Joan Busquets

Discourse parallelism, ellipsis, and ambiguity

In this paper we combine a simple recovery mechanism for ellipsis with a general, discourse account of parallelism to account for a variety of phenomena concerning ellipsis, including Sags wide scope puzzle and complex examples concerning sloppy identity. Our recovery mechanism requires an identity of logical structure between the recovered material and antecedent in the ellipsis. The recovered material and the antecedent are then interpreted independently in their respective contexts, subject only to the general discourse constraints on parallelism. These constraints give a uniform account of parallelism facts, whether or not there is ellipsis.

Spanish no, sí: Reactive moves to perceived face-threatening acts, Part II☆

This paper is the second installment of a two-part pragmatic analysis of a previously uninvestigated discourse particle in Spanish, no, si. In this paper, we examine the functions of this particle in conversational interaction and argue that it represents a pragmatic response to a perceived face-threatening act, whether intended as such or not. Our pragmatic analysis demonstrates that, as a conversational management strategy, no, si functions as an expression of an evaluative process in which the addressee interprets and reacts to the pragmatic value of the previous utterance. Following principles of politeness in Brown and Levinson (1987), no, si is a reaction to a perceived intent, and hedges the actual response it initiates, serving as an expression of footing to seek common ground or alignment with the participant. In the framework of conversation analysis (Schegloff, 1988), it is a marker of a dispreferred first and second part in an adjacency relationship.

The Polarity Parameter for Ellipsis Coherence

In this paper I argue that Catalan polarity particles (PPs) sí/no, també/tampoc, which one finds in some special realizations of ellipsis in Catalan, impose constraints on Discourse Structure. By virtue of their explicit or implicit markedness with respect to the [± neg] feature, I distinguish them as strong/weak PPs. I demonstrate that the polarity carried by these PPs provides a test-bed for discourse coherence, supervising the processing of the preceding discourse in relation to the last state. It is claimed that such PPs inherit in discourse the locality conditions that are present in the sentence-level in terms of comparison discourse relations like PARALLELISM or similarity (signalled by sí/també) and contrast (signalled by no/tampoc). I propose a formalism within a general discourse representation theory known as Segmented DRT (Asher, 1993).

Spanish no, si: reactive moves to perceived face-threatening acts, part I: discourse relations and cognitive states

This paper is the first installment of a two-part pragmatic analysis of a previously uninvestigated discourse particle in Spanish, no, si. In this paper we examine the distribution of the particle in conversational interaction, discussing discourse structure and the discourse relations involved in the use of the particle. Our data show that no, si is used in response to particular kinds of antecedent questions/utterances and also in an internal usage. The no, si responses are also examined in terms of the cognitive states of the interactants according to the functions of correction, acceptance, or rejection.

Fer-ho Anaphora in Catalan: Semantic and Discourse Properties

This paper considers the anaphoric status of the pro-form fer-ho (do it) in Catalan [This paper contains some ideas included in Busquets (2005)]. I discuss some anaphoric properties of fer-ho as deepanaphora. I also compare these properties to those of other types of anaphora, like VPE and pseudogapping (pg). I show that its interpretation is strongly constrained by information and discourse structure.

Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics

LACL.- k-Valued Non-associative Lambek Grammars (Without Product) Form a Strict Hierarchy of Languages.- Dependency Structure Grammars.- Towards a Computational Treatment of Binding Theory.- Translating Formal Software Specifications to Natural Language.- On the Selective Lambek Calculus.- Grammatical Development with Xmg.- Lambek-Calculus with General Elimination Rules and Continuation Semantics.- A Note on the Complexity of Constraint Interaction: Locality Conditions and Minimalist Grammars.- Large Scale Semantic Construction for Tree Adjoining Grammars.- A Compositional Approach Towards Semantic Representation and Construction of ARABIC.- Strict Deterministic Aspects of Minimalist Grammars.- A Polynomial Time Extension of Parallel Multiple Context-Free Grammar.- Learnable Classes of General Combinatory Grammars.- On Expressing Vague Quantification and Scalar Implicatures in the Logic of Partial Information.- Describing Lambda Terms in Context Unification.- Category Theoretical Semantics for Pregroup Grammars.- Feature Constraint Logic and Error Detection in ICALL Systems.- Linguistic Facts as Predicates over Ranges of the Sentence.- How to Build Argumental Graphs Using TAG Shared Forest: A View from Control Verbs Problematic.- When Categorial Grammars Meet Regular Grammatical Inference.- The Expressive Power of Restricted Fragments of English.- The Complexity and Generative Capacity of Lexicalized Abstract Categorial Grammars.- More Algebras for Determiners.

Dynamic Interpretation, Negation and VP-Anaphora*

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on dynamic interpretation, negation, and VP-anaphora. It discusses the Dynamic Montague Grammar formalism (DMG), and its semantic representation language into the analysis of VP-Ellipsis in Catalan language, following Gardents version and to adapt this approach to those elliptical constructs that interact with the Negative Polarity Operator (NPO). It is generally accepted that VP-Ellipsis is a kind of anaphora. This means that it is necessary to identify those parameters leading to the retrieval of a previously uttered entity because of which the anaphor is interpretable. As for VP-Ellipsis, the process consists of the suppression of the verb and its complements in the ellipsis, leaving no other evidence in the ellipsis clause than an auxiliary verb—in English—and adverbial modifiers—in Catalan. The antecedent clause (a-clause) will in this way modify the interpretation of the ellipsis clause (e-clause); at the same time, the a-clause interpretation will be possible with the help of a property or relationship that seems to be identical to the property or relationship expressed in the e-clause.