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In formal semantics, the scope of a semantic operator is the semantic object to which it applies. For instance, in the sentence "Paulina doesn't drink beer but she does drink wine," the proposition that Paulina drinks beer occurs within the scope of negation, but the proposition that Paulina drinks wine does not.
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal concepts from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language .
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 ...
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.
In formal semantics, a type shifter is an interpretation rule that changes an expression's semantic type.For instance, the English expression "John" might ordinarily denote John himself, but a type shifting rule called Lift can raise its denotation to a function which takes a property and returns "true" if John himself has that property.
There are several formal views of the syntax–semantics interface which differ in what they take to be the inputs and outputs of this mapping. In the Heim and Kratzer model commonly adopted within generative linguistics , the input is taken to be a special level of syntactic representation called logical form .
In formal semantics, a generalized quantifier (GQ) is an expression that denotes a set of sets. This is the standard semantics assigned to quantified noun phrases . For example, the generalized quantifier every boy denotes the set of sets of which every boy is a member: { X ∣ ∀ x ( x is a boy → x ∈ X ) } {\displaystyle \{X\mid \forall x ...
Formal linguistics is the branch of linguistics which uses applied mathematical methods for the analysis of natural languages. Such methods include formal languages , formal grammars and first-order logical expressions.