Sortal

Abstract: 1. The absoluteness of sameness 2. Outline of a theory of individuation 3. Sortal concepts: their characteristic activity or function or purpose 4. Essentialism and conceptualism 5. Conceptualism and realism 6. Vagueness, determinacy and identity: a conceptualist proposal 7. Personal identity.

Abstract: Introduction to the CLE, Hiyan Alshawi and Robert C. Moore - language analysis and interpretation, overview of CLE components logical forms, Jan van Eijck and Hiyan Alshawi - levels of logical form in the CLE, resolved logical form, quasi logical form categories and rules, Hiyan Alshawi - constraints, components and rules, categories for linguistic analysis, CLE categories, category unification and subsumption, Boolean expression feature values, feature sets, defaults and macros, internal category representation, grammar rules, syntax and morphology rules, semantic rules, lexical entries unification-based syntactic analysis, Stephen G. Pulman - theoretical background, subcategorization, start categories, sentence types, subject-auxilliary inversion, unbounded dependencies, passives, conjunctions semantic rules for English, Jan van Eijck and Robert C. Moore - semantic rules and sences, general principles of the CLE semantics, the semantics of specific constructions lexical analysis, David Carter - tokenizing the input, segmenting the tokens, recovering from unknown tokens syntactic and semantic processing, Robert C. Moore and Hiyan Alshawi - parsing, semantic analysis, morphological processing, ambiguities and packing quantifier scoping, Douglas B. Moran and Fernando C.N. Pereira - quantifier scoping problem, scoping rules and references, the scoping algorithm, refinements to the basic algorithm, implementation sortal restrictions, Hiyan Alshawi and David Carter - applying sortal restrictions, encoding sorts as terms, the external representation of sorts, specifying the sort hierarchy, developments resolving quasi logical forms, Hiyan Alshawi - deriving LFs from QLFs, anaphoric terms, context model, constraints on resolved LFs, anaphoric relations and formulae, further work on QLF resolution lexical acquisition, David Carter - strategy adopted, assumptions behind the strategy eliciting syntactic behaviour and semantic informtion, incorporating new entries, the core lexicon the CLE in application development, Arnold Smith - linguistic applications, model-based systems, the LF-Prolog query evaluator, the order-processing exemplar, extending the interface, new directions ellipsis, comparatives and generation, Hiyan Alshawi and Stephen G. Pulman Swedish-English QLF translation, Hiyan Alshawi, et al - the Swedish CLE, QLF-based translation, disambiguation and interaction.

Abstract: One of the goals of a certain brand of philosopher has been to give an account of language and linguistic phenomena by means of showing how sentences are to be translated into a “logically perspicuous notation” (or an “ideal language” — to use passe terminology). The usual reason given by such philosophers for this activity is that such a notational system will somehow illustrate the “logical form” of these sentences. There are many candidates for this notational system: (almost) ordinary first-order predicate logic (see Quine [1960]), higher-order predicate logic (see Parsons [1968, 1970]), intensional logic (see Montague [1969, 1970a, 1970b, 1971]), and transformational grammar (see Harman [1971]), to mention some of the more popular ones. I do not propose to discuss the general question of the correctness of this approach to the philosophy of language, nor do I wish to adjudicate among the notational systems mentioned here. Rather, I want to focus on one problem which must be faced by all such systems — a problem that must be discussed before one decides upon a notational system and tries to demonstrate that it in fact can account for all linguistic phenomena. The general problem is to determine what we shall allow as linguistic data; in this paper I shall restrict my attention to this general problem as it appears when we try to account for certain words with non-singular reference, in particular, the words that are classified by the count/mass and sortal/non-sortal distinctions.