The aim of illocutionary logic is to explain how context can affect the meaning of certain special kinds of performative utterances. Recall that performative utterances are understood as follows: a speaker performs the illocutionary act (e.g. act of assertion, of conjecture, of promise) with the illocutionary force (resp. assertion, conjecture, promise) named by an appropriate performative verb...

Systems Biology reconstructs biological phenomena in order to develop explanatory models of living systems. These models are represented precisely in terms of mathematical expressions. However, the meaning of a model usually is not formally specified but only described in natural language. Here, we discuss a framework for specifying the meaning of bio-models. We show that semantics appears on d...

A central but still unsettled question in formal theories about discourse interpretation is: What are the key theoretical structures on which discourse interpretation should depend? If we take our cue from theories that analyze the meanings of individual sentences, the meaning of the discourse's parts should determine the meaning of the whole; some sort principle of compositionality of meaning ...

In this thesis, I will survey some philosophically representative approaches to the problem of the relationship between context and meaning. Starting from G.W.F. Hegel’s discussion of the meaninglessness of indexical terms in the Phenomenology of Spirit, I will investigate Gottlob Frege’s notion of context and the legacy of this notion in the formal sciences of language, showing that this appro...

According to its model-theoretic semantics, Semantic Web IRIs are individual constants or predicate letters whose names are chosen arbitrarily and carry no formal meaning. At the same time it is a well-known aspect of Semantic Web pragmatics that IRIs are often constructed mnemonically, in order to be meaningful to a human interpreter. The latter has traditionally been termed ‘social meaning’, ...

Semantic parsing is the task of mapping a natural language sentence into a complete, formal meaning representation. Over the past decade, we have developed a number of machine learning methods for inducing semantic parsers by training on a corpus of sentences paired with their meaning representations in a specified formal language. We have demonstrated these methods on the automated constructio...

We address the question of which syntactic representation is best suited for role-semantic analysis of English in the FrameNet paradigm. We compare systems based on dependencies and constituents, and a dependency syntax with a rich set of grammatical functions with one with a smaller set. Our experiments show that dependency-based and constituent-based analyzers give roughly equivalent performa...

Copula constructions are problematic in the syntax of most languages. The paper describes three different dependency syntactic methods for handling copula constructions: function head, content head and complex label analysis. Furthermore, we also propose a POS-based approach to copula detection. We evaluate the impact of these approaches in computational parsing, in two parsing experiments for ...

Considering linguistic form and meaning as two facets of the same phenomenon has been the fundamental assumption behind corpus work on phraseology. This systematic interconnection was originally proposed by Firth and then adopted by Sinclair to become the basis of the theoretical framework he developed. Such a view of language has important implications with regard to analyzing and describing m...

ion high low medium Source component fixed/parameterized fixed/parameterized parameterized Set of constraints in empty not empty loosed formal parameter consists of defining the properties of holes, which are kept in the equations of formal parameters. Formally, we regard the process of making holes without properties as syntactic generalization, with properties as semantic generalization, and ...