A semantic analysis of quantification in English
Abstract
Throughout early English grammars and the following linguistic literature of the 20th century, the class of quantifiers has faced an identity crisis, brought about most strongly by purely or strongly syntax-based analyses and the lack of a comprehensive account of the semantic behavior of quantification. This analysis examines quantificational behavior from a wholly semantic view and distinguishes the necessary and sufficient parameters for describing quantification and delineating its subclasses. Considering the concept being quantified (object or class of temporality) and the kind of absolute or relative quantification, the semantic class is shown to demonstrate not only a wide range of lexical items and forms but a small group of types of quantification rather than the large span suggested by previous research. Beginning with a linguistic analysis to exemplify the variations in quantifier meanings, the descriptive power of Ontological Semantics (OntoSem) is used as an apparatus to formally represent subtle distinctions in quantificational semantics. The primary resources of OntoSem are a language-independent ontology of concepts and their relationship and the language-dependent lexicons, which are comprised of individual senses for each word in a given language. Each sense is describes semantically through the association with one ontological concept and a description of the given concept's relationship with other concepts (i.e., agent, instrument-of, relative-size, relative-number). With these resources, quantification may be shown to modify one of a particular set of concepts (OBJECT, ITERATION, FREQUENCY, TEMPORAL-SEGMENTATION, and DURATION) through the properties of NUMBER and AMOUNT to either the absolute degree or relatively with the given domain. Within this formalism, the comprehensive account of the semantic behavior of English quantification is represented formally with different parameters and their combinations to express the differences in meaning and in a machine-tractable form for use in computational applications.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Raskin, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Linguistics
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