
Taking Scope
The Natural Semantics of Quantifiers
Mark Steedman(Author)
MIT Press
Published on 20. January 2012
Book
Hardback
324 pages
978-0-262-01707-7 (ISBN)
Description
A novel view of the syntax and semantics of quantifier scope that argues for a "combinatory" theory of natural language syntax.In Taking Scope, Mark Steedman considers the syntax and semantics of quantifier scope in interaction with negation, polarity, coordination, and pronominal binding, among other constructions. The semantics is "surface compositional," in that there is a direct correspondence between syntactic types and operations of composition and types and compositions at the level of logical form. In that sense, the semantics is in the "natural logic" tradition of Aristotle, Leibniz, Frege, Russell, and others who sought to define a psychologically real logic directly reflecting natural language grammar.The book reunites the generative-transformational tradition initiated by Chomsky-which views the formal syntactic component as entirely autonomous--with the older, strongly lexicalist, construction-based tradition, which has sought to define a more lingistically transparent theory of meaning representation. Steedman offers a logical formalism that relates directly to the surface form of language and to the process of inference and proof that it must support. Such a natural logic, although formal by definition, should be allowed to grow organically from attested language phenomena rather than be axiomatized a priori in terms of any standard logic. Steedman also considers the application of natural semantic interpretations to practical natural language processing tasks, emphasizing throughout the elimination of traditional quantifiers from semantic formalism in favor of devices such as Skolem terms and structure-sharing among representations in processing.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge, Mass.
United States
Publishing group
MIT Press Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Interest Age: From 18 years
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
11 s/w Abbildungen
11 b&w illus.
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
590 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-262-01707-7 (9780262017077)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Mark Steedman is Professor of Cognitive Science in the Division of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Surface Structure and Interpretation (1996) and The Syntactic Process (2000), both published by the MIT Press.