Are Reduplicative Qua-Operators Superfluous?

Reduplicative approaches to the incarnation attempt to avoid the charge of incoherence by employing a qua-operator that operates on an entire assertion. The main objection to this approach is that it still yields a contradiction. Recently, two new reduplicative approaches have been offered that purport to avoid contradiction, one that offers a novel analysis of negative predications and the other which prevents conjoining divine and human predicates into a meaningful sentence. In this paper, I argue that these newer approaches either fail to provide a distinctive solution or do not show whether the model is genuinely possible.

Augmenting Paraphrase Generation with Syntax Information using Graph Convolutional Networks

Paraphrase generation is an important yet challenging task in NLP. Neural network-based approaches have achieved remarkable success in sequence-to-sequence(seq2seq) learning. Previous paraphrase generation work generally ignores syntactic information regardless of its availability, with the assumption that neural nets could learn such linguistic knowledge implicitly. In this work we make an endeavor to probe into the efficacy of explicit syntactic information for the task of paraphrase generation. Syntactic information can appear in the form of dependency trees which could be easily acquired from off-the-shelf syntactic parsers. Such tree structures could be conveniently encoded via graph convolutional networks(GCNs) to obtain more meaningful sentence representations, which could improve generated paraphrases. Through extensive experiments on four paraphrase datasets with different sizes and genres, we demonstrate the utility of syntactic information in neural paraphrase generation under the framework of seq2seq modeling. Specifically, our GCN-enhanced models consistently outperform their syntax-agnostic counterparts in multiple evaluation metrics.

The Condition Which Is Contained in Grammatical Rule

The grammatical rule is considered the final model that will be followed construct a meaningful sentence as Arabic used to say. This rule has certain limits that governs the grammatical rule in order not to be confused with another .one of these limits is the condition put by grammarians which is considered an important limit. The condition is also regarded a must to the rule although it is not shared in governing it. Yet, if it is absent, there will not be a grammatical rule. The condition will be very essential if we have similar grammatical rules and it becomes important to put more than one condition to differentiate among these rules for this reasons, the condition is important for the grammarians.

Indonesian University Students’ Common Mistakes when Formulating Interrogative Sentences with ‘Wh-questions’

This study investigated the most common mistakes university students made when formulating interrogative sentences using the ‘Wh-questions: Who, What, Whom, Which, Whose.’ The research was initiated by the researcher’s curiosity when finding out that students in IIE university (pseudonym) frequently made mistakes when trying to ask questions using the ‘Wh-question’ in almost every occasion; either in classrooms or in general lectures. The research which was conducted using descriptive qualitative method involving 60 university students as direct participants, who received some treatments found out that students’ most common mistakes were about choosing the right ‘Wh-question’ to form the question and to place every component that built the question in a correct order and the other mistakes were related to the right use of article, demonstrative, verb, an auxiliary verb, while little problem was related to a problem with diction and ability to make meaningful sentence. The study also found out that the IIE students made more mistakes than ever anticipated by Swan (1980) and that there was a close inseparable connection among all grammatical issues when composing any sentence in English.

The Two Dogmas without Empiricism

In Two Dogmas of Empiricism W.V. Quine begins his attack on the analytic/ synthetic dogma by criticizing Immanuel Kant’s conception of analyticity. After dismissing Kant’s interpretation as well as others, he articulates a view of the analytic/synthetic distinction that connects it to the other dogma of empiricism, reductionism. Ultimately, Quine rejects both dogmas in favor of a new form of empiricism which subscribes to neither one. Just as Quine believes it is possible to accept empiricism without the dogmas, I will argue that the Kantian can accept both dogmas while avoiding the forms of empiricism that Quine considers in his article. The paper is broken into four sections. First, I offer a brief overview of the two dogmas and their relationship to one another before examining Quine’s argument against ‘radical reductionism’, i.e., the position that every meaningful sentence is translatable into a sentence about immediate experience that is either true or false. The second section shows how one of Kant’s arguments from the Critique of Pure Reason anticipates the crux of Quine’s argument against radical reductionism. What is left after this argument is only an ’attenuated form’ of reductionism that Quine believes is identical to the analytic/synthetic distinction. In the third section, I explain how Kantians can draw the analytic/ synthetic distinction in a way that is consistent with this attenuated form of reductionism while avoiding the objections that Quine lodges against the two dogmas. I argue that this allows the Kantian to accept the dogmas while avoiding both the radically reductive form of empiricism as well as the form of empiricism that Quine endorses (web-of-belief holism). Finally, I will consider how this Kantian version of the analytic/synthetic distinction can be extended beyond the theoretical domain to practical and aesthetic sentences

Does the Nothing Noth?

In 1929 Heidegger gave his Freiburg inaugural lecture entitled ‘What is Metaphysics?’ In it he announced: Das Nichts selbst nichtet, ‘The Nothing itself noths (or ‘nihilates’, or ‘nothings’). This soon earned Heidegger fame as a purveyor of metaphysical nonsense. In his 1931 paper, ‘Overcoming of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language’ Rudolf Carnap charged Heidegger with the offences of the whole metaphysical genre. His sentence has the same grammatical form as the sentence ‘The rain rains’ – a sentence which Carnap, or at least his translator, regarded as a ‘meaningful sentence of ordinary language’. But this harmless guise conceals severe logical blemishes. Heidegger treats the indefinite pronoun ‘nothing’ as a noun, as the ‘name or description of an entity’. (When he says ‘The nothing noths’ he surely does not mean ‘There is nothing that noths’ or ‘It is not the case that anything noths’.) He introduces the meaningless word ’to noth‘. He implies, and later affirms, the existence of the nothing, when the ‘existence of this entity would be denied in its very definition’. If all this were not enough, the sentence is meaningless, since it is neither analytic, nor contradictory, nor empirical. It is metaphysics, and metaphysics seriously damages our spiritual health.

Syntactic Form and Semantic Function

The experiments reported here were designed to investigate the effects on linguistic performance of varying the interaction between the syntactic form of sentences and their semantic function. The experimental task required subjects to decide whether pairs of sentences had the same or a different meaning. The results of Experiment I confirmed the prediction that the times taken to decide about pairs of affirmative and negative sentences would be shorter when the negative was performing its natural function of signalling a change of meaning. To a lesser extent, performance on pairs of active and passive sentences was facilitated when the two sentences meant the same thing. These results were found both with “meaningful” sentence material and with abstract x–y sentences. A second experiment provided a control for the possibility that the results were due to syntactic derivational factors rather than to the semantic function interaction.