Ambiguities in Natural Language and Time References

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F61989100%3A27240%2F19%3A10243001" target="_blank" >RIV/61989100:27240/19:10243001 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://books.google.cz/books?id=3qTBDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA28&hl=cs&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank" >https://books.google.cz/books?id=3qTBDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA28&hl=cs&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Ambiguities in Natural Language and Time References

Original language description

There are many ambiguities in natural language that make its processing and analysing rather difficult. This issue has much in common with the difference between topic and focus articula-tion within a sentence and with ambiguity of terms occurring with de dicto or de re supposition. While in our theory there is no reference shift and unambiguous terms denote one and the same entity independently of a context, they vary in the way this entity is used. Moreover, I find that whereas articulating the topic of a sentence activates a presupposition, articulating the focus fre-quently yields merely an entailment. A presupposition P of a sentence S is entailed by the posi-tive as well as negated form of S. Hence, if P is not true the proposition S has a truth-value gap. The difference between a presupposition and mere entailment is substantial, because one and the same sentence can have two or more non-equivalent readings due to different topic-focus articulations. Another ambiguity that I am going to deal with is related to sentences in past or future with a reference time when this or that happened or will happen. Such sentences come with a presupposition that the time of evaluation is in a proper relation to the reference time. Furthermore, it can be undetermined whether definite descriptions refer to their holder in time t of evaluation or in time t&apos; belonging to the reference time interval. Logic cannot disambiguate a sentence, of course. This is a pragmatic issue. Yet, logic can con-tribute to disambiguating and our better mutual understanding by making all these hidden fea-tures explicit and logically tractable. My background theory is Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL). TIL is an expressive logic apt for the analysis of sentences with presuppositions, because in TIL we work with partial functions, in particular propositions with truth-value gaps. Moreo-ver, procedural semantics of TIL makes it possible to explicitly formalize different readings of a sentence in the form of fine-grained structured procedures encoded by these variants. In this way almost all the semantically salient features are decoded so that we can deal with them and derive relevant consequences of them.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

<a href="/en/project/GA18-23891S" target="_blank" >GA18-23891S: Hyperintensional Reasoning over Natural Language Texts</a><br>

Continuities

P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)

Publication year

2019

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Slavonic Natural Language Processing in the 21st Century

ISBN

978-80-263-1545-2

Number of pages of the result

23

Pages from-to

28-50

Number of pages of the book

249

Publisher name

Tribun EU

Place of publication

Brno

UT code for WoS chapter

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