Christian Ebert

The Interpretation of the German Specificity Markers Bestimmt and Gewiss

We closely investigate two specificity markers in German, namely, bestimmt and gewiss, by discussing their commonalities and differences w.r.t. matters of identification and scope-taking properties in connection with negation, nominal quantifiers, conditionals and intensional operators. Eventually we propose to analyse both markers as uniformly contributing the information that some salient agent is in possession of identifying knowledge of the referent that is introduced by the modified indefinite. The crucial differences between the two markers are that in case of gewiss, (1) this agent must be the speaker and (2) this information is contributed as a conventional implicature, whereas in the case of bestimmt, (1) the agent must not necessarily coincide with the speaker and (2) the information is contributed as at-issue meaning, which will allow for interaction of this meaning component with other operators in the sentence.

Language, games, and evolution: trends in current research on language and game theory

Recent years witnessed an increased interest in formal pragmatics and especially the establishment of game theory as a new research methodology for the study of language use. Game and Decision Theory (GDT) are natural candidates if we look for a theoretical foundation of linguistic pragmatics. Over the last decade, a firm research community has emerged with a strong interdisciplinary character, where economists, philosophers, and social scientists meet with linguists. Within this field of research, three major currents can be distinguished: one is closely related to the Gricean paradigm and aims at a precise foundation of pragmatic reasoning, the second originates in the economic literature and is concerned with the role of game theory in the context of language use, and the third aims at language evolution seen either from a biological or from a cultural perspective. Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this volume is based on a selection of papers of two international conferences, one organised at ESSLLI in 2007 on language, games, and evolution, and the other organised at the ZAS in Berlin on games and decisions in pragmatics in 2008. This volume is rounded off by additional invited papers and now contains eight articles of leading researchers in the field which together provide a state-of-the-art survey of current research on language evolution and game theoretic approaches to pragmatics.

Generating full paraphrases of fragments in a dialogue interpretation system

Using SHARDS -- a semantically-based HPSG approach to the resolution of dialogue fragments -- we will show how to generate full para-phrases for fragments in dialogue. We adopt a template-filler approach that does not require deep generation from an underlying semantic representation. Instead it reuses the results of the parse and interpretation process to dynamically compute templates and to update fillers as the dialogue proceeds. This recycling of already available syntactic and phonological information makes generation efficient, as it reduces the operations of the generator to mere string manipulations.

Formal syntax and semantics of case stacking languages

In this paper the phenomenom of case stacking is investigated from a formal point of view. We will define a formal language with idealized case marking behaviour and prove that stacked cases have the ability to encode structural information on the word thereby allowing for unrestricted word order. Furthermore, the case stacks help to compute this structure with a low complexity bound. As a second part we propose a compositional semantics for languages with stacked cases and show how this proposal may work for our formal language as well as for an example from Warlpiri.

Language, games, and evolution: an introduction

Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in formal pragmatics and especially the establishment of game theory as a new research methodology for the study of language use. Within this field of research, three major currents can be distinguished: one is closely related to the Gricean paradigm and aims at a precise foundation of pragmatic reasoning, the second originates in the economic literature and is concerned with the role of game theory in the context of language use, and the third aims at language evolution seen either from a biological or from a cultural perspective.

Full Paraphrase Generation for Fragments in Dialogue

Much previous work on generation has focused on the general problem of producing lexical strings from abstract semantic representations. We consider generation in the context of a particular task, creating full sentential paraphrases of fragments in dialogue. When the syntactic, semantic and phonological information provided by a dialogue fragment resolution system is made accessible to a generation component, much of the indeterminacy of lexical selection is eliminated.