Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory (eBook)

Shalom Lappin is Emeritus Professor of Computational Linguistics at King's College London, UK, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Member of the Academia Europaea. He is currently Director of the Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and Visiting Professor in the Cognitive Science Group in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London, UK. He is co-editor, with Alexander Clark and Chris Fox, of The Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (Wiley Blackwell, 2010), co-author, with Alexander Clark, of Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus (Wiley Blackwell, 2011), and co-author of Foundations of Intensional Semantics (with Chris Fox, Blackwell, 2005). Chris Fox is a Reader in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, UK. He is the author of The Ontology of Language (2000) and co-author of Foundations of Intensional Semantics (with Shalom Lappin, Blackwell, 2005).

Notes on Contributors ix

Preface xv

Introduction 1

Part I Quantifiers, Scope, Plurals, and Ellipsis 7

1 Generalized Quantifiers in Natural Language Semantics 9
Dag Westerståhl

2 Scope 40
Chris Barker

3 Plurals 77
Yoad Winter and Remko Scha

4 Ellipsis 114
Ruth Kempson, Ronnie Cann, Arash Eshghi, Eleni Gregoromichelaki, and Matthew Purver

Part II Modification, Presupposition, Tense, and Modality 141

5 Adjectival Modification and Gradation 143
Daniel Lassiter

6 Presupposition and Implicature 168
Christopher Potts

7 The Semantics of Tense and Aspect: A Finite-State Perspective 203
Tim Fernando

8 Conditionals and Modality 237
Magdalena Kaufmann and Stefan Kaufmann

Part III Nondeclaratives 271

9 Semantics of Questions 273
Andrzej Wisniewski

10 The Semantics of Imperatives 314
Chris Fox

Part IV Type Theory and Computational Semantics 343

11 Constructive Type Theory 345
Aarne Ranta

12 Type Theory with Records for Natural Language Semantics 375
Robin Cooper and Jonathan Ginzburg

13 Curry Typing, Polymorphism, and Fine-Grained Intensionality 408
Shalom Lappin

14 Semantic Complexity in Natural Language 429
Ian Pratt-Hartmann

15 Implementing Semantic Theories 455
Jan van Eijck

16 Vector Space Models of Lexical Meaning 493
Stephen Clark

17 Recognizing Textual Entailment 523
Mark Sammons

Part V Interfaces 559

18 Natural Logic 561
Lawrence S. Moss

19 The Syntax-Semantics Interface: Semantic Roles and Syntactic Arguments 593
Malka Rappaport Hovav and Beth Levin

20 Reference in Discourse 625
Andrew Kehler

21 Probabilistic Semantics and Pragmatics: Uncertainty in Language and Thought 655
Noah D. Goodman and Daniel Lassiter

22 Semantics and Dialogue 687
David Schlangen

23 Semantics and Language Acquisition 714
Eve V. Clark

Author Index 735

Subject Index 745

"The second edition of The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory surveys the field from a completely fresh perspective, with a new emphasis on formalisms and methods, and a closer focus on a wider range of phenomena than its distinguished predecessor. It will be read by linguists, philosophers, computational linguists, cognitive scientists, and others seeking to comprehend the continuing developments and rapid progress that have occurred in this area over the intervening decades."

Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh, UK