Reasoning with Intensional Negative Adjectivals: Semantics, Pragmatics, and Context

Abstract

Intensional negative adjectives alleged, artificial, fake, false, former, and toy are unusual adjectives that depending on context may or may not be restricting functions. A formal theory of their semantics, pragmatics, and context that uniformly accounts for their complex mathematical and computational characteristics and captures some peculiarities of individual adjectives is presented.Such adjectives are formalized as new concept builders, negation-like functions that operate on the values of intensional properties of the concepts denoted by their arguments and yield new concepts whose intensional properties have values consistent with the negation of the old values. Understanding these new concepts involves semantics, pragmatics and context-dependency of natural language. It is argued that intensional negative adjectives can be viewed as a special-purpose, weaker, context-dependent negation in natural language. The theory explains and predicts many inferences licensed by expressions involving such adjectives. Implementation of sample examples demonstrates its computational feasibility. Computation of context-dependent interpretation is discussed.The theory allows one to enhance a knowledge representation system with similar concept building, negationlike, context-dependent functions, the availability of which appears to be a distinct characteristic of natural languages.

Property Modifiers and Intensional Essentialism

“…In other words, Whenever no confusion arises, we use traditional infix notation without Trivialisation for truth-functions and the identity relation, to make the terms denoting constructions easier to read. Thus, for instance, instead of: (5) we usually write: (6) 3 Property Modifiers and Essences of Properties…”

“…Necessarily, i.e., in all worlds and times, the set of skillful surgeons is a subset of the set of surgeons. 5 The major difference between subsective and intersective modification is that subsectivity bans this sort of argument:…”

Iterated privation and positive predication

“…The paper also offers reasons for revising one of the existing rules; however, the extension we provide can be incorporated without revising anything. We are building upon the work of not least Coulson and Fauconnier [3], Horn [13][14][15], Iwańska [16], Jespersen [17], Kamp [22], Montague [25], Partee [27], Primiero and Jespersen [28], while the background theory is based on Duží et al [6,8].…”

Contextualization

“…Moreover, it is often the case that in different contexts, the same object have different semantics. For example, in the context of discussing different paintings, the expression "fake Monet" may convey information about the artist being somebody other than Monet, i.e., not Monet; whereas in the context of discussing details of various painting techniques, the expression "fake Monet" may convey information about the technique used, and state that the technique is similar, but not exactly like the technique used by Monet [53].…”

“…In the context of a non-blind person who has seen an elephant either in TV, or in a zoo, or even in the jungle, all these five definitions does not make any sense. Eleven such persons have been asked to define the concept of an "elephant", and the answers are shown in [53]). totally different from the five above.…”