tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Negative Polarity Licensing at the Syntax-Semantics Interface"

Recent work on the syntax-semantics interface (see . (Dalrymple et al., 1994)) uses a fragment of linear logic as a 'glue language' for assembling meanings compositionally. This paper presents a glue language account of how negative polarity items (. ever, any) get licensed within the scope of negative or downward-entailing contexts (Ladusaw, 1979), . Nobody ever left. This treatment of licensing operates precisely at the syntax-semantics interface, since it is carried out entirely within the interface glue language (linear logic). . | Negative Polarity Licensing at the Syntax-Semantics Interface John Fry Stanford University and Xerox PARC Dept of Linguistics Stanford University Stanford CA 94305-2150 USA Abstract Recent work on the syntax-semantics interface see . Dalrymple et al. 1994 uses a fragment of linear logic as a glue language for assembling meanings compositionally. This paper presents a glue language account of how negative polarity items . ever any get licensed within the scope of negative or downward-entailing contexts Ladusaw 1979 . Nobody ever left. This treatment of licensing operates precisely at the syntax-semantics interface since it is carried out entirely within the interface glue language linear logic . In addition to the account of negative polarity licensing we show in detail how linear-logic proof nets Girard 1987 Gallier 1992 can be used for efficient meaning deduction within this glue language framework. 1 Background A recent strain of research on the interface between syntax and semantics starting with Dalrymple et al. 1993 uses a fragment of linear logic as a glue language for assembling the meaning of a sentence compositionally. In this approach meaning assembly is guided not by a syntactic constituent tree but rather by the flatter functional structure the LFG f-structure of the sentence. As a brief review of this approach consider sentence 1 1 Everyone left. PRED SUBJ LEAVE g pRED everyone Each word in the sentence is associated with a meaning constructor template specified in the lex icon these meaning constructors are then instantiated with values from the f-structure. For sentence 1 this produces two premises of the linear logic glue language everyone gơ ex-o H tS x o H t every person S left X o leave X In the everyone premise the higher-order variable s ranges over the possible scope meanings of the quantifier with lower-case X acting as a traditional first-order variable placeholder within the scope. H ranges over LFG structures