Higher-Order Coloured Unification and natural language semantics

Gardent, Claire; Kohlhase, Michael

doi:10.3115/981863.981864

Cited by 13 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…The non-deictic variable is a variable that cannot remain free, and is in need to be bound. It is designated here as x d ; another avenue, as suggested in Giannakidou & Quer (2013), would be to represent the dependent vs. non-dependent contrast as belonging to different systems, e.g., as a difference between colored variables (Gardent & Kolhase 1996). The exact implementation is immaterial here.…”

Section: A Chierchia Style Account For the Mandarin Npi Shenmementioning

confidence: 99%

A critical assessment of exhaustivity for Negative Polarity Items

Giannakidou

2018

Acta Linguistica Hungarica

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In some recent works on negative polarity, exhaustivity is posited as the single defining property of all negative polarity item (NPI) and free choice item (FCI) paradigms. Chierchia (2006; 2013), and Chierchia & Liao (2015) are the best-known implementations of this theory. They stipulate that all NPIs and FCIs must be exhaustified, and posit a covert O(nly) and a syntactic feature [+Σ] to derive exhaustification and licensing respectively. In this paper, I challenge the exhaustivity hypothesis and find it, after careful empirical investigation, to be inadequate to explain the distribution and interpretation of NPIs in Greek, Korean, and Mandarin, which have been described in the literature as non-exhaustive. We also find the theory to be unable to derive the actual distribution of any in nonveridical contexts. Analytically, the problems with exhaustification are twofold. First, the use of covert O(nly) fails to account for why NPIs are licensed. Licensing is a grammaticality condition, and in order to capture it the syntactic feature [+Σ] is stipulated, NPI-licensing thus amounting to checking the [+Σ] feature. The stipulation of [+Σ], without a coherent characterization of its semantics, is a regression to a Klima-esque (1964) syntactic account, and faces precisely the challenges that that account faced. Second, for any variant of the Chierchia system to work for the data discussed here, the system built around it must posit additional ad hoc rules on a case-by-case basis. This produces a system with very little predictive power beyond each specific case because of the ad hoc nature of the rules posited. Our overall conclusion will be that the exhaustivity hypothesis, as formulated in the works discussed here, is a falsified, therefore unnecessary, hypothesis for NPIs.

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Section: A Chierchia Style Account For the Mandarin Npi Shenmementioning

confidence: 99%

A critical assessment of exhaustivity for Negative Polarity Items

Giannakidou

2018

Acta Linguistica Hungarica

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“…The coloured λ-calculus has a number of applications (for instance to computational linguistics and natural language semantics [12]) however its primary interest in terms of this paper is its application to rippling and its solutions to the problems raised in the last section, in particular the problems caused to the definition of skeleton by the presence of bound variables.…”

Section: The Coloured Lambda-calculusmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Use of Embeddings to Provide a Clean Separation of Term and Annotation for Higher Order Rippling

Dennis

Green²,

Smaill

2010

J Autom Reasoning

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Rippling is a proof search guidance technique with particular application to proof by mathematical induction. It is based on a concept of annotating the differences between two terms. In its original formulation this annotation was only appropriate to first-order formulae. We use a notion of embedding to adapt these annotations appropriately for higher-order syntax. This representation simplifies the theory of annotated terms, no longer requiring special substitution and unification theorems. A key feature of the representation is that it provides a clean separation of the term and the annotation. We illustrate this with selected examples using our implementation of these ideas in λClam.

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“…1As (Dalrymple et al, 1991) themselves observe, HOU also yields other, linguistically invalid, solutions. For a proposal on how to solve this over-generation problem, see (Gardent and Kohlhase, 1996b;.…”

Section: Axlike(x S)(p) -Like(p S)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Unifying parallels

Gardent

1999

Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Computational Linguistics -

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I show that the equational treatment of ellipsis proposed in (Dalrymple et al., 1991) can further be viewed as modeling the effect of parallelism on semantic interpretation. I illustrate this claim by showing that the account straightforwardly extends to a general treatment of sloppy identity on the one hand, and to deaccented foci on the other. I also briefly discuss the results obtained in a prototype implementation.

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Higher-Order Coloured Unification and natural language semantics

Cited by 13 publications

References 11 publications

A critical assessment of exhaustivity for Negative Polarity Items

A critical assessment of exhaustivity for Negative Polarity Items

The Use of Embeddings to Provide a Clean Separation of Term and Annotation for Higher Order Rippling

Unifying parallels

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