Insensitive Semantics is an overview of and contribution to the debates about how to accommodate context sensitivity within a theory of human communication, investigating the effects of context on communicative interaction and, as a corollary, what a context of utterance is and what it is to be in one.

• Provides detailed and wide-ranging overviews of the central positions and arguments surrounding contextualism
  

• Addresses broad and varied aspects of the distinction between the semantic and non-semantic content of language
  

• Defends a distinctive and explanatorily powerful combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism
  

• Confronts core problems which not only run to the heart of philosophy of language and linguistics, but which arise in epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy as well

Existence: Semantics and Syntax
This collection is an important contribution to the semantic and syntactic analysis of the expression of existence. The volume focuses on the three main linguistic constructions expressing existence: copular clauses, existential sentences, and (in)definiteness. The papers analyze the interaction between the basic notion of existence and pervasive phenomena of natural language, such as quantification and presupposition. The contributions represent state of the art research on theoretical and comparative issues related to the expression of existence, and make extensive reference to the semantic and syntactic facts of English and of various other languages. The richness of new data and the juxtaposition of different theoretical stances bring a number of new questions into focus.

Easy Share link: http://w16.easy-share.com/1700015182.html

The Grammar of Names

This book is the first systematic account of the syntax and semantics of names. Drawing on work in onomastics, philosophy, and linguistics John Anderson examines the distribution and subcategorization of names within a framework of syntactic categories, and considers how the morphosyntactic behaviour of names connects to their semantic roles. He argues that names occur in two basic circumstances: one involving vocatives and their use in naming predications, where they are not definite; the other their use as arguments of predicators, where they are definite. This division is discussed in relation to English, French, Greek, and Seri, and a range of other languages. Professor Anderson reveals that the semantic status of names, including prototypicality, is crucial to understanding their morphosyntax and role in derivational relationships. He shows that semantically coherent subsets of names, such as those referring to people and places, are characterized by morphosyntactic properties which may vary from language to language. His original and important investigation will appeal to scholars and advanced students of linguistics and philosophy.

Knowledge Representation and the Semantics of Natural Language (Cognitive Technologies)
The book presents an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge representation and the treatment of semantic phenomena of natural language, which is positioned between artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and cognitive psychology. The proposed method is based on Multilayered Extended Semantic Networks (MultiNets), which can be used for theoretical investigations into the semantics of natural language, for cognitive modeling, for describing lexical entries in a computational lexicon, and for natural language processing (NLP). Part I deals with fundamental problems of semantic knowledge representation and semantic interpretation of natural language phenomena. Part II provides a systematic description of the representational means of MultiNet, one of the most comprehensive and thoroughly specified collections of relations and functions used in real NLP applications. MultiNet is embedded into a system of software tools comprising a workbench for the knowledge engineer, a semantic interpreter translating natural language expressions into formal meaning structures, and a workbench for the computer lexicographer. The book has been used for courses in artificial intelligence at several universities and is one of the cornerstones for teaching computational linguistics in a virtual electronic laboratory.