Competing theories on the semantics of group pejorative terms (also known as ‘slurs’) comprise both advocates and opponents to Identity Thesis (IT), according which these their neutral counterparts do not differ in semantic value. In opponents' camp, Christopher Hom has offered an argument based substitution slurs that supports his semanticist approach cast doubts all IT-based approaches slurs....

Since the early 1990s, the semanticist Reinhard Muskens has advocated the use of the TYn family of higher-order logics as a general framework for semantic representation; he has backed up his claim by treating a wide variety of semantic phenomena in the TYn framework. Most interestingly of all, he has also shown that the central ideas of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) can be modeled in T...

Formal semanticists of natural language have traditionally worked with relatively impoverished lexical representations and have generally been conservative in drawing the line between those aspects of interpretation which are determined by lexical information and composition rules, and those which are determined contextually, leaving a substantial amount of work to context. While this strategy ...

When new phenomena are discovered, the semanticist may account for them by enriching his formal framework, or by reducing them to the complex interaction of some of its existing components. The first option may be more exciting; but the second may be more explanatory. Potts provided some welcome excitement with his groundbreaking study of expressives (Potts, to appear). Can a more conservative ...

Bob Frank, Giorgio Satta, and Lauri Karttunen stunned the computational OT community some years ago when they pointed out that unidirectional optimization is essentially a finite state technique. If all components of an OT system can be modeled by a finite state machine, then the complexity of the entire system does not exceed the complexity of its components. There has been some debate in past...

Not many people realize that the mass media carry two significant values in their content. One is the value of arts that very much represents the subjective thoughts; and the other is the value of science, which emphasizes precision, accuracy and accountability. Both values reside in the content of the mass media that very much become a precursor and inspiration for government and society to ac...

We present the grammar/semantic formalism of Applicative Abstract Categorial Grammars (AACG), based on the recent techniques from functional programming: applicative functors, staged languages and typed final language embeddings. AACG is a generalization of Abstract Categorial Grammars (ACG), retaining the benefits of ACG as a grammar formalism and making it possible and convenient to express a...

Halvorson (2012) argues that the semantic view of theories leads to absurdities. Glymour (2013) shows how to inoculate the semantic view against Halvorson’s criticisms, namely by making it into a syntactic view of theories. I argue that this modified semantic-syntactic view cannot do the philosophical work that the original “languagefree” semantic view was supposed to do. According to Clark Gly...

The aim of computational semantics is to capture the meaning of natural language expressions in representations suitable for performing inferences, in the service of understanding human language in written or spoken form. First-order logic is a good starting point, both from the representation and inference point of view. But even if one makes the choice of first-order logic as representation l...

Semantic theories for natural languages purport to describe a central aspect of the meaning of natural language sentences. In doing so, they usually employ some notion of truth. Most semanticists, even those who have no objections to invoking propositions, will define a truth-predicate that applies to sentences. Some will also employ a notion of propositional truth. Both types of semanticist fa...