Abstract not found

This paper addresses a number of issues surrounding the triggering of negative-polarity items, in particular matters of scope and c-command. It is argued that triggering is sensitive to the scope of negation and negative operators, but that a syntactic treatment in terms of c-command is problematic, because semantic scope and syntactic c-command, no matter how we define the latter, and at which level we check it, do not see eye to eye on all the relevant cases.

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

The traditional approach towards (negative) polarity items is to answer the question in which contexts NPIs are licensed. The inspiring approaches of Kadmon & Landman (1990, 1993) (K&L) and Krifka (1990, 1992, 1995) go a major step further: they also seek to answer the question of why these contexts license NPIs. To explain the appropriate use of polarity items in questions, however, we need to answer an even more challenging question: why is a NPI used in a particular utterance in the first place? K&L and Krifka go some way to answer this question as well in terms of an entailment-based notion of strength, but I seek to give the question a somewhat ‘deeper ’ explanation. Strength will be though of as ‘relevance ’ or ‘utility’, which only in special cases reduces to entailment. In questions, the information theoretical notion of ‘entropy ’ will play a crucial role: NPIs are used in a question to increase the average informativity of its answers. To account for the rhetorical effect of the use of some NPIs in questions, I propose a domain widening analysis of so-called ‘even NPIs’.

Before and after have closely related meanings. How close? A uniform analysis would make their semantics differ only with respect to the direction of a temporal ordering relation. Now one might think that before and after can not only be analyzed uniformly,

this paper I will discuss in how far this can be done. I will argue that conversation involves resolving one of the participants' decision problems. After discussing bidirectional OT I will show how decision theory can be used to determine the utility of an interpretation in a mathematical precise way. Then I will discuss how this formal notion of utility, in combination with bidirectional OT, can account for a number of conversational implicatures and how it relates to (i) Sperber & Wilson's psychologically inspired notion of cognitive relevance; (ii) the Stalnakerian assertability conditions; (iii) the Gricean maxims of conversation, and (iv) the so-called Q and I principles of neo-Gricean pragmatics (Horn 1984; Levinson, 2000)

This paper presents a dynamic semantic approach to the licensing of Polarity Sensitive Items (PSIs) and n--words of Negative Concord. We propose that PSIs are unified by the semantic scale property, which is responsible for their sensitivity to the context; we develop a semantic licensing analysis based on Fauconnier's (1975) scales and Ladusaw's (1979) notion of entailment. The first part of the paper concludes with a formalization of semantic licensing in the sense of Ladusaw (1979) within HPSG (see, e.g., Pollard and Sag (1994)) which allows for a uniform treatment of the licensing of PSIs and n--words of Negative Concord and accounts for the disambiguating nature of PSIs in scopally ambiguous sentences. The second part of the paper is concerned with the limitations of semantic licensing, which, we claim, needs to be sensitive to the context. We present the discussions of, e.g., Heim (1984) and Israel (1996) with respect to the importance of the context in particular licensing constellations, and then turn to linearity constraints on licensing. We present data from German which may not be accounted for by linearity constraints and sketch an analysis for this data which supports the necessity of context--sensitive semantic licensing.

this paper, I investigate the grammaticalization of NPIs in the largely unexplored area of verbs and verbal idioms, basing my conclusions on a comparison of English and Dutch data. These data, I should add, are mostly not diachronic in nature, but present tendencies in current usage, as reflected in various text corpora. I show that some verbs have a strong tendency to occur in negative contexts, although they are not, strictly speaking, NPIs. For these, I will introduce the term "semi-NPI". 1 Verbs of indifference

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.

. We suggest a new semantic interpretation of interrogative NPs, based on a novel algebraic theory of the semantics of questions. We discuss the role of interrogative NPs in compositionally deriving the semantics of wh-questions, examine the coordination of interrogative NPs, and apply notions from generalized quantifier theory to their interpretation. Keywords: generalized quantifiers,semantics,questions 1. Introduction In this paper we present a new interpretation of interrogative NPs (INPs), also referred to as wh-phrases, such as which woman. Such an investigation has two main motivations. First, INPs obviously play an important role in driving the interpretation of wh-questions. As the wide literature on the semantics of questions shows (see (Higginbotham, 1996; Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1997) for recent surveys), compositionally deriving the meanings of questions is notoriously difficult, especially when multiple INPs or interactions of INPs with other quantifiers are involved....