Conjunctive grammars with restricted disjunction

Conjunctive Grammars with Restricted Disjunction

Conjunctive interpretation of disjunction ∗

In this extended commentary I discuss the problem of how to account for “conjunctive” readings of some sentences with embedded disjunctions for globalist analyses of conversational implicatures. Following Franke (2010, 2009), I suggest that earlier proposals failed, because they did not take into account the interactive reasoning of what else the speaker could have said, and how else the hearer...

Conjunctive Grammars

This paper introduces a class of formal grammars made up by augmenting the formalism of context-free grammars with an explicit set-theoretic intersection operation. It is shown that conjunctive grammars can generate some important non-contextfree language constructs, including those not in the intersection closure of context-free languages, and that they can provide very succinct descriptions o...

Plurals , possibilities , and conjunctive disjunction ∗

Sentences with disjunction in the scope of a possibility modal often convey something stronger than predicted under the standard semantics for modals and disjunction, roughly paraphrasable in terms of a wide scope conjunction. You may have beer or wine, for example, is naturally understood as conveying that you may have beer and that you may have wine. This ‘puzzle of free choice permission’ (R...

Modelling Robustness with Conjunctive Grammars

Grammars in a broad sense [2] are used to specify structural commitment in software systems: concrete syntax definitions determine how source code is turned into a parse tree; library interfaces define the signatures of the functions exposed and used by third parties; document schemata fix the structure of the XML documents that are considered valid; type definitions influence assertions on the...