Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In formal semantics, a Hurford disjunction is a disjunction in which one of the disjuncts entails the other. The concept was first identified by British linguist James Hurford. [1] The sentence "Mary is in the Netherlands or she is in Amsterdam" is an example of a Hurford disjunction since one cannot be in Amsterdam without being in the ...
James Raymond Hurford, FBA (born 16 July 1941) is a retired linguist and academic. [1]He was the General Editor of the book series Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language, [2] as well as a member of the Centre for Language Evolution (formerly Language Evolution and Computation) research group at the University of Edinburgh where he is an emeritus professor.
A more restrictive and technical definition requires that homonyms be simultaneously homographs and homophones [1] —that is, they have identical spelling and pronunciation but different meanings. Examples include the pair stalk (part of a plant) and stalk (follow/harass a person) and the pair left ( past tense of leave ) and left (opposite of ...
In semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, a question under discussion (QUD) is a question which the interlocutors in a discourse are attempting to answer. In many formal and computational theories of discourse, the QUD (or an ordered set of QUD's) is among the elements of a tuple called the conversational scoreboard which represents the current state of the conversation.
Since their introduction in the mid-1960s by Jeffrey Gruber and Charles Fillmore, [2] [3] semantic roles have been a core linguistic concept and ground of debate between linguist approaches, because of their potential in explaining the relationship between syntax and semantics (also known as the syntax-semantics interface), [3] that is how ...
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.
The solution that DRT provides for the donkey sentence problem can be roughly outlined as follows: The common semantic function of non-anaphoric noun phrases is the introduction of a new discourse referent, which is in turn available for the binding of anaphoric expressions. No quantifiers are introduced into the representation, thus overcoming ...
The principle of compositionality (also known as semantic compositionalism) is highly debated in linguistics. Among its most challenging problems there are the issues of contextuality , the non-compositionality of idiomatic expressions , and the non-compositionality of quotations .