Database Reference
In-Depth Information
(i) semantic relations graph (SRG)
(iii)
numbered arcs graph (NAG)
kiss
a.
kiss
b.
kiss
1
8
3
2
6
8
1
7
man
woman
man
woman
man
woman
2
5
4
7
love
love
love
4
6
5
3
(woman)/ça
(woman)/ça
(woman)/ça
(ii)
signature
V
N
(N)
(iv)
surface realization
a.
1
2
3
4−5−6
7
8
.
V
The_man
who_loves
her
kissed
the_woman
b.
1
2
3
4
5
6−7−8
.
N
The_woman
was_kissed
by_the_man
who_loves
her
The ambiguous nodes in NAGs (iii) (a) and (b) are represented by (woman)/ça .
Of the four variants, the LH' constellation (1) has drawn the most interest in
the abundant literature on coreferential pronouns. One example, symptomatic
of Truth-Conditional Semantics, is the so-called “Donkey sentence:”
11.5.4 T HE D ONKEY SENTENCE
Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.
The seemingly most natural translation into a formula of Truth-Conditional
Semantics (i.e., predicate calculus used for the analysis of natural language
meaning) is the following:
11.5.5 Q UANTIFIER STRUCTURE ATTRIBUTED TO A D ONKEY SENTENCE
x [[farmer(x)
∧∃
y [donkey(y)
own(x,y)]
beat(x,y)]
Unfortunately, the y in beat(x,y) is not in the scope of the quantifier
y bind-
ing donkey(y) in the subordinate clause, as pointed out by Geach (1969). 6
6 Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) by Kamp (cf. Kamp 1981, Kamp and Reyle 1993, Geurts
2002) originated as an attempt to resolve this well-know problem of Truth-Conditional Semantics.
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search