It is as widely agreed as anything in philosophy that some words – “I”, “she”, “that” – are context-sensitive, and it is as controversial as anything in philosophy whether some other words are – “knows” prominent among them. But what are we agreeing to when we agree that “I” is context-sensitive, and what are we disagreeing about when we disagree whether “knows” is? We all know an answer to this question: “I” is (and “knows” might be) context sensitive as a matter of its meaning ; it is semantically context-sensitive. But in the absence of further explanation, “semantics” and “meaning” are little more than labels for the problem: what does it mean to say that a word is semantically context sensitive? There are various kinds of answer to this and related questions in the literature: some rely on some pre-theoretical understanding of meaning – for example, what is said by an utterance of a sentence – claiming that a sentence is context sensitive just in case what is said by utterances of it varies depending on the situation in which the utterances are made; others say linguistics (hence semantics) is a branch of psychology, concerned with the operation of some bit of the human brain, so that semantics must be capturing some sort of psychological fact; according to others, semantics aims at characterizing certain linguistic conventions (and is thus perhaps closer to a branch of sociology); and of course there are other possibilities. This chapter surveys a range of views about the aim of semantics and the nature of semantic fact, with an eye toward connecting some relevant disputes about the nature of context and context-sensitivity. I begin by setting out some presuppositions of the discussion; subsequent sections focus on the various views of semantics and their consequences for our take on context sensitivity.

Logics and languages

What are We Doing When We Theorize about Context Sensitivity

In accordance with some hints found already in Peirce, Morris introduced the terms syntactics, (henceforth syntax), semantics and pragmatics to denote the three basic components of a semiotic, i.e. the description and theory of a certain system of signs. Syntax was to be the most abstract study of signs disregarding their denotata and use. Semantics was to be more concrete including both syntax and the study of denotation but not use. Pragmatics finally was to be the fullbodied study of language use including both syntax and semantics. To be historically more accurate, in Morris (1938) semantics was the study of relations between signs and objects and pragmatics the study of relations between signs and interpreters. In Morris (1946), however, semantics is the study of signification in all modes of signifying and pragmatics the study of the origin, use and effects of signs.

http://www.sskkii.gu.se/jens/publications/docs001-050/015.pdf

A Bird's Eye View of Pragmatics

Towards a unified theory of presupposition

Intelligent communication requires reading between the lines, which in turn, requires rich background knowledge about how the world works. However, learning unspoken commonsense knowledge from language is nontrivial, as people rarely state the obvious, e.g., “my house is bigger than me.” In this talk, I will discuss how we can recover the trivial everyday knowledge just from language without an embodied agent. A key insight is this: The implicit knowledge people share and assume systematically influences the way people use language, which provides indirect clues to reason about the world. For example, if “Jen entered her house”, it must be that her house is bigger than her. I will discuss how we can model a variety of aspects of knowledge – ranging from naive physics to connotation – adapting the representations of frame semantics.

Preface from the program chairs

This paper proposes a new model of machine translation. In this model, the lambda formula obtained from the syntactic and semantic analysis of a source language sentence is viewed as a target language generating function and the target language sentence is obtained as a result of evaluating the formula by functional application or λ-calculus. This model provides a systematic and powerful way of incorporating human knowledge on the languages. A prototype is constructed on the LISP system. The performance was tested for four sample texts taken from existing technical reports and computer manuals.

Logics and languages

Citations

What are We Doing When We Theorize about Context Sensitivity

A Bird's Eye View of Pragmatics

Towards a unified theory of presupposition

Preface from the program chairs

An English-Japanese machine translation system based on formal semantics of natural language

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