zhi-{yao, you} ‘only-{need, have}’: on two conditional connectives in Mandarin

Domain restriction by conditional connectives

This paper aims to rehabilitate the idea that there are conditional connectives in the logical forms of natural language. I propose to adopt a connective with a truth-value gap semantics inspired by Belnap (1970), such that conditionals only have a truth-value if their antecedent is true. Together with the assumption that quantifiers select worlds for which their scope is defined, this predicts...

The ACID-Fission Pay Only for What You Need

On the Lexical Meaning of Conditional Connectives in Chinese

This paper examines some common logical notions, their explicit encoding in English and in Chinese, their representations in logic, and their semantic characterizations. Detailed treatments are given to the analysis of the necessary condition and the counterfactual protasisinducer ‘yàobúshì’ (if-not-be) in Chinese. Factors affecting the comprehension of these terms are explored in detail. Given...

Two restrictions on possible connectives

If languages could lexicalize arbitrary truth tables as sentential connectives, we should be able to find a great variety of connectives in the world’s languages. However, very few connectives are typologically attested, as has long been known. For example, no known language lexicalizes if-and-only-if, not-and, or McCawley (1972)’s schmor, a connective that returns true exactly when two or more...

If the two charge sheets are on two conductor plates, you have a parallel-plate capacitor. As you can recall from your physics course, net charge can only