Syncategorematic Conjunction and Structured Meanings

Syncategorematic Conjunction and Structured Meanings

One elegant and linguistically powerful guideline for a semantic theory of coordination will be referred to here as the Boolean assumption. According to this assumption conjunctive coordinators like and are described using the cross-categorial Boolean operator of Generalized Conjunction (GC). Symmetrically, disjunctive coordinators like or are modeled by Generalized Disjunction (GD). A common t...

The conjunction fallacy and the many meanings of and.

According to the conjunction rule, the probability of A and B cannot exceed the probability of either single event. This rule reads and in terms of the logical operator wedge, interpreting A and B as an intersection of two events. As linguists have long argued, in natural language "and" can convey a wide range of relationships between conjuncts such as temporal order ("I went to the store and b...

Structured Meanings in Computational Linguistics

Many natural language processing systems employ t ruth conditional knowledge representations (%ret)resentations' , etc.) to represent meanings of nata rm language expressions. T-representations have their strong and their weak sides. A strong side is logic: a relation of logical consequence can be de-. fined between such representations. A weak side is e x p r e s s i v e p o w e r : the capaci...

The logic of categorematic and syncategorematic infinity

Meanings, propositions, and verbs.

The event template for a verb is a lexical representation of the type of event that the verb can denote. Manner of motion verbs have a simple template: An entity is engaged in a manner of motion activity (e.g., walk). Change of location verbs have a different template: An entity changes from one location to another (e.g., arrive). We propose, and support empirically, that these templates determ...