Type-shifting: four categories - HAL-SHS - Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société Accéder directement au contenu
Pré-Publication, Document De Travail Année : 2018

Type-shifting: four categories

Résumé

In formal semantics of natural languages, lexical items are considered to have types. For example, Euclid's Elements is of type Book or of type e (i.e. individuals). Whether a given type assignment is universal, that is whether the type assignment works in all felicitous contexts or not affords four possible answers. Either type assignments are universal or not, and then if they are, either they have a complex structure which accommodates all senses of the corresponding lexical items, or they are atomic types meaning that when the context changes, we have a different lexical entry. If the types are not universal, then the family of types assigned to a lexical item are either systematically related or not. If the notion that lexical items have types has an objective reality, then only one of these four possibilities is real. In this paper, we explore these four possibilities and examine some of the main approaches in the literature in view of these four categories. This categorization aims at giving a big picture of the issue of type-shifting, this time shaped around a different characterization; we want to see how the approaches are similar or different in their essential visions toward the phenomena of type-shifting. In type theoretical approaches to formal semantics of natural languages, a lexical item in a sentence is assigned a type and using a number of composition rules and based on the syntactic structure of the sentence, the types compose to converge to a single type called t, the semantic type for sentences, together with a statement specifying the conditions under which the sentence is true. For example consider the example (1-a) below (1) a. Every linguist offended Fred. b. Fred offended every linguist. The syntactic structure of the sentence, its type assignments and the compositions are as follows(we omit the obvious truth conditions since it does not concern our discussion of type shifting): (2) t DP < et, t > < et, < et, t >> every < e, t > linguist < e, t > V < e, et > offended NP e N e Fred So the above type system correctly predicts that the example (1-a) is semantically interpretable. Consider the word every which has been assigned the type . We say the type is a locally correct type for the word every since this type assignment gives the expected result for a context, namely example (1-a). We call a type assignment, a 1
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
type-shifting.pdf (839.89 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
Loading...

Dates et versions

hal-01728738 , version 1 (12-03-2018)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-01728738 , version 1

Citer

Hamidreza Indiana University Bahramian. Type-shifting: four categories. 2018. ⟨hal-01728738⟩
40 Consultations
82 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More