Related Research Articles
Irene Roswitha Heim is a linguist and a leading specialist in semantics. She was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and UCLA before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989, where she is Professor Emerita of Linguistics. She served as Head of the Linguistics Section of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.
Larry M. Hyman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in phonology and has particular interest in African languages.
Barbara Hall Partee is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass).
Heidi Britton Harley is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. Her areas of specialization are formal syntactic theory, morphology, and lexical semantics.
Angelika Kratzer is a professor emerita of linguistics in the department of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Natural Language Semantics is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal of semantics published by Springer Science+Business Media. It covers semantics and its interfaces in grammar, especially in syntax. The founding editors-in-chief were Irene Heim (MIT) and Angelika Kratzer. The current editor-in-chief is Amy Rose Deal.
Donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning but whose syntactical role in the sentence poses challenges to grammarians. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parse such sentences.
Sandra (Sandy) Chung is an American linguist and distinguished professor emerita at the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on Austronesian languages and syntax.
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal tools from logic and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.
In linguistics, an expression is semantically ambiguous when it can have multiple meanings. The higher the amount of synonyms a word has, the higher the degree of ambiguity. Like other kinds of ambiguity, semantic ambiguities are often clarified by context or by prosody. One's comprehension of a sentence in which a semantically ambiguous word is used is strongly influenced by the general structure of the sentence. The language itself is sometimes a contributing factor in the overall effect of semantic ambiguity, in the sense that the level of ambiguity in the context can change depending on whether or not a language boundary is crossed.
Judith Tonhauser is a Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart.
Donca Steriade is a professor of Linguistics at MIT, specializing in phonological theory.
Pauline (Polly) Jacobson is a professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University, where she has been since 1977. She is known for her work on variable free semantics, direct compositionality, and transderivationality.
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. Scope can be thought of as the semantic order of operations.
In formal semantics, existential closure is an operation which introduces existential quantification. It was first posited by Irene Heim in her 1982 dissertation, as part of her analysis of indefinites. In her formulation, existential closure is a form of unselective binding which binds any number of variables of any semantic type. In alternative semantics and related frameworks, the term is often applied to a closely related operation which existentially quantifies over a set of propositional alternatives.
In formal semantics, a type shifter is an interpretation rule which changes an expression's semantic type. For instance, while the English expression "John" might ordinarily denote John himself, 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. Lift can be seen as mapping an individual onto the principal ultrafilter which it generates.
- Without type shifting:
- Type shifting with Lift:
In linguistics, the syntax–semantics interface is the interaction between syntax and semantics. Its study encompasses phenomena that pertain to both syntax and semantics, with the goal of explaining correlations between form and meaning. Specific topics include scope, binding, and lexical semantic properties such as verbal aspect and nominal individuation, semantic macroroles, and unaccusativity.
Kristen Syrett is a linguist whose work focuses on language acquisition, psycholinguistics, semantics, and pragmatics.
An indeterminate pronoun is a pronoun which can show a variety of readings depending on the type of sentence it occurs in. The term "indeterminate pronoun" originates in Kuroda's (1965) thesis and is typically used in reference to wh-indeterminates, which are pronouns which function as an interrogative pronoun in questions, yet come to have additional meanings with other grammatical operators. For example, in Japanese, dare means 'who' in a constituent question like (1) formed with the question-forming operator no:
References
- ↑ "Amy Rose Deal". linguistics.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2022-02-09.
- ↑ "Natural Language Semantics". Springer. Retrieved 2022-02-09.
- ↑ Heim, Irene; Kratzer, Angelika (2021-12-01). "Farewell and Welcome". Natural Language Semantics. 29 (4): 507. doi: 10.1007/s11050-021-09185-z . ISSN 1572-865X. S2CID 244082945.
- ↑ Crnič, Luka; Pesetsky, David; Sauerland, Uli (2014). "Introduction" (PDF). In Crnič, Luka; Sauerland, Uli (eds.). The Art and Craft of Semantics: A Festschrift for Irene Heim. Cambridge, MA: MIT. ISBN 9781502857477.
In 1993, Heim and Kratzer also founded the journal Natural Language Semantics, which they edit to this day as a profound ongoing service to theoretical linguistics. Almost immediately, their journal became one of the most important and respected in the field
- ↑ Partee, Barbara (2005). "Reflections of a formal semanticist as of Feb 2005" (PDF).
After fifteen years in which Linguistics and Philosophy, founded in 1977, was the preeminent journal for formal semantics, a new journal conceived and edited by Irene Heim and Angelika Kratzer was launched in 1992... Natural Language Semantics
- ↑ "A Theory of Indexical Shift". MIT Press . Archived from the original on 2023-01-04.
- ↑ "LSA Announces Additional Awards for 2022 | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2022-02-09.
- ↑ "LSA Honors and Awards | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2022-02-09.
