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Introducing some of the foundational concepts, principles and techniques in the formal semantics of natural language, Elements of Formal Semantics outlines the mathematical principles that underlie linguistic meaning. Making use of a wide range of concrete English examples, the book presents the most useful tools and concepts of formal semantics in an accessible style and includes a variety of practical exercises so that readers can learn to utilise these tools effectively. For readers with an elementary background in set theory and linguistics or with an interest in mathematical modelling, this fascinating study is an ideal introduction to natural language semantics. Designed as a quick yet thorough introduction to one of the most vibrant areas of research in modern linguistics today this volume reveals the beauty and elegance of the mathematical study of meaning.
This volume presents original up-to-date research in the field of language acquisition. The contributions reflect experimental work guided by linguistic theory, covering different populations of learners, a wide range of linguistic phenomena, a variety of empirical methods, and a rich set of typologically different languages. The studies investigate first and second language acquisition, as well as acquisition in children with developmental language disorder or hearing impairment. The different chapters address various phenomena in the areas of morpho-syntax, phonology, and semantics. This edited collection of papers is a valuable reference for researchers who are interested in language acquisition research and its multifaceted nature. The book highlights the fruitful connection between empirical research and linguistic theory, making it interesting to both psycholinguists and theoretical linguists. The experimental studies collected in this book contribute to our understanding of how different types of learners acquire and process language and can offer novel insights to theoretical linguistics as well.
An investigation of the logical flexibility principles needed for a formal semantic account of coordination, plurality, and scope in natural language. Since the early work of Montague, Boolean semantics and its subfield of generalized quantifier theory have become the model-theoretic foundation for the study of meaning in natural languages. This book uses this framework to develop a new semantic theory of central linguistic phenomena involving coordination, plurality, and scope. The proposed theory makes use of the standard Boolean interpretation of conjunction, a choice-function account of indefinites, and a novel semantics of plurals that is not based on the distributive/collective distinc...
By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights. This book is open access under a CC BY license.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference, Spatial Cognition 2020, held in Riga, Latvia, in September 2020. The physical event was postponed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 19 full papers and 6 short papers presented in this book were carefully selected and reviewed from 50 submissions. They focus on the following topics: spatial representation and cognitive maps; navigation and wayfinding; spatial representation in language, logic, and narrative; and spatial abilities and learning.
This handbook explores multiple facets of the study of word classes, also known as parts of speech or lexical categories. These categories are of fundamental importance to linguistic theory and description, both formal and functional, and for both language-internal analyses and cross-linguistic comparison. The volume consists of five parts that investigate word classes from different angles. Chapters in the first part address a range of fundamental issues including diversity and unity in word classes around the world, categorization at different levels of structure, the distinction between lexical and functional words, and hybrid categories. Part II examines the treatment of word classes acr...
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Asia Information Retrieval Symposium, AIRS 2006. The book presents 34 revised full papers and 24 revised poster papers. All current issues in information retrieval are addressed: applications, systems, technologies and theoretical aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video and multi-media data. The papers are organized in topical sections on text retrieval, search and extraction, text classification and indexing, and more.
The goal of this book is to explore the relationship between the cognitive notion of parthood and various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language. The monograph aims to investigate syntactic constructions and lexical categories, e.g., partitives, whole-adjectives, and multipliers, encoding different kinds of part-whole structures both in Slavic and non-Slavic languages. It is envisioned to inspire radical rethinking of the ontology of models accounting for nominal semantics. Specifically, it provides novel evidence for a mereotopological approach to meaning, i.e., a theory of wholes that captures not only parthood but also topological relations holding between parts. This evidence comes from the phenomenon of subatomic quantification, i.e., quantification over parts of referents of concrete count nouns.
An invaluable reference tool for students and researchers in theoretical linguistics, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition has been updated to incorporate the last 10 years of syntactic research and expanded to include a wider array of important case studies in the syntax of a broad array of languages. A revised and expanded edition of this invaluable reference tool for students and researchers in linguistics, now incorporating the last 10 years of syntactic research Contains over 120 chapters that explain, analyze, and contextualize important empirical studies within syntax over the last 50 years Charts the development and historiography of syntactic theory with coverage of the most important subdomains of syntax Brings together cutting-edge contributions from a global group of linguists under the editorship of two esteemed syntacticians Provides an essential and unparalleled collection of research within the field of syntax, available both online and across 8 print volumes This work is also available as an online resource at www.companiontosyntax.com