“Petra Hendriks”:http://odur.let.rug.nl/~hendriks/engels.htm has posted two new papers:
“Ambiguous and: Coherence and contrast in coordination”:http://odur.let.rug.nl/~hendriks/contrast03.pdf. First draft July 2003. Unpublished manuscript, University of Groningen.
bq. Abstract. It has been observed (Kehler, 1996, 2000, 2002) that ellipsis resolution processes interact with the inference processes underlying the establishment of coherence relations in discourse. For example, gapping only cooccurs with the coherence relation of Resemblance. In this paper I show that the reason why certain ellipsis processes only cooccur with certain types of coherence relations does not lie in the possibility to reconstruct the missing material. Rather, ellipsis processes differ in their relation to the topic of the sentence. Because coherence relations are argued to differ in the way they construct the topic (i.e., as a contrastive or non-contrastive topic), coherence relations pose restrictions on the types of ellipsis they can cooccur with. This conclusion is supported by observed differences between gapping and subject deletion in Dutch SGF-constructions.
“A New Hypothesis on Compositionality”:http://odur.let.rug.nl/~hendriks/sydney03.pdf (with Reinhard Blutner and Helen de Hoop). In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cognitive Science, Sydney, Australia, July 13-17, 2003.
bq. Abstract. In this paper we put forward a new hypothesis on compositionality of meaning, namely that compositionality is bidirectional optimization. Underspecification approaches to natural language interpretation generally start with an underspecified or weak meaning, which is strengthened by contextual information. In contrast, the bidirectional optimization approach we advocate proceeds from the strongest possible meaning. This meaning can be changed or weakened by contextual information. Under this approach, the meaning of an utterance is composed in a functional rather than a concatenative way. Hence, this approach avoids a number of well-known empirical problems associated with concatenative compositionality.
[previously "noted":http://fintel.mit.edu/blog/archives/000267.html in this weblog]
Home > About This Post
This entry was posted by fintel on Monday, July 21st, 2003, at 6:57 am.
Subscribe to the
RSS 2.0 feed for all comments to this post.
Post a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.