WordNet is an on-line lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current

this paper, I will discuss four major topics relating to current research in lexical semantics: methodology, descriptive coverage, adequacy of the representation, and the computational usefulness of representations. In addressing these issues, I will discuss what I think are some of the central problems facing the lexical semantics community, and suggest ways of best approaching these issues. Then, I will provide a method for the decomposition of lexical categories and outline a theory of lexical semantics embodying a notion of cocompositionality and type coercion, as well as several levels of semantic description, where the semantic load is spread more evenly throughout the lexicon. I argue that lexical decomposition is possible if it is performed generatively. Rather than assuming a fixed set of primitives, I will assume a fixed number of generative devices that can be seen as constructing semantic expressions. I develop a theory of Qualia Structure, a representation language for lexical items, which renders much lexical ambiguity in the lexicon unnecessary, while still explaining the systematic polysemy that words carry. Finally, I discuss how individual lexical structures can be integrated into the larger lexical knowledge base through a theory of lexical inheritance. This provides us with the necessary principles of global organization for the lexicon, enabling us to fully integrate our natural language lexicon into a conceptual whole

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This paper presents results of the application to epistemic logic structures of the method proposed by Carnap for the development of logical foundations of probability theory. These results, which provide firm conceptual bases

Combining logics has become a rapidly expanding enterprise that is inspired mainly by concerns about modularity and the wish to join together tailored made logical tools into more powerful but still manageable ones. A natural

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Two-dimensional approaches to semantics, broadly understood, recognize two “dimensions ” of the meaning or content of linguistic items. On these approaches, expressions and their utterances are associated with two different sorts of semantic values, which play different explanatory roles. Typically, one semantic value is associated with reference and ordinary truth-conditions, while the other is associated with the way that reference and truth-conditions depend on the external world. The second sort of semantic value is often held to play a distinctive role in analyzing matters of cognitive significance and/or context-dependence. In this broad sense, even Frege’s theory of sense and reference might qualify as a sort of two-dimensional approach. More commonly, two-dimensional approaches are understood more narrowly to be a species of possible-worlds semantics, on which each dimension is understood in terms of possible worlds and related modal notions. In possible-world semantics, linguistic expressions and/or their utterances are first associated with an extension. The extension of a sentence is its truth-value: for example, the extension of ‘Plato was a philosopher ’ is true. The extension of a

Fibring is de ned as a mechanism for combining logics with a rstorder base, at both the semantic and deductive levels. A completeness theorem is established for a wide class of such logics, using a variation of the Henkin method that takes advantage of the presence of equality and inequality in the logic. As a corollary, completeness is shown to be preserved when bring logics in that class. A modal rst-order logic is obtained as a bring where neither the Barcan formula nor its converse hold.

In reports filed from several fronts in the semantics/pragmatics border wars, I seek to bolster the loyalist (neo-)Gricean forces against various recent revisionist sorties, including (but not limited to) the relevance-theoretic view on which the maxims (or more specifically their sole surviving descendant, the principle of relevance) inform truth-conditional content through the determination of “explicatures”, Levinson’s defense of implicatures serving as input to logical form, recent arguments by Mira Ariel for a semantic treatment of the upper bound (‘not all’) for propositions of the form Most F are G, and Chierchia’s proposal to reanalyze implicatures as part of compositional semantics. I argue for drawing the semantics/pragmatics boundary in a relatively traditional way, maintaining a constrained characterization of what is said, while adopting a variant of Kent Bach’s position on “impliciture” and supporting the Gricean conception of implicature as an aspect of speaker meaning, as opposed to its reconstruction in terms of default inference or utterance interpretation. I survey current controversies concerning the meaning and acquisition of disjunction and other scalar operators, the relation of subcontrariety and its implications for lexicalization, the nature of polarity licensing, and the innateness controversy. In each case, I seek to emphasize the signiÞcance of the generalizations that a (neo-)classical pragmatic approach enables us to capture. For some time, David Kaplan (cf. Kaplan 1978:223) has taken to harking nostalgically back to

Explaining how the meaning of words relate to the meaning of the utterance in which they are used is of utmost importance. The most common approaches view the meaning of an utterance as a composition of the meanings of it parts, which of course include the words used to construct the utterance. This approach is suc- cessful for entailments. However, similar approaches to explain the presuppositionai behaviour of utterances have for the most part failed. In this paper we describe the application of Default Logic to the representation and the generation of natural guage presuppositions. The view is taken that the presuppositions of an utterance are conjectures made by the hearer based upon the assumption that the speaker is following Grice's maxims of cooperative conversation. These conjectures represent information implicitly contained in the utterance which cannot be generated by classical techniques. The compositional framework is maintained. The difference is that functional units rather than predetermined semantic units are inherited by the meaning structure. The function's meaning changes depending on the contents of the meaning structure. Hence, we view the study of these functional units as lexical pragmatics rather than lexical semantics. Default Logic is one formal method for performing default reasoning in the area of Artificial Intelligence called Knowledge Representation. Default reasoning attempts to fill with conjectures the gaps left by classical forms of reasoning. We suggest that the use of non-classicai inferenc- ing techniques such as default reasoning will prove fruitful in the realm of lexical reasoning.