Generalized Quantifiers

Generalized Quantifiers PDF

Author: Peter Gärdenfors

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 9400933819

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Some fifteen years ago, research on generalized quantifiers was con sidered to be a branch of mathematical logic, mainly carried out by mathematicians. Since then an increasing number of linguists and philosophers have become interested in exploring the relevance of general quantifiers for natural language as shown by the bibliography compiled for this volume. To a large extent, the new research has been inspired by Jon Barwise and Robin Cooper's path-breaking article "Generalized Quantifiers and Natural Language" from 1981. A concrete sign of this development was the workshop on this topic at Lund University, May 9-11, 1985, which was organized by Robin Cooper, Elisabet Engdahl, and the present editor. All except two of the papers in this volume derive from that workshop. Jon Barwise's paper in the volume is different from the one he presented in connection with the workshop. Mats Rooth's contribution has been added because of its close relationship with the rest of the papers. The articles have been revised for publication here and the authors have commented on each other's contributions in order to integrate the collection. The organizers of the workshop gratefully acknowledge support from the Department of Linguistics, the Department of Philosophy and the Faculty of Humanities at Lund University, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (through the Wallenberg Foundation), the Swedish Institute, and the Letterstedt Foundation.

Generalized Quantifiers and Computation

Generalized Quantifiers and Computation PDF

Author: Jouko Väänänen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2003-06-26

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 3540465839

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This book comprises revised full versions of lectures given during the 9th European Summer School in Logic, Languages, and Information, ESSLLI'97, held in Aix-en-Provence, France, in August 1997. The six lectures presented introduce the reader to the state of the art in the area of generalized quantifiers and computation. Besides an introductory survey by the volume editor various aspects of generalized quantifiers are studied in depth.

Quantifiers and Cognition: Logical and Computational Perspectives

Quantifiers and Cognition: Logical and Computational Perspectives PDF

Author: Jakub Szymanik

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-02-19

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 3319287494

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This volume on the semantic complexity of natural language explores the question why some sentences are more difficult than others. While doing so, it lays the groundwork for extending semantic theory with computational and cognitive aspects by combining linguistics and logic with computations and cognition. Quantifier expressions occur whenever we describe the world and communicate about it. Generalized quantifier theory is therefore one of the basic tools of linguistics today, studying the possible meanings and the inferential power of quantifier expressions by logical means. The classic version was developed in the 1980s, at the interface of linguistics, mathematics and philosophy. Before this volume, advances in "classic" generalized quantifier theory mainly focused on logical questions and their applications to linguistics, this volume adds a computational component, the third pillar of language use and logical activity. This book is essential reading for researchers in linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, logic, AI, and computer science.

Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language

Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language PDF

Author: Edward Keenan

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-03-28

Total Pages: 973

ISBN-13: 9400726813

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Covering a strikingly diverse range of languages from 12 linguistic families, this handbook is based on responses to a questionnaire constructed by the editors. Focusing on the formation, distribution and semantic interpretation of quantificational expressions, the book explores 17 languages including German, Italian, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Malagasy, Hebrew, Pima, Basque, and more. The language data sets enable detailed crosslinguistic comparison of numerous features. These include semantic classes of quantifiers (generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, partitive), syntactically complex quantifiers (intensive modification, Boolean compounding, exception phrases) and several others such as quantifier scope ambiguities, quantifier float, and binary quantifiers. Its theory-independent content extends earlier work by Matthewson (2008) and Bach et al. (1995), making this handbook suitable for linguists, semanticians, philosophers of language and logicians alike.

Quantifiers in Language and Logic

Quantifiers in Language and Logic PDF

Author: Stanley Peters

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-04-27

Total Pages: 549

ISBN-13: 019929125X

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Quantification is a topic which brings together linguistics, logic, and philosophy. Quantifiers are the essential tools with which, in language or logic, we refer to quantity of things or amount of stuff. In English they include such expressions as no, some, all, both, and many. Peters and Westerstahl present the definitive interdisciplinary exploration of how they work - their syntax, semantics, and inferential role.Quantifiers in Language and Logic is intended for everyone with a scholarly interest in the exact treatment of meaning. It presents a broad view of the semantics and logic of quantifier expressions in natural languages and, to a slightly lesser extent, in logical languages. The authors progress carefully from a fairly elementary level to considerable depth over the course of sixteen chapters; their book will be invaluable to a broad spectrum of readers, from those with a basicknowledge of linguistic semantics and of first-order logic to those with advanced knowledge of semantics, logic, philosophy of language, and knowledge representation in artificial intelligence.

Fuzzy Quantifiers

Fuzzy Quantifiers PDF

Author: Ingo Glöckner

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2008-08-11

Total Pages: 467

ISBN-13: 3540325034

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From a linguistic perspective, it is quanti?cation which makes all the di?- ence between “having no dollars” and “having a lot of dollars”. And it is the meaning of the quanti?er “most” which eventually decides if “Most Ame- cans voted Kerry” or “Most Americans voted Bush” (as it stands). Natural language(NL)quanti?erslike“all”,“almostall”,“many”etc. serveanimp- tant purpose because they permit us to speak about properties of collections, as opposed to describing speci?c individuals only; in technical terms, qu- ti?ers are a ‘second-order’ construct. Thus the quantifying statement “Most Americans voted Bush” asserts that the set of voters of George W. Bush c- prisesthemajorityofAmericans,while“Bushsneezes”onlytellsussomething about a speci?c individual. By describing collections rather than individuals, quanti?ers extend the expressive power of natural languages far beyond that of propositional logic and make them a universal communication medium. Hence language heavily depends on quantifying constructions. These often involve fuzzy concepts like “tall”, and they frequently refer to fuzzy quantities in agreement like “about ten”, “almost all”, “many” etc. In order to exploit this expressive power and make fuzzy quanti?cation available to technical applications, a number of proposals have been made how to model fuzzy quanti?ers in the framework of fuzzy set theory. These approaches usually reduce fuzzy quanti?cation to a comparison of scalar or fuzzy cardinalities [197, 132].