Description
Book SynopsisThis volume is an outgrowth of the second Workshop on Logic, Language and Computation held at Stanford in the spring of 1993. The workshop brought together researchers interested in natural language to discuss the current state of the art at the borderline of logic, linguistics and computer science. The papers in this collection fall into three central research areas of the nineties, namely quantifiers, deduction, and context. Each contribution reflects an ever-growing interest in a more dynamic approach to meaning, which focuses on inference patterns and the interpretation of sentences in the context of a larger discourse. The papers apply either current logical machinery - such as linear logic, generalised quantifier theory, dynamic logic - or formal analyses of the notion of context in discourse to classical linguistic issues, with original and thought-provoking results deserving of a wide audience.
Table of Contents1. The Context-Dependency of Implicit Arguments; 2. A Deductive Account of Quantification in LFG; 3. The Sorites Fallacy and the Context-dependence of Vague Predicates; 4. Presuppositions and Information Updating; 5. Indefeasible semantics and Defeasible Pragmatics; 6. Pronoun Interpretation Preferences: an Account; 7. Resumptive Quantifiers in Exception Sentences; 8. (In)definites and genericity.
