The general slogan in the title of this paper (which is taken from Strawson 1952, 57) gives a general, but nevertheless accurate, expression of Strawson’s view concerning the nature of formal logic per se in relation to natural language. What is at stake here is the extent to which the formal methods and the formal semantics of contemporary symbolic logic can render the meanings of natural language expressions. Strawson sets up an agenda for logical theory which, although rather dated for a logic text, is what one naturally expects from an introduction to elementary formal logic and a systematic analysis of certain crucial metalogical concepts, most notably entailment. However, my own reading is that Strawson’s approach to logic makes a lasting contribution to understanding the inner workings of natural language through his critical discussion of the limits of the formal renderings of the semantics of natural language expressions via canonical first-order notations. One can recognize in this critical attitude towards the limits of formal methods a consistent generalization of Strawson’s own strategy from his critical response to Russell’s theory of descriptions.In my paper I shall focus on certain examples which illustrate the general slogan that characterizes Strawson’s views on the nature of logic in connection with ordinary language and talk., Obecný slogan v názvu tohoto článku (který je převzat ze Strawson 1952, 57) dává obecný, ale přesto přesný, vyjádření Strawsonova pohledu na povahu formální logiky per se ve vztahu k přirozenému jazyku. V sázce je zde míra, do jaké formální metody a formální sémantika současné symbolické logiky mohou učinit význam výrazů přirozeného jazyka. Strawson sestavuje agendu pro logickou teorii, která, i když je spíše logická, je to, co člověk přirozeně očekává od úvodu k základní formální logice a systematické analýze určitých klíčových metalogických pojmů, zejména z hlediska jejich významu. Nicméně, mé vlastní čtení je, že Strawsonův přístup k logice je trvalým příspěvkem k pochopení vnitřního fungování přirozeného jazyka jeho kritickou diskusí o mezích formálního vykreslování sémantiky výrazů přirozeného jazyka prostřednictvím kanonických zápisů prvního řádu. V tomto kritickém postoji k hranicím formálních metod lze rozpoznat důsledné zobecnění Strawsonovy vlastní strategie z jeho kritické reakce na Russellovu teorii popisu.Ve svém příspěvku se zaměřím na některé příklady, které ilustrují obecný slogan, který charakterizuje Strawsonovy názory na povahu logiky ve spojení s běžným jazykem a mluvením., and Mircea Dumitru
The valency lexicon PDT-Vallex has been built in close connection with the annotation of the Prague Dependency Treebank project (PDT) and its successors (mainly the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank project, PCEDT). It contains over 11000 valency frames for more than 7000 verbs which occurred in the PDT or PCEDT. It is available in electronically processable format (XML) together with the aforementioned treebanks (to be viewed and edited by TrEd, the PDT/PCEDT main annotation tool), and also in more human readable form including corpus examples (see the WEBSITE link below). The main feature of the lexicon is its linking to the annotated corpora - each occurrence of each verb is linked to the appropriate valency frame with additional (generalized) information about its usage and surface morphosyntactic form alternatives.
This essay deals with the relationship between philosophy of law and philosophy of language. The author closely follows the discussion concerning the determination of the content of the law which has been remarked by current semantics and pragmatics in philosophy of language. According to a view that has considerable currency at present, philosophy of language and linguistics have a direct bearing on the content of the law. The general outlook of this view - the communicative-content theory of law (the communication theory) can be captured in the following way. Legal texts are linguistic texts, so the meaning or content of a legal text is an instance of linguistic meaning generally. It therefore stands to reason that, in order to understand the meaning of an authoritative legal text or utterance, such as a statute or regulation, we should look to our best theories about language and communication., Tato esej pojednává o vztahu mezi filozofií práva a filosofií jazyka. Autorka úzce navazuje na diskusi o vymezení obsahu zákona, která byla v současné době sémantikou a pragmatikou ve filosofii jazyka poznamenána. Podle názoru, který má v současné době značnou měnu, má filosofie jazyka a lingvistiky přímý vliv na obsah zákona. Obecná perspektiva tohoto pohledu - teorie komunikativního obsahu práva ( teorie komunikace) lze zachytit následujícím způsobem. Právní texty jsou lingvistické texty, takže význam nebo obsah právního textu je obecně známkou lingvistického významu. Proto je rozumné, abychom pochopili význam autoritativního právního textu nebo projevu, jako je zákon nebo nařízení, a měli bychom se zaměřit na naše nejlepší teorie o jazyce a komunikaci., and Marek Neština
The Prague Dependency Treebank 3.5 is the 2018 edition of the core Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT). It contains all PDT annotation made at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics under various projects between 1996 and 2018 on the original texts, i.e., all annotation from PDT 1.0, PDT 2.0, PDT 2.5, PDT 3.0, PDiT 1.0 and PDiT 2.0, plus corrections, new structure of basic documentation and new list of authors covering all previous editions. The Prague Dependency Treebank 3.5 (PDT 3.5) contains the same texts as the previous versions since 2.0; there are 49,431 annotated sentences (832,823 words) on all layers, from tectogrammatical annotation to syntax to morphology. There are additional annotated sentences for syntax and morphology; the totals for the lower layers of annotation are: 87,913 sentences with 1,502,976 words at the analytical layer (surface dependency syntax) and 115,844 sentences with 1,956,693 words at the morphological layer of annotation (these totals include the annotation with the higher layers annotated as well). Closely linked to the tectogrammatical layer is the annotation of sentence information structure, multiword expressions, coreference, bridging relations and discourse relations.
The aim of this paper is to consider a possibility of understanding assertibility as a semantic concept. This leads to a nonstandard view of the relation and borderline between semantics and pragmatics. For the language of classical propositional logic entailment will be defined as a relation which preserves assertibility rather than truth and it will be shown that this enables us to model some linguistic phenomena in an adequate way., Cílem příspěvku je zvážit možnost pochopení asertivity jako sémantického konceptu. To vede k nestandardnímu pohledu na vztah a hranici mezi sémantikou a pragmatikou. Pro jazyk klasické výrokové logiky bude definice definována jako vztah, který zachovává spíše asertivitu než pravdu a bude ukázáno, že to nám umožňuje adekvátně modelovat některé jazykové jevy., and Vít Punčochář
Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophical system joins issues that have often been regarded as incompatible or at least in mutual tension. Two of these are his holistic approach to language and knowledge on the one hand and his realism on the other hand. In my paper I first outline this tension and then present a number of steps, including the rejection of semantic relations, picturing and the defense of realism, which can help us to accommodate it. I highlight the payoff of these steps for the question to be solved. In the last part of the paper I detect new and more refined tensions revealed by Sellars’ solution. I identify possible dissonances between his Kantian and his naturalist treatment of causality as well as between his two ways of conceiving of language arguing that these new questions furnish a more interesting approach to our initial problem., Filozofický systém Wilfrida Sellara spojuje otázky, které jsou často považovány za neslučitelné nebo alespoň ve vzájemném napětí. Dva z nich jsou jeho holistický přístup k jazyku a znalostem na jedné straně a jeho realismus na straně druhé. Ve svém příspěvku nejprve nastiňuji toto napětí a pak představuji řadu kroků, včetně odmítnutí sémantických vztahů, zobrazování a obrany realismu, které nám mohou pomoci vstříc. Zdůrazňuji výplatu těchto kroků za otázku, která má být vyřešena. V poslední části práce zjišťuji nová a rafinovanější napětí, která odhalila Sellarsova řešení. Identifikuji možné disonance mezi jeho kantiánskou a jeho naturalistickou léčbou kauzality, stejně jako mezi jeho dvěma způsoby chápání jazyka argumentující, že tyto nové otázky poskytují zajímavější přístup k našemu počátečnímu problému., and Stefanie Dach
Slurs are pejorative expressions that derogate individuals or groups on the basis of their gender, race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation and so forth. In the constantly growing literature on slurs, it has become customary to appeal to so-called “neutral counterparts” for explaining the extension and truth-conditional content of slurring terms. More precisely, it is commonly assumed that every slur shares its extension and literal content with a non-evaluative counterpart term. I think this assumption is unwarranted and, in this paper, I shall present two arguments against it. (i) A careful comparison of slurs with complex or thick group-referencing pejoratives lacking neutral counterparts shows that these are in fact very hard to distinguish. (ii) Slurs lack the referential stability of their alleged neutral counterparts, which suggests that they are not coreferential. Developing (ii) will involve introducing a new concept which I regard as essential for understanding how slurs behave in natural language: referential flexibility. I shall support my claims by looking at historical and current ways in which slurs and other pejorative terms are used, and I shall argue that both etymological data and new empirical data support the conclusion that the assumption of neutral counterparts not only is unwarranted but obscures our understanding of what slurs are, and what speakers do with them.
Contextual word prominence in a text is a consequence of the functional relationship between word frequency and text segmentation. This probabilistic function is formalized in quantitative linguistics as Menzerath-Altmann´s law. When this law is applied not only to a text as a whole, but also to individual lexical units which, within contextual boundaries, are transformed into word forms, two contextual levels are formed from each text structure: a segmental and a textual level. On these two levels, the interaction between words can be characterized as the semantic specification of the lexical units. The contextual characteristics of individual words are defined as their contextual weights. The maximum value of this variable, proper to a given frequency, belongs to a set that forms a Menzerathian curve, i.e. a curve that complies with the basic principle of text structures. This curve can be treated as a semantic attractor.
The verbo-nominal syntagmas in Hindī represent multi-word naming units of action, process or state. They are developed from some more complex syntactic structures also including other functional words (postpositions and postpositional phrases, adverbs etc.). As condensed structures/formations they include a noun or an adjective and a functional verb. There is a set of verbs, which lost their original meaning (light verbs) and have a verbalizing function. The VNS-es as naming units in their semantic structure and development include several types. As literal VNS-es they are easily comprehensible, since the nominal and the verbal constituents signalize the meaning of the syntagma sufficiently clearly. In other types of VNS-es at least one constituent shifts its original meaning and different types or stages of metaphoric and idiomatic syntagmas arise. The metaphor is a poetic and stylistic figure; nevertheless many metaphors become semantic units denoting verbal action/process/state.