Abstract not found

Languages that have determiners often have a rich inventory of them. In English, indefinite determiners include a(n), some, a certain, this, one, another, cardinals, partitives, the zero determiner of bare plurals (in some analyses), and, according to Horn 1999 and Giannakidou 2001, any. Despite the attention indefinites have

We present a lexicon-based approach to extracting sentiment from text. The Semantic Orientation CALculator (SO-CAL) uses dictionaries of words annotated with their semantic orientation (polarity and strength), and incorporates intensification and negation. SO-CAL is applied to the polarity classification task, the process of assigning a positive or negative label to a text that captures the text’s opinion towards its main subject matter. We show that SO-CAL’s performance is consistent across domains and in completely unseen data. Additionally, we describe the process of dictionary creation, and our use of Mechanical Turk to check dictionaries for consistency and reliability. 1.

This paper proposes three revisions to the standard view on presupposition: the employment of optimality theory for the defaults and preferences, the possibility of inaccessible antecedents for presupposition resolution and a fine-grained classification of presupposition triggers based on the availability of expression alternatives and the requirement of the presupposition. The treatment deals with some phenomena that have not been addressed by current presupposition theories

Fragmentary utterances such as ‘short ’ answers and subsentential XPs without linguistic antecedents are proposed to have fully sentential syntactic structures, subject to ellipsis. Ellipsis in these cases is preceded by A′-movement of the fragment to a clause-peripheral position; the combination of movement and ellipsis accounts for a wide range of connectivity and anti-connectivity effects in these structures. Fragment answers furthermore shed light on the nature of islands, and contrast with sluicing in triggering island effects; this is shown to follow from an articulated syntax and the PF theory of islands. Fragments without linguistic antecedents are argued to be compatible with an ellipsis analysis, and do not support direct interpretation approaches to these phenomena.

In reports filed from several fronts in the semantics/pragmatics border wars, I seek to bolster the loyalist (neo-)Gricean forces against various recent revisionist sorties, including (but not limited to) the relevance-theoretic view on which the maxims (or more specifically their sole surviving descendant, the principle of relevance) inform truth-conditional content through the determination of “explicatures”, Levinson’s defense of implicatures serving as input to logical form, recent arguments by Mira Ariel for a semantic treatment of the upper bound (‘not all’) for propositions of the form Most F are G, and Chierchia’s proposal to reanalyze implicatures as part of compositional semantics. I argue for drawing the semantics/pragmatics boundary in a relatively traditional way, maintaining a constrained characterization of what is said, while adopting a variant of Kent Bach’s position on “impliciture” and supporting the Gricean conception of implicature as an aspect of speaker meaning, as opposed to its reconstruction in terms of default inference or utterance interpretation. I survey current controversies concerning the meaning and acquisition of disjunction and other scalar operators, the relation of subcontrariety and its implications for lexicalization, the nature of polarity licensing, and the innateness controversy. In each case, I seek to emphasize the signiÞcance of the generalizations that a (neo-)classical pragmatic approach enables us to capture. For some time, David Kaplan (cf. Kaplan 1978:223) has taken to harking nostalgically back to

Abstract not found

The main aim of this paper is to provide a new analysis of licensers of negative polarity items (NPIs). The problems with Fauconnier-Ladusaw's downward entailment analysis have been argued since Linebarger (1980). I will show that there exists a class of weak NPI licensers characterized by non-monotonicity and exclusivity. Weak negation, which is monotone decreasing, has been known to license weak NPIs such as any and ever (Zwarts 1993). However, non-monotonic items also trigger these wideners. Exclusivity or uniqueness characterizes non-monotonic operators, such as only, exactly n, superlatives, ordinal numerals, the determiner the, generic NPs, and also if and only if clauses, hope, happy, glad and others. Many of them function as generalized quantifiers which prohibit either downward or upward entailment. As Jespersen (1917) traces the origin of NPIs back to the strengthening of negation, non-monotonic contexts also favor strengthening by these words. We begin by considering the limited distribution of polarity items. The following section presents shortcomings of previous analyses, and then, non-monotonic expressions and their exclusivity are discussed. 1

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.

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.