Litotes and downward monotonicity
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چکیده
منابع مشابه
The argumentative litotes in The Analects
Litotes, often confused with meiosis and understatement, has long suffered neglect. By comparing synonymous key words in previous definitions, this essay defines litotes as “a trope in which an affirmative is expressed by the negation of its opposite,” and for the first time classifies litotes into three subtypes based upon Aristotle’s study of opposition: contradictory, contrary and relative. ...
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Starting out from the assumption that monotonicity plays a central role in interpretation and inference, we derive a number of predictions about the complexity of processing quantified sentences. A quantifier may be upward entailing (i.e. license inferences from subsets to supersets) or downward entailing (i.e. license inferences from supersets to subsets). Our main predictions are the followin...
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One of the prominent mathematical features of natural language is the prevalence of “upward” and “downward” inferences involving determiners and other functional expressions. These inferences are associated with negative and positive polarity positions in syntax, and they also feature in computer implementations of textual entailment. Formal treatments of these phenomena began in the 1980’s and...
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This paper discusses the occurrence of certain polarity items (PIs) in the complements of factive verbs and only, which are not downward entailing (DE). Two solutions in the direction of weakening classical monotonicity are discussed: Strawson DE, von Fintel 1999; and weak DE, Hoeksema 1986. Both rely on the idea that monotonicity is computed only after the inference to the subset is made part ...
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Monotonicity is considered to be one of the key properties of languages both in logic and linguistics. In model theory it contributes to definability (see e.g. Väänänen and Westerståhl, 2002), in linguistics it is used, among other applications, to explain the phenomenon of negative polarity items (see e.g. Ladusaw, 1979). There are also strong links between monotonicity and learnability (see e...
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