Abstract We model the conventional meaning of utterances that combine two distinct clause types: a (positive) declarative or imperative (in rare cases, interrogative) anchor and (negative) interrogative tag, such as won’t you? . argue express single speech act, in fact, update conversational scoreboard. The proposed this effect is straightforward extension prior proposals for semantics declarat...

In this paper I wish to discuss an interesting constraint on the interpretation of the Italian infinitive in subordinate clauses introduced by an interrogative or relative phrase (for short, "wh-infinitives"). Firstly, observe that in an infinitival declarative complement, as in (1), the compound infinitive describes an event which is temporally located before the event or state described by th...

To design for users’ values, one must first elicit those values. This paper describes research on detection of values in texts and describes applications to design. Expert, crowdsourced, and automatic content analysis offer non-intrusive ways of learning about users’ values that can serve as accompaniments or alternatives to interrogative methods such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups.

A formal theory based on a binary operator of directional associative relation is constructed in the article and an understanding of an associative normal form of image constructions is introduced. A model of a commutative semigroup, which provides a presentation of a sentence as three components of an interrogative linguistic image construction, is considered.

Current unit selection speech synthesis voices cannot produce emphasis or interrogative contours because of a lack of the necessary prosodic variation in the recorded speech database. A method of recording script design is proposed which addresses this shortcoming. Appropriate components were added to the target cost function of the Festival Multisyn engine, and a perceptual evaluation showed a...

The French interrogative system, which allows for variation among several distinct syntactic structures, constitutes a domain in which normative prescription and actual usage differ greatly (Elsig, 2009). Although many sociolinguistic studies have examined this variation (e.g., Ashby, 1977; Behnstedt, 1973; Coveney, 1989, 2002; Fox, 1989; Myers, 2007; Quillard, 2000), most can be characterized ...

In this paper it is argued that the interpretation of an interrogative sentence is underspecified by its conventional meaning. A uniform but still substantial underspecified meaning is given, and it is shown how this underspecification can be resolved by making use of a relevance relation between propositions.

In the rst part of this paper I discussed two central notions concerning questions, aboutness and resolvedness, and proposed an analysis of these notions which I used to provide a situation semantics account for both query and embedded uses of interrogatives (seèResolving Questions, I' for discussion and for the notation assumed below; all sections numbered 5.x and less are in part I.). In this...