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This book examines the semantics and pragmatics of determiners or pronouns that signal ignorance on the part of the speaker, such as Spanish algun. It offers novel empirical observations and important theoretical insights on epistemic indefinites and related topics such as modal free relatives, modified numerals, and epistemic modals.
A collection of overviews of approaches to the formal expression of information structure in natural language and its interaction with general principles of human cognition and communication.
A text usually provides more information than a random sequence of clauses: It combines sentence-level information to larger units which are glued together by coherence relations that may induce a hierarchical discourse structure. Since linguists have begun to investigate texts as more complex units of linguistic communication, it has been controversially discussed what the appropriate level of analysis of discourse structure ought to be and what the criteria to identify (minimal) discourse units are. Linguistic structure–and more precisely, the extraction and integration of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information–is shown to be at the center of text processing and discourse comprehension. However, its role in the establishment of basic building blocks for a coherent discourse is still a subject of debate. This collection addresses these issues using various methodological approaches. It presents current results in theoretical, diachronic, experimental as well as computational research on structuring information in discourse.
This volume examines subordinate wh-clauses that lack an interrogative interpretation, particularly those in which the wh-word seems to deviate from its literal meaning. These include subordinate manner wh-clauses that have a declarative-like meaning, locative wh-clauses expressing kinds, and headed relatives that serve as recognitional cues, among many others. While regular interrogative embedding has been widely studied in recent years, little is known about the circumstances under which non-interrogative (subordinate) wh-clauses are licensed, nor why some, but not all, wh-phrases can be polyfunctional. The chapters in the book combine the study of cross-linguistic variation in patterns of...
This book investigates the semantics and pragmatics of a representative sample of parenthetical constructions. Todor Koev argues that these constructions fall into two major classes: pure and impure. Pure parentheticals comment on some part of the descriptive content of the root sentence but are otherwise relatively independent of it. Impure parentheticals modify components of the illocutionary force and affect the felicity or the truth of the root sentence. The book studies parentheticals from three theoretical viewpoints: illocutionary effects, scopal properties, and discourse status. It establishes and explicates the notion of parenthetical meaning in a formally precise and predictive dynamic-semantic model. As a result, parentheticality is brought to bear on linguistic phenomena such as entailment and presupposition, binding and anaphora, evidentiality and modality, illocutionary force, and polarity.
Definiteness has been a central topic in theoretical semantics since its modern foundation. However, despite its significance, there has been surprisingly scarce research on its cross-linguistic expression. With the purpose of contributing to filling this gap, the present volume gathers thirteen studies exploiting insights from formal semantics and syntax, typological and language specific studies, and, crucially, semantic fieldwork and cross-linguistic semantics, in order to address the expression and interpretation of definiteness in a diverse group of languages, most of them understudied. The papers presented in this volume aim to establish a dialogue between theory and data in order to answer the following questions: What formal strategies do natural languages employ to encode definiteness? What are the possible meanings associated to this notion across languages? Are there different types of definite reference? Which other functions (besides marking definite reference) are associated with definite descriptions? Each of the papers contained in this volume addresses at least one of these questions and, in doing so, they aim to enrich our understanding of definiteness.
This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the study of generics. It gathers new work from senior and young researchers and is organized along three main areas of study: the generic and individuals; genericity and time; and the sources of genericity and types of judgment.
Volume LNCS 13519 is part of the refereed proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2022, which was held virtually during June 26 to July 1, 2022. A total of 5583 individuals from academia, research institutes, industry, and governmental agencies from 88 countries submitted contributions, and 1276 papers and 275 posters were included in the proceedings that were published just before the start of the conference. Additionally, 296 papers and 181 posters are included in the volumes of the proceedings published after the conference, as “Late Breaking Work” (papers and posters). The contributions thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas.
The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) is organized every year by the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) in different sites around Europe. The papers cover vastly dierent topics, but each fall in the intersection of the three primary topics of ESSLLI: Logic, Language and Computation. The 13 papers presented in this volume have been selected among 81 submitted papers over the years 2019, 2020 and 2021. The ESSLLI Student Session is an excellent venue for students to present their work and receive valuable feedback from renowned experts in their respective fields. The Student Session accepts submissions for three different tracks: Language and Computation (LaCo), Logic and Computation (LoCo), and Logic and Language (LoLa).
This 2001 book examines how government of unified Germany has dealt with former government of Communist East Germany.