Phrasal semantics is concerned with how the meaning of a sentence is composed both from the meaning of the constituent words, and from extra meaning contained within the structural organization of the sentence itself. In this context, grammatical constructions correspond to form-meaning mappings that essentially capture this “extra” meaning and allow its representation. The current research exa...

When humans and artificial agents (e.g. robots) have mismatched perceptions of the shared environment, referential communication between them becomes difficult. To mediate perceptual differences, this paper presents a new approach using probabilistic labeling for referential grounding. This approach aims to integrate different types of evidence from the collaborative referential discourse into ...

Referential thinking is the tendency to view innocuous stimuli as having a specific meaning for the self and is associated with personality traits and disorders. In three studies, this research examined the relations among referential thinking, self-processing, and paranoia. In study 1, follow-up questions on the Referential Thinking Scale (Lenzenweger, Bennett, & Lilenfeld, 1997) revealed that...

his paper describes a logically compelling criterion of meaning—that is, a necessary condition of meaning, one which is non-arbitrary and compelling. One cannot not accept the proposed criterion without selfreferential inconsistency. This “metalogical” variety of selfreferential inconsistency is new, opening a third category beyond semantical and pragmatical forms of self-referential inconsiste...

We report on the results of our reasoning experiments concerning direct inferences with quantifiers: some, most, all. We investigated scalar implicatures of some and most, as well as inferences from all to most, from all to some and from most to some. Based on our results, we propose that scalar implicatures are context-independent and default in this sense that the pragmatic interpretation of ...