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Logic, Language and Meaning
This book contains the revised papers presented at the Amsterdam Colloquium 2009, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in December 2009. The 41 thoroughly refereed and revised contributions presented together with the revised abstracts of 5 invited talks are organized in five sections: the first section contains extended abstracts of the talks given by the invited speakers; the second, third and fourth sections contain invited and submitted contributions to the three thematic workshops hosted by the colloquium: the Workshop on Implicature and Grammar, the Workshop on Natural Logic, and the Workshop on Vagueness; the final section consists of submissions to the general program. The topics covered range from descriptive (syntactic and semantic analyses of all kinds of expressions) to theoretical (logical and computational properties of semantic theories, philosophical foundations, evolution and learning of language).
Language in Social Interaction
The central idea underlying the studies in this volume is that when speakers act in social context language acquires a social signature whose details have not yet been fully understood. This volume brings together eleven original, empirical studies in the fields of conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and syntax whose central theme is the interplay of interacting speakers and linguistic structures within the world of social interaction. The studies fall into three topical categories: Interaction and Social Behavior (Part I), Interaction-structuring expressions (Part II), and Grammar in Interaction (Part III).
Polarity-Sensitive Expressions
Polarity (positive, negative) is one of the most fundamental concepts in the system of language and there are many expressions that are sensitive to polarity. For example, any in English and wh-mo in Japanese appear in negative contexts, but not in positive contexts. While previous studies have shown that polarity-sensitive expressions are a general phenomenon in languages, it has also become clear that there are variations in polarity-sensitive expressions. This volume explores the variations in polarity-sensitive expressions through comparisons between Japanese and other languages, such as English, German, Spanish, and Old Japanese, and examines the environments and contexts in which polar...
Negative Concord: A Hundred Years On
The concept of ‘negative concord’ refers to the seemingly multiple exponence of semantically single negation as in You ain’t seen nothing yet. This book takes stock of what has been achieved since the notion was introduced in 1922 by Otto Jespersen and sets the agenda for future research, with an eye towards increased cross-fertilization between theoretical perspectives and methodological tools. Major issues include (i) How can formal and typological approaches complement each other in uncovering and accounting for cross-linguistic variation? (ii) How can corpus work steer theoretical analyses? (iii) What is the contribution of diachronic research to the theoretical debates?
Beyond 'any' and 'ever'
The grammar of negative polarity items is one of the challenges for linguistic theory. NPIs cross-cut all traditional categories in grammar and semantics, yet their distribution is by no means arbitrary. Theories of NPI licensing have been proposed in terms of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics - each with its own merits and problems. The volume comprises state-of-the-art studies and suggests an interpolation approach to NPI licensing.
Projective Meaning in Mandarin Chinese
Multidimensional semantic theory has greatly influenced the semantic and pragmatic research of natural languages in the past few decades, but Chinese-based research in this direction has been very scarce so far. This monograph, through five case studies, investigates the distributional, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of adverbs, logical words (negative words and conditional connectives), focus particles, pleonastic negation and classifiers in Mandarin Chinese. It provides new data from Chinese that relate to projective meaning and multidimensional semantic research, and combines formal analyses with corpus-linguistic and experimental methods. The results show that the existing diagno...
