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Alternative Semantics
Alternative semantics (or Hamblin semantics) is a framework in formal semantics and logic. In alternative semantics, expressions denote ''alternative sets'', understood as sets of objects of the same semantic type. For instance, while the word "Lena" might denote Lena herself in a classical semantics, it would denote the singleton set containing Lena in alternative semantics. The framework was introduced by Charles Leonard Hamblin in 1973 as a way of extending Montague grammar to provide an analysis for questions. In this framework, a question denotes the set of its possible answers. Thus, if P and Q are propositions, then \ is the denotation of the question whether P or Q is true. Since the 1970s, it has been extended and adapted to analyze phenomena including focus, scope, disjunction In logic, disjunction (also known as logical disjunction, logical or, logical addition, or inclusive disjunction) is a logical connective typically notated as \lor and read aloud as "o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Formal Semantics (natural Language)
Formal semantics is the scientific study of linguistic meaning through formal tools from logic and mathematics. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. Formal semanticists rely on diverse methods to analyze natural language. Many examine the meaning of a sentence by studying the circumstances in which it would be true. They describe these circumstances using abstract mathematical models to represent entities and their features. The principle of compositionality helps them link the meaning of expressions to abstract objects in these models. This principle asserts that the meaning of a compound expression is determined by the meanings of its parts. Propositional and predicate logic are formal systems used to analyze the semantic structure of sentences. They introduce concepts like singular terms, predicates, quantifiers, and logical connectives to represent the logical form of natural language expres ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the study of deductively valid inferences or logical truths. It examines how conclusions follow from premises based on the structure of arguments alone, independent of their topic and content. Informal logic is associated with informal fallacies, critical thinking, and argumentation theory. Informal logic examines arguments expressed in natural language whereas formal logic uses formal language. When used as a countable noun, the term "a logic" refers to a specific logical formal system that articulates a proof system. Logic plays a central role in many fields, such as philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics. Logic studies arguments, which consist of a set of premises that leads to a conclusion. An example is the argument from the premises "it's Sunday" and "if it's Sunday then I don't have to work" leading to the conclusion "I don't have to wor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Denotation
In linguistics and philosophy, the denotation of a word or expression is its strictly literal meaning. For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of having high temperature. Denotation is contrasted with other aspects of meaning including '' connotation''. For instance, the word "warm" may evoke calmness, coziness, or kindness (as in the warmth of someone's personality) but these associations are not part of the word's denotation. Similarly, an expression's denotation is separate from pragmatic inferences it may trigger. For instance, describing something as "warm" often implicates that it is not hot, but this is once again not part of the word's denotation. Denotation plays a major role in several fields. Within semantics and philosophy of language, denotation is studied as an important aspect of meaning. In mathematics and computer science, assignments of denotations are assigned to expressions are a crucial step in defining interpreted formal languages. The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Type Theory
In mathematics and theoretical computer science, a type theory is the formal presentation of a specific type system. Type theory is the academic study of type systems. Some type theories serve as alternatives to set theory as a foundation of mathematics. Two influential type theories that have been proposed as foundations are: * Typed λ-calculus of Alonzo Church * Intuitionistic type theory of Per Martin-Löf Most computerized proof-writing systems use a type theory for their foundation. A common one is Thierry Coquand's Calculus of Inductive Constructions. History Type theory was created to avoid paradoxes in naive set theory and formal logic, such as Russell's paradox which demonstrates that, without proper axioms, it is possible to define the set of all sets that are not members of themselves; this set both contains itself and does not contain itself. Between 1902 and 1908, Bertrand Russell proposed various solutions to this problem. By 1908, Russell arrive ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Leonard Hamblin
Charles Leonard Hamblin (20 November 1922 – 14 May 1985) was an Australian philosopher, logician, and computer pioneer, as well as a professor of philosophy at the New South Wales University of Technology (now the University of New South Wales) in Sydney. Among his most well-known achievements in the area of computer science was the introduction of Reverse Polish Notation and the use in 1957 of a push-down pop-up stack. This preceded the work of Friedrich Ludwig Bauer and Klaus Samelson on use of a push-pop stack. The stack had been invented by Alan Turing in 1946 when he introduced such a stack in his design of the ACE computer. In philosophy, Hamblin is known for his book ''Fallacies'', a standard work in the area of the false conclusions in logic. In formal semantics, Hamblin is known for his computational model of discourse as well as Hamblin semantics (or alternative semantics), an approach to the semantics of questions. Career and life Hamblin was born in Peter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Montague Grammar
Montague grammar is an approach to natural language semantics, named after American logician Richard Montague. The Montague grammar is based on mathematical logic, especially higher-order predicate logic and lambda calculus, and makes use of the notions of intensional logic, via Kripke models. Montague pioneered this approach in the 1960s and early 1970s. Overview Montague's thesis was that natural languages (like English) and formal languages (like programming languages) can be treated in the same way: There is in my opinion no important theoretical difference between natural languages and the artificial languages of logicians; indeed, I consider it possible to comprehend the syntax and semantics of both kinds of language within a single natural and mathematically precise theory. On this point I differ from a number of philosophers, but agree, I believe, with Chomsky and his associates. ("Universal Grammar" 1970) Montague published what soon became known as Montague gram ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Questions
A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammar, grammatical forms, typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interrogative in form but may not be considered wiktionary:bona fide, bona fide questions, as they are not expected to be answered. Questions come in a number of varieties. For instance; ''Polar questions'' are those such as the English language, English example "Is this a polar question?", which can be answered with yes and no, "yes" or "no". ''Alternative questions'' such as "Is this a polar question, or an alternative question?" present a list of possibilities to choose from. ''Open-ended question, Open questions'' such as "What kind of question is this?" allow many possible resolutions. Questions are widely studied in linguistics and philosophy of language. In the subfield of pragmatics, questions are regarded as illocutionary acts whi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proposition
A proposition is a statement that can be either true or false. It is a central concept in the philosophy of language, semantics, logic, and related fields. Propositions are the object s denoted by declarative sentences; for example, "The sky is blue" expresses the proposition that the sky is blue. Unlike sentences, propositions are not linguistic expressions, so the English sentence "Snow is white" and the German "Schnee ist weiß" denote the same proposition. Propositions also serve as the objects of belief and other propositional attitudes, such as when someone believes that the sky is blue. Formally, propositions are often modeled as functions which map a possible world to a truth value. For instance, the proposition that the sky is blue can be modeled as a function which would return the truth value T if given the actual world as input, but would return F if given some alternate world where the sky is green. However, a number of alternative formalizations have be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Focus (linguistics)
In linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ..., focus ( abbreviated ) is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English language, English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed Prosody (linguistics), prosodically by a pitch accent (intonation), pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person whom Mary insulted. By contrast, in the sentence "Mary only INSULTED Bill", the verb "insult" is focused and thus expresses that Mary performed no other actions towards Bill. Focus is a cross-linguistic phenomenon and a major topic in linguistics. Research on focus spans numerous subfields including phonetics, syntax, semantics (linguistics), semantics, pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scope (formal Semantics)
In formal semantics (linguistics), formal semantics, the scope of a semantic operator is the semantic object to which it applies. For instance, in the sentence "''Paulina doesn't drink beer but she does drink wine''," the proposition that Paulina drinks beer occurs within the scope of negation, but the proposition that Paulina drinks wine does not. Scope can be thought of as the semantic order of operations. One of the major concerns of research in formal semantics is the relationship between operators' syntax, syntactic positions and their semantic scope. This relationship is not transparent, since the scope of an operator need not directly correspond to its Deep structure and surface structure, surface position and a single surface form can be semantic ambiguity, semantically ambiguous between different scope construals. Some theories of scope posit a level of syntactic structure called Logical form (linguistics), logical form, in which an item's syntactic position corresponds t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Disjunction
In logic, disjunction (also known as logical disjunction, logical or, logical addition, or inclusive disjunction) is a logical connective typically notated as \lor and read aloud as "or". For instance, the English language sentence "it is sunny or it is warm" can be represented in logic using the disjunctive formula S \lor W , assuming that S abbreviates "it is sunny" and W abbreviates "it is warm". In classical logic, disjunction is given a truth functional semantics according to which a formula \phi \lor \psi is true unless both \phi and \psi are false. Because this semantics allows a disjunctive formula to be true when both of its disjuncts are true, it is an ''inclusive'' interpretation of disjunction, in contrast with exclusive disjunction. Classical proof theoretical treatments are often given in terms of rules such as disjunction introduction and disjunction elimination. Disjunction has also been given numerous non-classical treatments, motivated by problems ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Negative Polarity Item
In grammar and linguistics, a polarity item is a lexical item that is associated with affirmation or negation. An affirmation is a positive polarity item, abbreviated PPI or AFF. A negation is a negative polarity item, abbreviated NPI or NEG. The linguistic environment in which a polarity item appears is a licensing context. In the simplest case, an affirmative statement provides a licensing context for a PPI, while negation provides a licensing context for an NPI. However, there are many complications, and not all polarity items of a particular type have the same licensing contexts. In English As examples of polarity items, consider the English lexical items ''somewhat'' and ''at all'', as used in the following sentences: # I liked the film somewhat. # I didn't like the film at all. # *I liked the film at all. # *I didn't like the film somewhat. As can be seen, ''somewhat'' is licensed by the affirmative environment of sentence (1), but it is forbidden (anti-licensed) by th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
