The problem of explaining the knowledge possessed by a native speaker of a natural language and the philosophical problem of rule-following are juxtaposed, and the former is seen to be an instance of the latter. A recent solution to the rule-following problem is reviewed, with special attention to the consequences that the solution has for the nature of those concepts acquired from exemplars. The concept of a grammatical sentence is one of these. Finally, it is shown that, as a consequence, we can see the grammaticality of a sentence to be an abstract property, which is simultaneously objective and tied to the responses of competent speakers. Thus, we gain a better understanding of some central questions in the philosophy of linguistics.

In this paper, we argue that the subject requirement or Extended Projection Principle (EPP) is naturally derived from predication, not in the standard syntax-based manner of Rothstein (1983), Chomsky (1986) or Heycock (1991), but in a full-blooded semantic manner within the selective mentalist Grammar Semantics of Bouchard (1995). We propose that the EPP is the effect of a basic proposition-forming operation of natural language, which is induced by a predication operator (Bowers 1993). On our analysis, insertion of an expletive in the subject position or raising to the subject position are therefore ultimately analysed as semantically motivated processes, triggered by the operation of proposition formation.

This study is a semantic and pragmatic analysis of the Norwegian right-detached particle så, which occurs exclusively with sentence fragments. The framework of description is relevance theory, a cognitively based theory of communication whose objective is to account for how we are able to understand utterances and to make ourselves understood, in spite of the fact that the linguistic code that we use vastly underdetermines what we mean, and even what we say in the strict sense (truth conditions). It is argued that så encodes a procedure for the addressee to follow in his inferential processing of the linguistic signal. The lexical entry for så contains an instruction to the addressee to contextually activate one or more positive propositions which resemble the one asserted by the utterance of the så-fragment, and to arrange them mentally on a scale whose lower bound is represented by the så-fragment proposition. The speaker implicitly communicates her lack of commitment to the more highly ranked propositions on the scale. The principle behind the scalar ranking is argued to be highly context-dependent.

This paper presents an analysis of Icelandic umlaut in Optimality Theory. We account for umlaut in sal[œ]t-[Y]m ‘lettuce’ (dat. pl.) and d[œ:]g-[Y]m ‘day’ (dat. pl.), in which /a/ is fronted and rounded when followed by [Y], as well as forms such as j[œ]kli ‘glacier’ (dat. sg.) and b[œ]rn ‘child’ (ace. pl.) with an umlauted vowel, but no overt trigger. We explain why there is no umlaut in forms such as dal-n[Y]m ‘valley’ (def.), kakt[Y]s ‘cactus’ (nom. sg.), or d[a:]g-[Y]r ‘day’ (nom. sg.) despite the fact that /a/ occurs in the umlaut environment. We also explain why there is one umlauted vowel in sal[œ]t-[Y]m ≪ /salat + Ym/, but two umlauted vowels in f[œ]t-n[Y]ð-[Y]m ≪ /fat + nað + Ym/ ‘clothing’ (dat. pl.) and why the umlauted vowel is sometimes [Y] and sometimes [œ].

The focus of my analysis is the so-called existential construction. The languages examined are English, Swedish and Icelandic. The present article assumes the perspective of Ronald W. Langacker's cognitive grammar as the theoretical background. First of all, the assumption is that the unstressed, initial pronoun there, or its Scandinavian equivalents, are semantically definable as abstract-setting subjects of their respective sentences, with, possibly, the exception of Icelandic það. Secondly, the conceptualization of the existential scenes in the three languages is a dynamic process in each case. The dynamicity of the semantics of existential scenes is the result of assuming two planes, the actual and a virtual one, and establishing correspondences between them. The actual plane reflects our direct apprehension of reality. A virtual plane consists in the dynamic re-assignment of roles to the actual elements introduced by means of the virtual abstract-setting subject.

Structural ambiguity, particularly attachment of prepositional phrases, is a serious type of global ambiguity in Natural Language. The disambiguation becomes crucial when a syntactic analyzer must make the correct decision among at least two equally grammatical parse-trees for the same sentence. This paper attempts to find answers to the problem of how attachment ambiguity can be resolved by utilizing Machine Learning (ML) techniques. ML is founded on the assumption that the performance in cognitive tasks is based on the similarity of new situations (testing) to stored representations of earlier experiences (training). Therefore, a large amount of training data is an important prerequisite for providing a solution to the problem. A combination of unsupervised and restricted supervised acquisition of such data will be reported. Training is performed both on a subset of the content of the Gothenburg Lexical Database (GLDB), and on instances of large corpora annotated with coarse-grained semantic information. Testing is performed on corpora instances using a range of different algorithms and metrics. The application language is written Swedish.

Standard negation is the basic sentential negation in a language. This article proposes a typology of standard negation that takes into account the whole negative construction and allows explanation of different negation types by different semantico-pragmatic background phenomena. There is semantic and pragmatic asymmetry between affirmation and negation, and this asymmetry is manifested in different ways in the morphosyntax of negative constructions. The primary division in the classification is between symmetric and asymmetric negation. The asymmetric type can be divided into subtypes according to which aspects of the semantico-pragmatic asymmetry are grammaticalized in the negative constructions. Symmetric and asymmetric negative constructions are analogous to the affirmative structure and to the background semantics and pragmatics of negation, respectively.