Pragmatic Aspects Of Scalar Modifiers

This dissertation will provide a new empirical perspective on the interface between semantics and pragmatics.

This volume examines the meaning of scalar modifiers - expressions such as more than, a bit, and much - from the standpoint of the interface between semantics and pragmatics. In natural language, scalar expressions such as comparatives, intensifiers, and minimizers are used for measuring an object or event at a semantic level. However, cross-linguistically scalar modifiers can often be used to express a range of subjective feelings or discourse pragmatic information at the level of conventional implicature (CI). For example, in English more than anything can signal the degree of importance of the given utterance, and in Japanese the minimizer chotto 'a bit' can weaken the degree of imposition of the speech act. In this book, Osamu Sawada draws on data from Japanese and a range of other languages to explore the dual-use phenomenon of scalar modifiers: he claims that although semantic scalar meanings and CI scalar meanings are logically different, the relationship between the two makes it crucial to examine them both together. The volume provides a new perspective on the semantic-pragmatics interface, and will be of interest to researchers and students of Japanese linguistics, semantics and pragmatics, and theoretical linguistics more generally.

This book constitutes extended, revised, and selected papers from the 13th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence supported by the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, JSAI-isAI 2021, held online in November 2021. The 26 full papers were carefully selected from 86 submissions. The papers are organized in the volume according to the following workshops: 15th International Workshop on Juris-Informatics, JURISIN 2021; 18th Workshop on Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics, LENLS 18, 5th International Workshop on SCIentific DOCument Analysis, SCI-DOCA 2021; Workshop on Artificial Affective (Kansei) Intelligence, KANSEI-AI 2021; 5th Workshop on Artificial Intelligence of and for Business, AI-Biz 2021.

Polarity (positive, negative) is one of the most fundamental concepts in the system of language and there are many expressions that are sensitive to polarity. For example, any in English and wh-mo in Japanese appear in negative contexts, but not in positive contexts. While previous studies have shown that polarity-sensitive expressions are a general phenomenon in languages, it has also become clear that there are variations in polarity-sensitive expressions. This volume explores the variations in polarity-sensitive expressions through comparisons between Japanese and other languages, such as English, German, Spanish, and Old Japanese, and examines the environments and contexts in which polarity-sensitive expressions occur, as well as the types of (cross-linguistic) variation allowed. The value of the present volume lies in its inclusion of research papers inquiring into various types of polarity-sensitive expressions, such as negative-, positive-, and discourse-sensitive polarity items as well as their variations. The research indicates new directions for the study of polarity-sensitive expressions in the fields of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics.

This volume is the first to explore the formal linguistic expressions of emotions at different levels of linguistic complexity. Research on the language-emotion interface has to date concentrated primarily on the conceptual dimension of emotions as expressed via language, with semantic and pragmatic studies dominating the field. The chapters in this book, in contrast, bring together work from different linguistic frameworks: generative syntax, functional and usage-based linguistics, formal semantics and pragmatics, and experimental phonology. The volume contributes to the growing field of research that explores the interaction between linguistic expressions and the 'expressive dimension' of language, and will be of interest to linguists from a range of theoretical backgrounds who are interested in the language-emotion interface.

This book constitutes extended, revised and selected papers from the 11th International Symposium of Artificial Intelligence supported by the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, JSAI-isAI 2019. It was held in November 2019 in Yokohama, Japan. The 26 papers were carefully selected from 46 submissions and deal with topics of AI research and are organized into 4 sections, according to the 4 workshops: JURISIN 2019, AI-Biz 2019, LENLS 16, and Kansei-AI 2019.

An accessible guide to the linguistic semantics of adjectives, adverbs, gradability, vagueness, comparatives, and modification more generally.

This book investigates the morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of language, and the interactions between them, from the perspective of Optimality Theory. It integrates optimization processes into the formal and functional study of grammar, interpreting optimization as the result of conflicting, violable ranked constraints. Unlike previous work on the topic, this book also takes into account the question of directionality of grammar. A model of grammar in which optimization processes interact bidirectionally allows both language generation-the process of selecting the optimal form of a given meaning-and language interpretation-the process of optimal interpretation of a given form-to be taken into account. Chapters in this volume explore the consequences of both symmetric (unidirectional) and asymmetric (bidirectional) versions of Optimality Theory, investigating the syntax-semantics interface, first language acquisition, and sequential bilingual grammars. The volume presents cutting edge research in Optimality-Theoretic syntax and semantics, as well as demonstrating how optimization processes as modelled in this formalism serve as a viable approach for linguists and scholars in related fields.