Intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) systems give feedback on grammatical errors based on the syntactic analysis of an utterance. However, parsing a language learner sentence in isolation can result in multiple interpretations, which even humans may not be able to resolve. For deriving a helpful error diagnosis, an interpretation that is consistent with the intended meaning i...

This article concentrates on a couple of semiotic approaches working out, the one hand, mediated character reducing interpretative trajectories to actual translation into language narratives (A. J. Greimas) or textuality (F. Rastier), and, other, direct, apparently unmediated passage visceral physicality verbal signifying system, which make semantic and syntactic components perfunctory interpre...

Semantic interpretation involves the process of ‘translating’ natural language to a representation of its meaning. It could be understood as the task of mapping syntax to semantics, assuming that the syntactic relationships in an utterance correspond to functional relationships in the meaning representation. Relevant work in this area often uses techniques from machine translation and machine l...

Montague’s framework for semantic interpretation has always been less well adapted to the interpretation of words than of syntactic constructions. In the late 1970s, David Dowty addressed this problem, concentrating on the interpretation of tense, aspect, inchoatives, and causatives in an extension of Montague’s Intensional Logic. In this paper I will try to revive this project, conceiving it a...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate neural correlates of early-closure garden-path sentence processing and use of extrasyntactic information to resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities. Sixteen participants performed an auditory picture verification task on sentences presented with natural versus flat intonation. Stimuli included sentences in which the garden-pat...

The goal of this thesis is to account for distributional patterns of given and new items in Czech, especially their word order. The system proposed here has four basic components: (i) syntax, (ii) economy, (iii) interpretation, and (iv) reference set computation. The approach belongs to the family of interface driven approaches. The syntactic part of the thesis introduces a free syntactic movem...

In this paper, I will report on an experimental study investigating the Bare Noun/Proper Name parameter (Longobardi 1991, 1994, 1996, 2001, to appear) and its L2 acquisition. It has been noticed that English and Italian mass or bare plural nouns (bare nouns, BNs) have identical syntactic form and distribution, but differ in available interpretations, the Italian meaning being a subset of the En...

is sentence has two meanings that depend on how she is semantically interpreted. On one meaning, she refers to the same individual that Sally does. On this interpretation, we say that she is “coreferent” with Sally. On the other interpretation, she refers to some female individual that isn’t Sally. On this interpretation we say that she and Sally are “disjoint in reference.” One way of expressi...

2 Abstract In this article I defend the view that many central aspects of the semantics of tense are determined by independently-motivated principles of syntactic theory. I begin by decomposing tenses syntactically into a temporal ordering predicate (the true tense, on this approach) and two time-denoting arguments corresponding to covert a reference time (RT) argument and an eventuality time (...