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Scope (formal Semantics)
In formal semantics (linguistics), formal semantics, the scope of a semantic operator is the semantic object to which it applies. For instance, in the sentence "''Paulina doesn't drink beer but she does drink wine''," the proposition that Paulina drinks beer occurs within the scope of negation, but the proposition that Paulina drinks wine does not. Scope can be thought of as the semantic order of operations. One of the major concerns of research in formal semantics is the relationship between operators' syntax, syntactic positions and their semantic scope. This relationship is not transparent, since the scope of an operator need not directly correspond to its Deep structure and surface structure, surface position and a single surface form can be semantic ambiguity, semantically ambiguous between different scope construals. Some theories of scope posit a level of syntactic structure called Logical form (linguistics), logical form, in which an item's syntactic position corresponds t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Formal Semantics (linguistics)
Formal semantics is the scientific study of linguistic meaning through formal tools from logic and mathematics. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. Formal semanticists rely on diverse methods to analyze natural language. Many examine the meaning of a sentence by studying the Truth condition, circumstances in which it would be true. They describe these circumstances using Model theory, abstract mathematical models to represent entities and their features. The principle of compositionality helps them link the meaning of expressions to Mathematical object, abstract objects in these models. This principle asserts that the meaning of a compound expression is determined by the meanings of its parts. Propositional logic, Propositional and predicate logic are formal systems used to analyze the semantic structure of sentences. They introduce concepts like singular terms, Predicate (mathematical logic), predicates, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wh-movement
In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, or wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words. An example in English is the dependency formed between ''what'' and the object position of ''doing'' in "What are you doing?". Interrogative forms are sometimes known within English linguistics as '' wh-words'', such as ''what, when, where, who'', and ''why'', but also include other interrogative words, such as ''how''. This dependency has been used as a diagnostic tool in syntactic studies as it can be observed to interact with other grammatical constraints. In languages with wh- movement, sentences or clauses with a wh-word show a non-canonical word order that places the wh-word (or phrase containing the wh-word) at or near the front of the sentence or clause ("''Whom'' are you thinking about?") instead of the canonical position later in the sentence ("I am thinking about ''you''"). Leaving the wh-word in its canonical pos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Barbara Partee
Barbara Hall Partee (born June 23, 1940) is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). She is known as a pioneer in the field of formal semantics. Biography Born in Englewood, New Jersey, Partee grew up in the Baltimore area. She attended Swarthmore College, where she majored in mathematics with minors in Russian and philosophy, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1961. She did her graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Noam Chomsky. Her 1965 PhD dissertation from MIT was entitled ''Subject and Object in Modern English''. Partee began her professorial career at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1965 as an assistant professor of linguistics. She taught there until 1972, when she transferred to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, soon becoming a full professor. During her time at UMass Amherst, she has taught numerous students who would become notable ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Island (linguistics)
In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, or wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words. An example in English is the dependency formed between ''what'' and the object position of ''doing'' in "What are you doing?". Interrogative forms are sometimes known within English linguistics as '' wh-words'', such as ''what, when, where, who'', and ''why'', but also include other interrogative words, such as ''how''. This dependency has been used as a diagnostic tool in syntactic studies as it can be observed to interact with other grammatical constraints. In languages with wh- movement, sentences or clauses with a wh-word show a non-canonical word order that places the wh-word (or phrase containing the wh-word) at or near the front of the sentence or clause ("''Whom'' are you thinking about?") instead of the canonical position later in the sentence ("I am thinking about ''you''"). Leaving the wh-word in its canonical pos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quantifier Raising
In generative grammar, the technical term operator denotes a type of expression that enters into an a-bar movement dependency.Chomsky, Noam. (1981) Lectures on Government and Binding, Foris, Dordrecht.Haegeman, Liliane (1994) Introduction to Government and Binding Theory. Blackwell.Koopman, H., & Sportiche, D. (1982). Variables and the Bijection Principle. ''The Linguistic Review, 2'', 139-60. One often says that the operator "binds a variable". Cinque, Guglielmo (1991) Types of A-Bar Dependencies. MIT Press. Operators are often determiners, such as interrogatives ('which', 'who', 'when', etc.), or quantifiers ('every', 'some', 'most', 'no'), but adverbs such as sentential negation ('not') have also been treated as operators.Zanuttini, R. (1997) Negation and Clausal Structure: A Comparative Study of Romance Languages, Oxford University Press. It is also common within generative grammar to hypothesise phonetically empty operators whenever a clause type or construction exhibits s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syntactic Movement
Syntactic movement is the means by which some theories of syntax address discontinuities. Movement was first postulated by structuralist linguists who expressed it in terms of ''discontinuous constituents'' or ''displacement''. Some constituents appear to have been displaced from the position in which they receive important features of interpretation. The concept of movement is controversial and is associated with so-called ''transformational'' or ''derivational'' theories of syntax (such as transformational grammar, government and binding theory, minimalist program). Representational theories (such as head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar, construction grammar, and most dependency grammars), in contrast, reject the notion of movement and often instead address discontinuities with other mechanisms including graph reentrancies, feature passing, and type shifters. Illustration Movement is the traditional means of explaining discontinuities such as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
C-command
In generative grammar and related frameworks, a node in a parse tree c-commands its sister node and all of its sister's descendants. In these frameworks, c-command plays a central role in defining and constraining operations such as syntactic movement, Binding (linguistics), binding, and scope (formal semantics), scope. Tanya Reinhart introduced c-command in 1976 as a key component of her theory of Anaphora (linguistics), anaphora. The term is short for "Constituent (linguistics), constituent command". Definition and examples Standard Definition Common terms to represent the relationships between nodes are below (refer to the tree on the right): *M is a parent or mother to A and B. *A and B are children or daughters of M. *A and B are sisters or siblings. *M is a grandparent or grandmother to C and D. The standard definition of c-command is based partly on the relationship of dominance: ''Node N1 dominates node N2 if N1 is above N2 in the tree and one can trace a path from N1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logical Form (linguistics)
In generative grammar and related approaches, the logical form (LF) of a linguistic expression is the variant of its syntactic structure which undergoes formal semantics (linguistics), semantic interpretation. It is distinguished from ''phonetic form'', the structure which corresponds to a sentence's pronunciation. These separate mental representation, representations are postulated in order to explain the ways in which an expression's meaning can be partially independent of its pronunciation, e.g. scope (formal semantics)#Scope ambiguity, scope ambiguities. LF is the cornerstone of the classic generative view of the syntax-semantics interface. However, it is not used in Lexical Functional Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, as well as some modern variants of the generative approach. Syntax interfacing with semantics The notion of Logical Form was originally invented for the purpose of determining Quantifier (linguistics), quantifier scope. As the theory around t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Generative Grammar
Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists (), tend to share certain working assumptions such as the competence–performance distinction and the notion that some domain-specific aspects of grammar are partly innate in humans. These assumptions are rejected in non-generative approaches such as usage-based models of language. Generative linguistics includes work in core areas such as syntax, semantics, phonology, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition, with additional extensions to topics including biolinguistics and music cognition. Generative grammar began in the late 1950s with the work of Noam Chomsky, having roots in earlier approaches such as structural linguistics. The earliest version of Chomsky's model was called Transformational grammar, with subsequent itera ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tanya Reinhart
Tanya Reinhart (; 1943 – 17 March 2007) was an Israeli linguist and political activist. A frequent writer on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, she contributed columns to the Israeli centrist newspaper '' Yedioth Ahronoth'' and longer articles to the American left-wing magazines '' CounterPunch'' and '' ZNetwork'' and the global open publishing network Indymedia. Biography Reinhart was born in Haifa in 1943 and was raised by her mother. Victoria Brittain"Tanya Reinhart" ''The Guardian'', 21 March 2007. She studied philosophy and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem as an undergraduate, where she later received an M.A. in comparative literature and philosophy. In 1976 she obtained a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her thesis supervisor was Noam Chomsky. She was active in the Communist Youth League, following in the steps of her mother. Reinhart was a professor of linguistics and literary theory at Tel-Aviv University. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Variable
In mathematics, and in other disciplines involving formal languages, including mathematical logic and computer science, a variable may be said to be either free or bound. Some older books use the terms real variable and apparent variable for free variable and bound variable, respectively. A ''free variable'' is a notation (symbol) that specifies places in an expression where substitution may take place and is not a parameter of this or any container expression. The idea is related to a ''placeholder'' (a symbol that will later be replaced by some value), or a wildcard character that stands for an unspecified symbol. In computer programming, the term free variable refers to variables used in a function that are neither local variables nor parameters of that function. The term non-local variable is often a synonym in this context. An instance of a variable symbol is ''bound'', in contrast, if the value of that variable symbol has been bound to a specific value or range of va ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Angelika Kratzer
Angelika Kratzer is a professor emerita of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Biography She was born in Germany, and received her PhD from the University of Konstanz in 1979, with a dissertation entitled ''Semantik der Rede''. She is an influential and widely cited semanticist whose expertise includes modals, conditionals, situation semantics, and a range of topics relating to the syntax–semantics interface. Among her most influential ideas are: a unified analysis of modality of different flavors (building on the work of Jaakko Hintikka); a modal analysis of conditionals; and the hypothesis ("the little v hypothesis") that the agent argument of a transitive verb is introduced syntactically whereas the theme argument is selected for lexically. She co-wrote with Irene Heim the semantics textbook ''Semantics in Generative Grammar'', and is co-editor, with Irene Heim, of the journal '' Natural Language Semantics.'' Aw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
