Karttunen (1971) first pointed out that T&E can sometimes have ‘implicative’ readings, implying that their complement holds (in the case of enough)—or fails to hold (in the case of too)—in the actual world, instead of merely holding in some possible world(s). In uttering (2) for example, the speaker seems to imply that Jean actually left early (contrast this inference to the (lack of) inference...

The probabilistic top-k queries based on the interplay of score and probability, under the possible worlds semantic, become an important research issue that considers both score and uncertainty on the same basis. In the literature, many different probabilistic top-k queries are proposed. Almost all of them need to compute the probability of a tuple ti to be ranked at the j-th position across th...

Among the most remarkable developments in metaphysics since the 1950’s is the explosion of philosophical interest in possible worlds. This paper proposes an explanation of what possible worlds are, and argues that this proposal, the interpreted models conception, should be attractive to anyone who thinks that modal facts are primitive, and so not to be explained in terms of some non-modal notio...

Logical structures for modeling agents’ reasoning about unawareness are presented where it can hold simultaneously that: (i) agents’ beliefs about whether they are fully aware need not be veracious with partitional information; and (ii) the agent is fully aware if and only if she is aware of a fixed domain of formulae. In light of (ii), all states are deemed “possible”. Semantics operate in two...

The traditional thesis that God exists necessarily I could as well not exist. Had I fallen from the cliff last year, I would not exist now. Furthermore, had my parents not met, or had God not created a universe, I would never have come into existence. At any rate, there are many ways the world could be without me, or even without anybody like me. It is, in this sense, possible that I do not exi...

certainly the meaning-letters play an important role in arabic language, so that the correct understanding of arabic prose and poetry and also the exalted meaning of the holly quran is dependent on knowledge of these letters, their difference and guidance applications. the fundamental and important role of these letters is subject of this research. at the beginning of this paper the following q...

We propose an approach for modularizing P-log programs and corresponding compositional semantics based on conditional probability measures. We do so by resorting to Oikarinen and Janhunen’s definition of a logic program module and extending it to P-log by introducing the notions of input random attributes and output literals. For answering to P-log queries our method does not imply calculating ...

To represent and reason about contextualized knowledge often two-dimensional Description Logics (DLs) are employed, where one DL is used to describe contexts (or possible worlds) and the other DL is used to describe the objects, i.e. the relational structure of the specific contexts. Previous approaches for DLs of context that combined pairs of DLs resulted in undecidability in those cases wher...

This is a short story of how we have evolved over the last 40 years, doing semantics. It could partially overlap with a history of PACLIC which is commemorating the 25th year or a quarter of a century of its founding. The story tells how we semanticists of natural language moved from all possible worlds to small worlds, now living in and with a tiny mobile world.