We further argue that while discourse containing specific indefinites may make reference to speaker’s referents, the indefinite forms themselves are never directly referential, rather they are attributive. Moreover, the speaker’s referent never figures directly in any of the communicated propositions (unlike with definites). Thus these specific indefinites are ‘attributive’ in any sense of that...

A logical formalism associating properties to space parcels in so-called attribute formulas, is proposed. Properties are related through the axioms of a taxonomy graph, and parcels through a partonomy graph. Attributive formulas establish relations between parcels and properties, and we use them to align different taxonomies, over a compatible partonomy, using Formal Concept Analysis. We discus...

Proof erasure plays an essential role in the paradigm of programming with theorem proving. In this paper, we introduce a form of attributive types that carry an attribute to determine whether expressions assigned such types are eligible for erasure before run-time. We formalize a type system to support this form of attributive types and then establish its soundness. In addition, we outline an e...

This paper describes a media-independent, compositional, plan-based approach to representing attributive descriptions for use in integrated text and graphics generation. An attributive description's main function is to convey information directly contributing to the communicative goals of a discourse, whereas a referential description's only function is to enable the audience to identify a part...

The perception of semantic similarity derives from distinct processes of comparison and integration. A dual process model of conceptual combination claims that attributive combination (e.g., umbrella tree) entails comparison, while relational combination (e.g., pancake spatula) requires integration. The present research uses similarity as a test of this dual process model. Participants (N = 168...

This construction consists minimally of two parts: an adjective (e.g., dumb, crazy) or a noun (e.g., fool, punk) and the word ass; these two parts together serve to modify a noun, as shown in (1), where dumb ass modifies husband. Because of the attributive modificational nature of this construction, I will call it the Ass Attributive Construction (AAC). Because the construction admits some alte...