Strawson on Term-Ordering

Strawson on Intended Meaning and Context

Strawson proposed in the early seventies an attractive threefold distinction regarding how context bears on the meaning of ‘what is said’ when a sentence is uttered. The proposed scheme is somewhat crude and, being aware of this aspect, Strawson himself raised various points to make it more adequate. In this paper, we review the scheme of Strawson, note his concerns, and add some of our own. Ho...

Term-ordering free involutive bases

In this paper, we consider a monomial ideal J / P := A[x1, . . . , xn], over a commutative ring A, and we face the problem of the characterization for the familyMf (J) of all homogeneous ideals I / P such that the A-module P/I is free with basis given by the set of terms in the Gröbner escalier N(J) of J. This family is in general wider than that of the ideals having J as initial ideal w.r.t. a...

NPI Licensing, Strawson Entailment, and Context Dependency

The Fauconnier-Ladusaw analysis of negative polarity licensing (that NPIs are licensed in the scope of downward entailing operators) continues to be the benchmark theory of negative polarity. In this paper, I consider some of the moves that are needed to maintain its basic intuition in some recalcitrant arenas: negative polarity licensing by only, adversatives, superlatives, and conditionals. W...

Efficient Checking of Term Ordering Constraints

Using inequalities as term ordering constraints

In this paper we show how linear inequalities can be used to approximate KnuthBendix term ordering constraints, and how term operations such as substitution can be carried out on systems of inequalities. Using this representation allows an offthe-shelf linear arithmetic decision procedure to check the satisfiability of a set of ordering constraints. We present a formal description of a resoluti...