Abstract Semantic automata were developed to compare the complexity of generalized quantifiers based on the complexity of the string languages that describe their truth conditions. An important point that has gone unnoticed so far is that …
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Fragments of First-Order Logic for Linguistic Structures
Abstract Logic has always played a central role in the study of natural language meaning. But logic can also be used to describe the structure of words and sentences. Recent research has revealed that these structures are so simple that they can be …
Adjuncts, Islands, Algebra (with a Sprinkling of Semantics)
Optimality Is Not a Race: Against a Performance-Based View of Reference-Set Computation
Abstract Reference-set constraints (RCs; also known as transderivational constraints) differ from standard well-formedness conditions in that for every tree, they compute a set of output candidates called its reference set and pick from said set the optimal candidate(s) according to some economy …
Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics: Where Do We Find Optimality?
Optimality Conditions Could Care Less About Optimality