Characters and Character States

This chapter examines the theory and methods that allow systematists to recognize characters, character states, and the taxa they delimit. In systematics, similarity is a relative relation that exists among at least three things. For a given attribute, two things are more similar to one another than either of them is to a third thing, and when multiple attributes are assessed together, the nested degrees of similarity across the range of attributes provide evidence for hypothesizing phylogenetic relationships. Yet things can be similar in one aspect but not similar in other aspects. Once recognized and characterized in words, a theory of similarity of a feature shared among taxa may be tested in three (often interconnected) ways: (1) conjunction, (2) similarity of structure, and (3) similarity of position. Although the distinction between characters and states may be semantic, treatment of features as alternate states of the same character versus different characters is necessary for the construction of data matrices. How this is done can have important implications for character weights, and potentially the outcome of analyses.

Non-relational Embedding Verbs: Quotes and Reports

Some verbs cannot have their clausal complements replaced by referential expressions salva congruitate and/or veritate. This makes it difficult to analyse them as denoting relations of the type expressed by run-of-the-mill transitive verbs. The main goal in this work is to find an explanation for why some English embedding verbs are relational while others fail to be so. The question is, why can the latter, but not the former verbs have their embedded clauses replaced by direct speech complements? A comparison in the relevant contexts of the related categories of direct and indirect quotation reveals an important degree of coincidence that calls for (a) an overlapping semantic treatment, and (b) an interpretation of their often invoked differences as due to the contrasting semantic requirements of the class of verbs that fails to express a relation, non-relational ones. For us, the key distinguishing factor is utterance denotation, the differences between the two main classes of verbs identified in the work deriving from reliance on either the form or the content of the utterances involved. In order to account for these facts, we propose a substantial revision of the Davidsonian approach to clausal complementation.

Quantum Programming with Inductive Datatypes: Causality and Affine Type Theory

Inductive datatypes in programming languages allow users to define useful data structures such as natural numbers, lists, trees, and others. In this paper we show how inductive datatypes may be added to the quantum programming language QPL. We construct a sound categorical model for the language and by doing so we provide the first detailed semantic treatment of user-defined inductive datatypes in quantum programming. We also show our denotational interpretation is invariant with respect to big-step reduction, thereby establishing another novel result for quantum programming. Compared to classical programming, this property is considerably more difficult to prove and we demonstrate its usefulness by showing how it immediately implies computational adequacy at all types. To further cement our results, our semantics is entirely based on a physically natural model of von Neumann algebras, which are mathematical structures used by physicists to study quantum mechanics.

Anaphora

This chapter presents LFG analyses for different types of anaphora. Section 14.1 discusses how incorporated pronominal elements behave differently from elements that alternate with agreement markers, and the ways in which these differ from morphologically independent pronouns. Anaphoric relations and binding patterns have been the subject of much research within the LFG framework; Section 14.2 discusses positive and negative constraints on anaphoric binding stated in terms of structural relations holding at f-structure, and Section 14.3 discusses prominence relations which hold between the anaphor and its potential antecedents stated at f-structure as well as other linguistic levels. A glue-theoretic treatment of the semantics of anaphoric binding is presented in Section 14.4, modeled using a version of Discourse Representation Theory. This semantic treatment will be drawn upon in subsequent chapters, particularly in the discussion of anaphoric control in Chapter 15.

Propositional attitudes

In Chapter 8 it is shown that inquisitive semantics gives rise to a new view on propositional attitudes, especially those that are relevant for information exchange. Namely, besides the familiar informationdirected attitudes like knowing and believing, it allows us tomodel issuedirected attitudes like wondering and being curious as well. This also leads to a semantic treatment of the verbs that are used to express such attitudes. Among other things, this treatment explains the selectional restrictions of verbs like wonder, i.e. why they only take interrogative complements, while verbs like know take both declarative and interrogative complements.

Propositions and the Meaning of ‘Ought’

Matthew Chrisman’s new book, The Meaning of ‘Ought’: Beyond Descriptivism and Expressivism in Metaethics, presents a semantic treatment of the deontic modal operator Ought designed to address the problem of subject-sensitivity: why, for example, “I ought to dance with you” might be true, while “You ought to dance with me” is false. Such sentence-pairs challenge the view that Ought is an operator on propositions—an assumption which is common ground amongst both classical and much contemporary work. Chrisman argues that rather than propositions, the operator Ought takes as its argument a non-propositional formal object called a practition. In this review, I discuss the inspiration and formal features of this treatment. While I argue that the distinction between practitions and propositions is not adequately characterized in Chrisman’s compositional semantics, subject-sensitivity raises interesting questions about the metaethical assumptions at play in the formal semantics—including the worry that treating Ought as a propositional operator illicitly begs the question in favor of broadly consequentialist views.

It-Related Anglicisms in der Spiegel: A Semantic Analysis

The paper endeavours to semantically scrutinize anglicisms in Der Spiegel in the specialist field of IT. It was attempted to establish if, and to what extent, the anglicisms alter their meaning in the borrowing process. The article focuses on randomly selected anglicisms in IT-related texts in Der Spiegel, for both the newspaper and the domain are deemed to have been the most prolific in terms of English borrowings. The objective of this comparative study is to arrive at certain general tendencies governing the semantic treatment of English words in German. The paper constitutes merely an excerpt from the research on IT-related anglicisms, and may well serve as a basis for further research, on the grounds that alongside the development of ICT, languages need new names for concepts. Therefore, it is by all means prudent and instructive to delve into the tendencies governing the way anglicisms permeate into the German language.

Responsive predicates are question-embedding: evidence from Estonian

The proper semantic treatment of the complements of Responsive Predicates (ResPs),those predicates which may embed either declarative or interrogative clauses, is a longstandingpuzzle, given standard assumptions about complement selection. In order to avoidpositing systematic polysemy for ResPs, typical treatments of ResP complements treat theirarguments either as uniformly declarative-like (propositional) or interrogative-like (question).I shed new light on this question with novel data from Estonian, in which there are verbsthink-like meanings with declarative complements and wonder-like meanings with interrogativecomplements. I argue that these verbs’ meaning is fundamentally incompatible with aproposition-taking semantics for ResPs, and therefore a question-taking semantics is to be preferred.Keywords: responsive predicates, embedded clauses, interrogatives, contemplation, Estonian.