Framing, the effect of context on cognitive processes, is a prominent topic of research in psycho... more Framing, the effect of context on cognitive processes, is a prominent topic of research in psychology and public opinion research. Research on framing has traditionally relied on controlled experiments and manually annotated document collections. In this paper we present a method that allows for quantifying the relative strengths of competing linguistic frames based on corpus analysis. This method requires little human intervention and can therefore be efficiently applied to large bodies of text. We demonstrate its effectiveness by tracking changes in the framing of terror over time and comparing the framing of abortion by Democrats and Republicans in the U.S.
Framing, the effect of context on cognitive processes, is a prominent topic of research in psycho... more Framing, the effect of context on cognitive processes, is a prominent topic of research in psychology and public opinion research. Research on framing has traditionally relied on controlled experiments and manually annotated document collections. In this paper we present a method that allows for quantifying the relative strengths of competing linguistic frames based on corpus analysis. This method requires little human intervention and can therefore be efficiently applied to large bodies of text. We demonstrate its effectiveness by tracking changes in the framing of terror over time and comparing the framing of abortion by Democrats and Republicans in the U.S.
Research in historical semantics relies on the examination, selection, and interpretation of text... more Research in historical semantics relies on the examination, selection, and interpretation of texts from corpora. Changes in meaning are tracked through the collection and careful inspection of examples that span decades and centuries. This process is inextricably tied to the researcher"s expertise and familiarity with the corpus. Consequently, the results tend to be difficult to quantify and put on an objective footing, and "big-picture" changes in the vocabulary other than the specific ones under investigation may be hard to keep track of. In this paper we present a method that uses Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer, Foltz & Laham, 1998) to automatically track and identify semantic changes across a corpus. This method can take the entire corpus into account when tracing changes in the use of words and phrases, thus potentially allowing researchers to observe the larger context in which these changes occurred, while at the same time considerably reducing the amount of work required. Moreover, because this measure relies on readily observable co-occurrence data, it affords the study of semantic change a measure of objectivity that was previously difficult to attain. In this paper we describe our method and demonstrate its potential by applying it to several well-known examples of semantic change in the history of the English language.
... In these cases the latter, hypothetical reading can be forced by adding the the sentential ad... more ... In these cases the latter, hypothetical reading can be forced by adding the the sentential adverb 'moshi' to the antecedent, which may be translated roughly as 'assuming that' or 'in the event that'. Sentence (4) is unambiguously hypothetical: ...
Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Computational Linguistics -, 1999
Collocational word similarity is considered a source of text cohesion that is hard to measure and... more Collocational word similarity is considered a source of text cohesion that is hard to measure and quantify. The work presented here explores the use of information from a training corpus in measuring word similarity and evaluates the method in the text segmentation task. An implementation, the VecTile system, produces similarity curves over texts using pre-compiled vector representations of the contextual behavior of words. The performance of this system is shown to improve over that of the purely string-based TextTiling algorithm (Hearst, 1997).
This paper proposes an account of the interpretation of 'only' in the antecedents of indi... more This paper proposes an account of the interpretation of 'only' in the antecedents of indicative conditionals. Our concern lies with the implication from a conditional of the form if (only φ), ψ to its 'only' -less counterpart if φ, ψ: when and why it is warranted. We argue that the pragmatic relationship of scalar upward monotonicity determines its availability. Two factors serve as license. First, it may arise by virtue of a language user's pre-existing world knowledge. Second, it may manifest when it constitutes the most informative reading of the conditional available. We discuss one case in point; namely, its appearance when the consequent is desirable.
Similarity in contextual behavior between words is considered a source of "lexical cohesion," whi... more Similarity in contextual behavior between words is considered a source of "lexical cohesion," which is otherwise hard to measure or quantify. Such contextual similarity is used by an implementation for text segmentation, the VecTile system, which uses precompiled vector representations of words to produce similarity curves over texts. The performance of this system is shown to improve over that of the TextTiling algorithm of Hearst (1997).
In the literature on modality and conditionals, the Limit Assumption is routinely invoked to ensu... more In the literature on modality and conditionals, the Limit Assumption is routinely invoked to ensure that a simple definition of necessity (truth at all minimal worlds) can safely be substituted for a more complicated one (cf. Lewis's and Kratzer's definitions involving multiple layers of quantification). The Limit Assumption itself was formulated by David Lewis in 1973 and 1981, and while its plausibility has at times been debated on philosophical grounds, its content is rarely questioned. I show that there is in fact no single "correct" Limit Assumption: which one is right depends on structural properties of the model and the intended notion of necessity. The version that is most widely appealed to in the linguistic literature turns out to be incorrect for its intended purpose. The source of the confusion can be traced back to Lewis himself.
Kratzer (1981) discussed a naıve premise semantics of counterfactual conditionals, pointed to an ... more Kratzer (1981) discussed a naıve premise semantics of counterfactual conditionals, pointed to an empirical inadequacy of this interpretation, and presented a modification-partition semantics-which Lewis (1981) proved equivalent to Pollock's (1976) version of his ordering semantics. Subsequently, Kratzer (1989) proposed lumping semantics, a different modification of premise semantics, and argued it remedies empirical failings of ordering semantics as well as of naïve premise semantics. We show that lumping semantics yields truth conditions for counterfactuals that are not only different from what she claims they are, but also inferior to those of the earlier versions of premise semantics.
This chapter presents a survey of the most important features of the formal semantic analysis of ... more This chapter presents a survey of the most important features of the formal semantic analysis of modality and mood. It first focuses on modality as exemplified by the modal verbs, presenting the main concepts and introducing the most common basic formal apparatus used in its analysis, and surveying some of the issues that are currently central in the field. The chapter then turns to the treatment of mood, discussing formal semantic treatments of both “sentential mood” and “verbal mood”. The last part of the chapter addresses the issue of modal subordination. The chapter aims to give a sense of the major phenomena and theoretical approaches, as well as introduce the primary literature.
The German discourse particles ‘ja’ and ‘doch’ both mark the information expressed by their host ... more The German discourse particles ‘ja’ and ‘doch’ both mark the information expressed by their host sentence as somehow given, obvious, or uncontroversial (McCready & Zimmermann 2011 call them ‘epistemic particles’). Two things are puzzling: (i) despite its ‘epistemic’ nature, ‘doch’ can appear in imperatives and with performative modals; (ii) despite their similarity, ‘ja’ is unacceptable in imperatives and forces a descriptive reading of modal verbs. We explain (i) by assuming that the performativity of modalized propositions depends on certain contextual constellations which may conflict with constraints imposed by the particles. To account for (ii), we offer an analysis for ‘ja’ and ‘doch’ that explains the inviolable ban against ‘ja’ (but not ‘doch’) from performative modal contexts in terms of defeasible inferences about the context.
Framing, the effect of context on cognitive processes, is a prominent topic of research in psycho... more Framing, the effect of context on cognitive processes, is a prominent topic of research in psychology and public opinion research. Research on framing has traditionally relied on controlled experiments and manually annotated document collections. In this paper we present a method that allows for quantifying the relative strengths of competing linguistic frames based on corpus analysis. This method requires little human intervention and can therefore be efficiently applied to large bodies of text. We demonstrate its effectiveness by tracking changes in the framing of terror over time and comparing the framing of abortion by Democrats and Republicans in the U.S.
Framing, the effect of context on cognitive processes, is a prominent topic of research in psycho... more Framing, the effect of context on cognitive processes, is a prominent topic of research in psychology and public opinion research. Research on framing has traditionally relied on controlled experiments and manually annotated document collections. In this paper we present a method that allows for quantifying the relative strengths of competing linguistic frames based on corpus analysis. This method requires little human intervention and can therefore be efficiently applied to large bodies of text. We demonstrate its effectiveness by tracking changes in the framing of terror over time and comparing the framing of abortion by Democrats and Republicans in the U.S.
Research in historical semantics relies on the examination, selection, and interpretation of text... more Research in historical semantics relies on the examination, selection, and interpretation of texts from corpora. Changes in meaning are tracked through the collection and careful inspection of examples that span decades and centuries. This process is inextricably tied to the researcher"s expertise and familiarity with the corpus. Consequently, the results tend to be difficult to quantify and put on an objective footing, and "big-picture" changes in the vocabulary other than the specific ones under investigation may be hard to keep track of. In this paper we present a method that uses Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer, Foltz & Laham, 1998) to automatically track and identify semantic changes across a corpus. This method can take the entire corpus into account when tracing changes in the use of words and phrases, thus potentially allowing researchers to observe the larger context in which these changes occurred, while at the same time considerably reducing the amount of work required. Moreover, because this measure relies on readily observable co-occurrence data, it affords the study of semantic change a measure of objectivity that was previously difficult to attain. In this paper we describe our method and demonstrate its potential by applying it to several well-known examples of semantic change in the history of the English language.
... In these cases the latter, hypothetical reading can be forced by adding the the sentential ad... more ... In these cases the latter, hypothetical reading can be forced by adding the the sentential adverb 'moshi' to the antecedent, which may be translated roughly as 'assuming that' or 'in the event that'. Sentence (4) is unambiguously hypothetical: ...
Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Computational Linguistics -, 1999
Collocational word similarity is considered a source of text cohesion that is hard to measure and... more Collocational word similarity is considered a source of text cohesion that is hard to measure and quantify. The work presented here explores the use of information from a training corpus in measuring word similarity and evaluates the method in the text segmentation task. An implementation, the VecTile system, produces similarity curves over texts using pre-compiled vector representations of the contextual behavior of words. The performance of this system is shown to improve over that of the purely string-based TextTiling algorithm (Hearst, 1997).
This paper proposes an account of the interpretation of 'only' in the antecedents of indi... more This paper proposes an account of the interpretation of 'only' in the antecedents of indicative conditionals. Our concern lies with the implication from a conditional of the form if (only φ), ψ to its 'only' -less counterpart if φ, ψ: when and why it is warranted. We argue that the pragmatic relationship of scalar upward monotonicity determines its availability. Two factors serve as license. First, it may arise by virtue of a language user's pre-existing world knowledge. Second, it may manifest when it constitutes the most informative reading of the conditional available. We discuss one case in point; namely, its appearance when the consequent is desirable.
Similarity in contextual behavior between words is considered a source of "lexical cohesion," whi... more Similarity in contextual behavior between words is considered a source of "lexical cohesion," which is otherwise hard to measure or quantify. Such contextual similarity is used by an implementation for text segmentation, the VecTile system, which uses precompiled vector representations of words to produce similarity curves over texts. The performance of this system is shown to improve over that of the TextTiling algorithm of Hearst (1997).
In the literature on modality and conditionals, the Limit Assumption is routinely invoked to ensu... more In the literature on modality and conditionals, the Limit Assumption is routinely invoked to ensure that a simple definition of necessity (truth at all minimal worlds) can safely be substituted for a more complicated one (cf. Lewis's and Kratzer's definitions involving multiple layers of quantification). The Limit Assumption itself was formulated by David Lewis in 1973 and 1981, and while its plausibility has at times been debated on philosophical grounds, its content is rarely questioned. I show that there is in fact no single "correct" Limit Assumption: which one is right depends on structural properties of the model and the intended notion of necessity. The version that is most widely appealed to in the linguistic literature turns out to be incorrect for its intended purpose. The source of the confusion can be traced back to Lewis himself.
Kratzer (1981) discussed a naıve premise semantics of counterfactual conditionals, pointed to an ... more Kratzer (1981) discussed a naıve premise semantics of counterfactual conditionals, pointed to an empirical inadequacy of this interpretation, and presented a modification-partition semantics-which Lewis (1981) proved equivalent to Pollock's (1976) version of his ordering semantics. Subsequently, Kratzer (1989) proposed lumping semantics, a different modification of premise semantics, and argued it remedies empirical failings of ordering semantics as well as of naïve premise semantics. We show that lumping semantics yields truth conditions for counterfactuals that are not only different from what she claims they are, but also inferior to those of the earlier versions of premise semantics.
This chapter presents a survey of the most important features of the formal semantic analysis of ... more This chapter presents a survey of the most important features of the formal semantic analysis of modality and mood. It first focuses on modality as exemplified by the modal verbs, presenting the main concepts and introducing the most common basic formal apparatus used in its analysis, and surveying some of the issues that are currently central in the field. The chapter then turns to the treatment of mood, discussing formal semantic treatments of both “sentential mood” and “verbal mood”. The last part of the chapter addresses the issue of modal subordination. The chapter aims to give a sense of the major phenomena and theoretical approaches, as well as introduce the primary literature.
The German discourse particles ‘ja’ and ‘doch’ both mark the information expressed by their host ... more The German discourse particles ‘ja’ and ‘doch’ both mark the information expressed by their host sentence as somehow given, obvious, or uncontroversial (McCready & Zimmermann 2011 call them ‘epistemic particles’). Two things are puzzling: (i) despite its ‘epistemic’ nature, ‘doch’ can appear in imperatives and with performative modals; (ii) despite their similarity, ‘ja’ is unacceptable in imperatives and forces a descriptive reading of modal verbs. We explain (i) by assuming that the performativity of modalized propositions depends on certain contextual constellations which may conflict with constraints imposed by the particles. To account for (ii), we offer an analysis for ‘ja’ and ‘doch’ that explains the inviolable ban against ‘ja’ (but not ‘doch’) from performative modal contexts in terms of defeasible inferences about the context.
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