's difficulty reflect a genuine inability to derive scalar implicatures or is it due to demands imposed by the experimental task on an otherwise pragmatically savvy child? Experiment 1 addresses the first question by testing a group of 30 5-year-olds and 30 adults (all native speakers of Greek) on three different scales, meriki/ oli (some/all), dio/ tris (two/three) and arxi<o / teliono (start/finish). In each case, subjects were presented with contexts which satisfy the truth conditions of the stronger (i.e. more informative) terms on each scale (i.e. all, three and finish) but were described using the weaker terms of the scales (i.e. some, two, start). We found that while adults overwhelmingly rejected these infelicitous descriptions, children almost never did so. Children also differed from adults in that thei rejection rate on the numerical scale was reliably higher than on the two other scales. In order to address question (b), we trained a group of 30 5-year-olds to detect in...

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the linguistic phenomenon of polarity sensitivity. It is motivated by the belief that the complexity of the phenomenon requires a more articulated analysis than the standard one based on licensing conditions. Traditionally, the term of polarity sensitive is used to identify items whose distribution is considered to be affected by the positivity or negativity of the context of occurrence. The notion of negative context covers more than environments containing overt negation or negative quantifiers. Elements that induce a negative context are potential licensers for negative polarity sensitive items. The phenomenon of polarity sensitivity has been approached from a variety of perspectives in the literature. The cluster of data associated with it raises semantically and syntactically important questions. There is reduced agreement on the definition of pertinent negativity. Sensitive elements show meaning variations when taken in isolation or in con...

This paper discusses the processes by which conversants in a dialogue can infer whether their assertions and proposals have been accepted or rejected by their conversational partners. It expands on previous work by showing that logical consistency is a necessary indicator of acceptance, but that it is not sufficient, and that logical inconsistency is sufficient as an indicator of rejection, but it is not necessary. I show how conversants can use information structure and prosody as well as logical reasoning in distinguishing between acceptances and logically consistent rejections, and relate this work to previous work on implicature and default reasoning by introducing three new classes of rejection: IMPLIGATURE REJECTIONS, EPISTEMIC REJECTIONS and DELIBERATION REJECTIONS. I show how these rejections are inferred as a result of default inferences, which, by other analyses, would have been blocked by the context. In order to account for these facts, I propose a model of the common ground that allows these default inferences to go through, and show how the model, originally proposed to account for the various forms of acceptance, can also model all types of rejection.

Since Austin introduced the term infelicity, the linguistic literature has been flooded with its use. Today, not only performatives that fail are considered infelicitous but also utterances that are syntactically, semantically, or pragmatically ill-formed. However, no formal or computational explanation has been given for infelicity. This thesis provides one for those infelicities that occur when a pragmatic inference is cancelled. We exploit a well-known difference between pragmatic and semantic information: since implicatures and presuppositions, i.e., the carriers of pragmatic information, are not specifically uttered, pragmatic inferences are defeasible, while most of semantic inferences are indefeasible. Our contribution assumes the existence of a finer grained taxonomy with respect to pragmatic inferences. It is shown that if one wants to account for the natural language expressiveness, she should distinguish between pragmatic inferences that are felicitous to defeat and pragmatic inferences that are infelicitously defeasible. Thus, it is shown that one should consider at least three types of information: indefeasible, felicitously defeasible, and infelicitously defeasible. The cancellation of the last of these determines the pragmatic infelicities.

This paper sketches an HPSG analysis of the English auxiliary system, including finite negation, inversion, ellipsis, contraction, and the restricted distribution of unfocussed do. Negative and other adverbials are selected by the finite auxiliary, enabling a treatment of lexical variation in scope assignment. Auxiliary constructions are featurally distinguished from others, allowing a succinct account of do in terms of lexical specification. This constraint-based, lexicalist analysis expresses the central generalizations governing the auxiliary constructions, as well as the observed lexical idiosyncrasy. 1

Time adverbials introduced by until impose restrictions on the aspectual class of the main clause they combine with: they only combine with durative sentences. In negative sentences, the situation is more complex. The question arises whether negative sentences are durative, or whether there is a separate use of until as a negative polarity item. In this paper, I discuss the three treatments of not... until that are characterized in the literature as the scope analysis, the ambiguity thesis and the lexical composition approach. I work out the interpretation of the three approaches in an event-based semantics, and argue that they are truth-conditionally equivalent in sentences containing an explicit negation. Furthermore, they generate the same pragmatic implicatures. A separate negative polarity use of until is motivated by sentences containing NPI-licensers different from explicit negation, though. The observation that the scope analysis, the ambiguity thesis and the lexical composition approach are semantically and pragmatically equivalent in sentences containing an explicit negation helps us describe the similarities and differences between the expression of exclusion of a range of values on the rime axis in a variety of languages.

In this paper I will present and defend an analysis of (a sample of) the English modal auxiliary verbs using a relevance-theoretic semantic and pragmatic framework. I will start by discussing previous analyses of modality in English with an eye to explaining how a cluster of related meanings- epistemic, root, and other- is expressed by the same set of lexical items. I will then go on to develop a unitary semantic approach to the English toodais, treating them as (mostly) incomplete propositional operators. After defending the details of my semantic account, I will show how the proposed semantics can give rise to the range of root interpretations modal verbs can receive in context. Epistemic interpretations require some further theoretical machinery, which will make crucial use of the notion of metarepresentation. Finally, I will sketch the differences between natural-language interpretations of modal operators and their alethic/logical uses.

In the 1980’s, the analysis of presupposition projection contributed to a ‘dynamic turn’ in semantics: the classical notion of meanings as truth conditions was replaced with a dynamic notion of meanings as Context Change Potentials (Heim 1983). We explore an alternative in which presupposition projection follows from the combination of a fully classical semantics with two pragmatic principles of manner, Be Articulate and Be Brief. Be Articulate is a violable constraint which requires that a meaning pp’, conceptualized as involving a precondition p (its ‘presupposition’), should be articulated as … (p and pp’) … (e.g. … it is raining and John knows it…) rather than as … pp ’. Be Brief, which is more highly ranked than Be Articulate, disallows a full conjunction whose first element is semantically idle. In particular,... (p and pp’)... is ruled out by Be Brief- and hence … pp ’ … is acceptable despite Be Articulate- if one can determine as soon as p and is uttered that no matter how the sentence ends these words could be eliminated without affecting its contextual meaning. Two equivalence theorems guarantee that these principles derive Heim’s results in almost all cases. Unlike dynamic semantics, our analysis does not encode in the meaning of connectives the left-right asymmetry which is often found in presupposition projection; instead, we give a flexible analysis of this incremental bias, which allows us to account for some ‘symmetric readings ’ in which the bias is overridden (e.g. If the bathroom is not hidden,