Semantics of the Barwise sentence: insights from expressiveness, complexity and inference.
In this paper, we study natural language constructions which were first examined by Barwise: The richer the country, the more powerful some of its officials. Guided by Barwise’s observations, we suggest that conceivable interpretations of such constructions express the existence of various similarit...
| Publicado en: | Linguistics & Philosophy Vol. 41; no. 4; pp. 423 - 456 |
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| Autores principales: | , |
| Formato: | Artículo |
| Publicado: |
Springer Nature
Aug2018
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=130862962&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 130862962 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 01650157 OJI jtl: Linguistics & Philosophy issn: 01650157 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Aug2018 vid: 41 iid: 4 pid: 237 pub: Springer Nature artinfo: ui: 130862962 10.1007/s10988-018-9231-5 ppf: 423 ppct: 33 formats: fmt: @attributes: type: P size: 858KB tig: atl: Semantics of the Barwise sentence: insights from expressiveness, complexity and inference. aug: au: Kalociński, Dariusz Godziszewski, Michał Tomasz affil: Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, ul. Krakowskie Przedmieście 3, 00-927, Warsaw, Poland su: Semantics Linguistic complexity Computational complexity Ambiguity Quantifiers (Linguistics) sug: subj: Semantics Linguistic complexity Computational complexity Ambiguity Quantifiers (Linguistics) keyword: Embedding Expressiveness Homomorphism Partial order Polyadic quantification Strong Meaning Hypothesis Tractable cognition ab: In this paper, we study natural language constructions which were first examined by Barwise: The richer the country, the more powerful some of its officials. Guided by Barwise’s observations, we suggest that conceivable interpretations of such constructions express the existence of various similarities between partial orders such as homomorphism or embedding (strong readings). Semantically, we interpret the constructions as polyadic generalized quantifiers restricted to finite models (similarity quantifiers). We extend the results obtained by Barwise by showing that similarity quantifiers are not expressible in elementary logic over finite models. We also investigate whether the proposed readings are sound from the cognitive perspective. We prove that almost all similarity quantifiers are intractable. This leads us to first-order variants (weak readings), which only approximate the strong readings, but are cognitively more plausible. Driven by the question of ambiguity, we recall Barwise’s argumentation in favour of strong readings, enriching it with some arguments of our own. Given that Barwise-like sentences are indeed ambiguous, we use a generalized Strong Meaning Hypothesis to derive predictions for their verification. Finally, we propose a hypothesis according to which conflicting pressures of communication and cognition might give rise to an ambiguous construction, provided that different semantic variants of the construction withstand different pressures involved in its usage. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Linguistics & Philosophy is a copyright of Springer, 2018. All Rights Reserved. item: Linguistics & Philosophy holder: Springer Nature dt: @attributes: year: 2018 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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