Counterparts, Essences and Quantified Modal Logic

It is commonplace to formalize propositions involving essential properties of objects in a language containing modal operators and quantifiers. Assuming David Lewis’s counterpart theory as a semantic framework for quantified modal logic, I will show that certain statements discussed in the metaphysics of modality de re, such as the sufficiency condition for essential properties, cannot be faithfully formalized. A natural modification of Lewis’s translation scheme seems to be an obvious solution but is not acceptable for various reasons. Consequently, the only safe way to express some intuitions regarding essential properties is to use directly the language of counterpart theory without modal operators.

Reasoning Talk at Chinese Families’ Dinner Table: Across Three Generations and Different Communicative Contexts

This study examines the feature of reasoning talk used by 37 Chinese families at the dinner table across three generations with the background of co-parenting and in consideration of different communicative contexts. Drawing upon Hasan’s semantic framework, reasons were mainly coded as logical or social types. We categorize the communicative context of reasoning talk into contextualized (meal-related) and decontextualized topics. When the proportion of social reasoning was found slightly higher than that of logical reasoning, the families’ reasoning talk account for only 3.85% of the total language. Specifically, the count of mothers’ total reasoning talk was significantly above other family members, while there were no significant differences among the other participants. The effect of the communicative contexts on family members’ social reasoning was found. The reasoning talk grounded on local rules (family-made rules) and coercive power occurred significantly more frequently in contextualized than decontextualized context. A higher rate of local-rule grounded reasoning talk of all family members appeared in contextualized than decontextualized context, and this gap was particularly obvious among mothers. These findings reveal the significant role of mothers in family communications and confirm the pedagogical values of decontextualized communicative context for promoting children’s learning opportunities at the dinner table.

Historical Cartographic Information for Cultural Heritage Applications in a Semantic Framework

Les cartes historiques constituent un outil précieux pour la recherche en histoire, puisqu’elles sont dépositaires de renseignements sur l’espace qui reflètent la littératie géographique, l’idéologie et les préoccupations géopolitiques de l’époque où elles ont été établies – renseignements qui souvent ne sont pas fournis par d’autres sources. Les cartes historiques sont aussi un élément fondamental des applications dédiées au patrimoine culturel et aux sciences humaines numériques puisqu’elles donnent, en tant que cartes de base, une image de l’espace historique sur laquelle sont projetées d’autres ressources et le nom des lieux historiques, ce qui permet d’organiser et de géocoder diverses informations. Les cartes historiques devraient être abordées selon une approche sémantique qui considère les modèles et les normes de données des différentes disciplines liées au patrimoine culturel et aux sciences humaines numériques. C’est dans cet esprit que notre recherche poursuit des travaux antérieurs consistant à élaborer un profil d’application pour documenter les cartes historiques à partir du modèle du CIDOC et créer une base de données annotée de cartes historiques. Ce profil tient compte des concepts définitionnels de la carte et de ses relations aux objets, aux personnes, aux évènements et aux processus culturels. En vue de rassembler ces données et de les visualiser, une application web a été conçue à partir d’Arches, plateforme logicielle à code source ouvert destinée à la gestion du patrimoine culturel et compatible à la fois avec les normes du CIDOC et celles de l’information géographique.

REDbox: a comprehensive semantic framework for data collection and management in tuberculosis research

The outcomes of a clinical research directly depend on the correct definition of the research protocol, the data collection strategy and the data management plan. Furthermore, researchers often need to work within challenging contexts, such as in Tuberculosis services, where human and technological resources for research may be rare. The use of Electronic Data Capture systems, such as REDCap and KoBotoolbox, can help to mitigate such risks and to enable a reliable environment to conduct health research and promote results dissemination and data reusability. The proposed solution was based on needs pinpointed by researchers, considering the lack of an embracing solution to conduct research in low resources environments. The REDbox framework was built to enhance data collection, management and sharing in tuberculosis research, while providing a better user experience. The relevance of this article lies in the innovative approach to support TB research by combining existing technologies and developing support features. When focusing on positive aspects of each tool, it is possible to underpin tuberculosis research by improving data collection, management capability and security. Furthermore, the aggregation of meaning in raw data helps to promote the quality and the availability of research data.

A Case of Kinship

This article describes onomasiological explorations of Old Frisian and Old English lexis in the semantic field of KINSHIP through a novel, digital approach. In connecting Old Frisian lexis, drawn from the Altfriesisches Handwörterbuch (AFWB), to the overarching structure of A Thesaurus of Old English (TOE), a dataset has been created that shares a semantic framework with the one existing for Old English lexis. The connected resources are shared and analysed using the web application Evoke. Statistical data provided by this tool, such as the degree of lexicalization for this field, facilitates comparative analyses of the two historical languages. As this article demonstrates, the reuse of the onomasiological macrostructure of TOE offers new insights into linguistic and cultural aspects of these two languages and their language communities.

Predicate Transformer Semantics for Hybrid Systems

We present a semantic framework for the deductive verification of hybrid systems with Isabelle/HOL. It supports reasoning about the temporal evolutions of hybrid programs in the style of differential dynamic logic modelled by flows or invariant sets for vector fields. We introduce the semantic foundations of this framework and summarise their Isabelle formalisation as well as the resulting verification components. A series of simple examples shows our approach at work.

Isomorphic mapping in fictional interpretation

This chapter investigates how readers/hearers come to assign a subjective interpretation to a fictional text. It argues that fictional texts use a speech act operator that involves an inference from the text worlds to the reader’s reality (Bauer and Beck 2014). The inference is based on a mapping from concepts in the text to real objects, properties, and relations which has isomorphic features, i.e., it is a structure-preserving mapping. We illustrate the workings of our semantic framework by applying it to two poems by Emily Dickinson and offer some generalizations regarding plausible vs. implausible mappings and what governs their choice.

The semantics of conversion nouns and -ing nominalizations: A quantitative and theoretical perspective

This paper addresses a fundamental problem of derivational morphology: which meanings are possible for the words of a given morphological category, which forms can be chosen to express a given meaning, and what is the role of the base in these mappings of form and meaning? In a broad empirical study we examine the extent to which two types of nominalizations in English – conversion nouns and -ing nominalizations – can express either eventive or referential readings, can be quantified as either count or mass, and can be based on verbs of particular aspectual classes (state, activity, accomplishment, achievement, semelfactive). Past literature (for example, Grimshaw 1990 Brinton 1995, 1998 Borer 2013) has suggested an association between conversion nominalization, count quantification, and referential reading on the one hand, and between -ing nominalization, mass quantification and eventive reading on the other. Using a subset of the data reported in Andreou & Lieber (2020), we give statistical evidence that the relationship between morphological form, type of quantification, and aspectual class of base verb is neither categorical, as the literature suggests, nor completely free, but rather is probabilistic. We provide both a univariate analysis and a multivariate analysis (using conditional inference trees) that show that the relationship among the variables of morphological form, eventivity, quantification and aspectual class of base is complex. Tendencies sometimes go in the direction suggested by past literature (e.g. -ing forms tend to be eventive), but sometimes contradict past predictions (conversion also tends to be eventive). We also document that an important role is played by the specific verb underlying the nominalization rather than the aspectual class of verb. Finally, we consider what the pattern of polysemy that we uncover suggests with respect to theoretical modeling, looking at syntactic models (Distributed Morphology), lexical semantic models (the Lexical Semantic Framework), Analogical Models, and Distributional Semantics.