Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Dynamic semantics is a framework in logic and natural language semantics that treats the meaning of a sentence as its potential to update a context. In static semantics, knowing the meaning of a sentence amounts to knowing when it is true; in dynamic semantics, knowing the meaning of a sentence means knowing "the change it brings about in the information state of anyone who accepts the news ...
In semantics, a donkey sentence is a sentence containing a pronoun which is semantically bound but syntactically free. They are a classic puzzle in formal semantics and philosophy of language because they are fully grammatical and yet defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents.
The theory of descriptions is the philosopher Bertrand Russell's most significant contribution to the philosophy of language.It is also known as Russell's theory of descriptions (commonly abbreviated as RTD).
In semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, the common ground of a conversation is the set of propositions that the interlocutors have agreed to treat as true. For a proposition to be in the common ground, it must be common knowledge in the conversational context.
ACD is a classic puzzle for theories of the syntax-semantics interface, since it threatens to introduce an infinite regress. It is commonly taken as motivation for syntactic transformations such as quantifier raising , though some approaches explain it using semantic composition rules or by adoption more flexible notions of what it means to be ...
Before the 1950s, there was no discussion of a syntax–semantics interface in American linguistics, since neither syntax nor semantics was an active area of research. [17] This neglect was due in part to the influence of logical positivism and behaviorism in psychology, that viewed hypotheses about linguistic meaning as untestable.
In dynamic semantics, modals are analyzed as tests which check whether their prejacent is compatible with (or follows from) the information in the conversational common ground. Probabilistic approaches motivated by gradable modal expressions provide a semantics which appeals to speaker credence in the prejacent.
In formal linguistics, discourse representation theory (DRT) is a framework for exploring meaning under a formal semantics approach. One of the main differences between DRT-style approaches and traditional Montagovian approaches is that DRT includes a level of abstract mental representations (discourse representation structures, DRS) within its formalism, which gives it an intrinsic ability to ...