Abstract not found

The set of English modal verbs is widely recognized to communicate two broad clusters of meanings: epistemic and root modal meanings. A number of researchers have claimed that root meanings are acquired earlier than epistemic ones; this claim has subsequently been employed in the linguistics literature as an argument for the position that English modal verbs are polysemous (Sweetser, 1990). In this paper I offer an alternative explanation for the later emergence of epistemic interpretations by linking them to the development of the child's theory of mind (Wellman, 1990); if correct, this hypothesis might have important implications for the shape of the semantics of modal verbs.

Abstract 1 In this paper we study the parameters that come into play when assessing the truth conditions of say reports and contrast them with belief attributions. We argue that these conditions are sensitive in intricate ways to the connection between the interpretation of the complement of say and the properties of the reported speech act. There are three general areas this exercise is relevant to, besides the immediate issue of understanding the meaning of say: (i) the discussion shows the need to go beyond the simplest view of propositional attitudes, which treats them as restricted quantifiers over worlds; (ii) the complex connections that must exist between the say report and its source speech act show that one has to be able to differentiate between various layers of meaning for the antecedent sentences; (iii) finally, this paper is a small step towards a typology of propositional attitudes that allows us to uncover the complex web of relationships that grammatical mood is sensitive to. 1.

this paper, we argue that natural language interfaces with discourse capabilities have an important role to play in decision support systems, because such interfaces are responsive to focus of attention in the mind of a human decision maker. The decision support systems that we will discuss employ graphical user interfaces. They are characterized by strict ordering requirements for commands, no reference to previous operations, and an often arbitrary, redundant, and repetitive order of operations. Natural language interfaces (NLIs) allow English language commands and questions to be input either via a keyboard or using a speech input device in a relatively natural and easy way, and discourse capabilities allow a user to input commands or questions that are connected in some specifiable ways. We will provide examples from systems that have been developed at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). Currently these two laboratories are cooperating under the JDL Centers of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence Program in which NRL operates as a Center of Excellence for Natural Language Processing. We believe that research on natural language discourse will improve the capabilities of natural language interfaces to decision support systems as well as provide extensions that can ultimately make their graphical interfaces easier and more natural to use [Marsh 1991]. We will consider interfaces developed at NRL and ARL for three decision support systems. In recent years the Interactive Systems group at NRL's Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence has been developing natural language (NL) interfaces for existing decision, planning, and training tools. One such tool is the KOALAS Test Planning Tool (here called simply KOA...

this paper, we argue that natural language interfaces with discourse capabilities have an important role to play in decision support systems, because such interfaces are responsive to focus of attention in the mind of a human decision maker. The decision support systems that we will discuss employ graphical user interfaces. They are characterized by strict ordering requirements for commands, no reference to previous operations, and an often arbitrary, redundant, and repetitive order of operations. Natural language interfaces (NLIs) allow English language commands and questions to be input either via a keyboard or using a speech input device in a relatively natural and easy way, and discourse capabilities allow a user to input commands or questions that are connected in some specifiable ways. We will provide examples from systems that have been developed at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). Currently these two laboratories are cooperating under the JDL Centers of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence Program in which NRL operates as a Center of Excellence for Natural Language Processing. We believe that research on natural language discourse will improve the capabilities of natural language interfaces to decision support systems as well as provide extensions that can ultimately make their graphical interfaces easier and more natural to use [Marsh 1991].

0. What this paper is about

The exclusive component of unembedded disjunctions is standardly derived as a conversational implicature by assuming that or forms a lexical scale with and (Horn, 1972, Gazdar 1979). It is well-known, however, that this assumption does not suffice to determine the required scalar competitors of disjunctions with more than two atomic disjuncts (McCawley 1981, Simons 1998). To solve this, Sauerland 2004 assumes that or forms a lexical scale with two otherwise unattested silent connectives (L and R) that retrieve the left and right terms of a disjunction. A number of recent works have proposed an Alternative Semantics for indefinites and disjunction to account for their interaction with modals and other propositional operators (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002, Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito 2003, Kratzer 2005, Aloni 2002, Simons 2005, Alonso-Ovalle 2006). We note that the McCawley-Simons problem does not arise in an Alternative Semantics, because we can assume that the set of pragmatic competitors to a disjunction is the closure under intersection of the set of propositions that it denotes. An adaptation of the strengthening mechanism presented in Fox 2007 allows for the derivation of the exclusive component of disjunctions with more than two atomic disjuncts without having to rely on the L and R operators.