Type-logical semantics
Towards abstract categorial grammars
ACL '01 Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
A logic for easy linking semantics
Proceedings of the 17th Amsterdam colloquium conference on Logic, language and meaning
Implicit arguments: event modification or option type categories?
AC'11 Proceedings of the 18th Amsterdam colloquim conference on Logic, Language and Meaning
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Common versions of event semantics do not naturally explain the obligatory narrow scope of existential quantification over events, or the typically event-oriented modification by adverbials. We argue that these linguistic properties reflect a distinction between overt arguments and purely semantic slots like the event argument. The distinction is naturally captured in Abstract Categorial Grammar (ACG) [1, 2, 3, 4], which manipulates pairs of forms and meanings, a.k.a. linguistic signs. The sign's pheno-type defines syntactic arguments and the sign's semantic type standardly defines semantic arguments. Both these concrete types are standardly derived by induction on the structure of one abstract type (category) of the sign, by assigning pheno-level and semantic types to basic abstract types. We assume that semantic event arguments are only introduced by the (basic) result type of the verb's abstract type, whose pheno-level type is standardly a string. Consequently semantic event arguments lack a correlate in the verb's pheno-type. Both narrow-scope existential quantification over events and the orientation of event modifiers follow rigorously from this assumption. Based on this architecture, we develop simple accounts of adverbial modification, nominalization and passive constructions in an ACG fragment.