Occasion-sensitive semantics for objective predicates

Occasion-Sensitive Semantics

In this paper we provide a formal model for occasion-sensitive semantics motivated by so called ‘Travis cases’ (Travis 1978, 2000, 2008, 2009). We suggest that understanding of an utterance of φ (knowing its truth conditions) can be modelled as a twofold partitioning of worlds in logical space, where the initial partition is induced by the contextinvariant meaning of the sentence uttered and th...

Possible Worlds Semantics for Predicates

The Semantics of Gradable Predicates

A Semantics for Context-Sensitive Reduction Semantics

This paper explores the semantics of the meta-notation used in the style of operational semantics introduced by Felleisen and Hieb. Specifically, it defines a formal system that gives precise meanings to the notions of contexts, decomposition, and plugging (recomposition) left implicit in most expositions. This semantics is not naturally algorithmic, so the paper also provides an algorithm and ...

Psychological Predicates and the Syntax-semantics Interface

The hypothesis of the autonomy of syntax makes special demands on one of the central issues in linguistic theory: the specification of correspondences between a lexical conceptual and syntactic structure. One strategy is to distinguish several layers of lexical representation and allow only one of them to be "visible" to syntactic and morphological processes (cf. Pinker 1989, Grimshaw 1990). A ...