Questions tagged [logic]
The logic tag has no usage guidance.
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On colorless green ideas
I’m pretty new here. My main focus is logic, so I spend most of my time on the math and philosophy forums.
Chomsky proposed that while “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is a well-formed sentence ...
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Information Selection with Because
I'm having difficulty with the extraction of information from sentences containing the word "because."
I was analyzing a text about the advantages and disadvantages of open-plan offices. ...
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Uniquenesses of Hebrew
Franz Philipp Kaulen, S.J. (1827-1907)
was impressed in favor of [ancient] Hebrew by the following facts:
In no other language is there such an intimate relation between nouns and their objects;
the ...
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An Overview of Mathematical-Logical Approaches in Formalizing Natural Languages
I am an undergraduate mathematics student with a keen interest in pursuing research in the formalization of natural languages (from a more mathematical-logical approach), yet there aren't many ...
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Are there two senses of "grammar" with respect to semantics?
Are there two senses of "grammar"?
Is it correct that
in linguistics, semantics (and maybe also pragmatics) belongs to and is specified in grammar? (My impression from limited reading of a ...
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What are the semantics of questions and requests/commands?
In linguistics, is it correct that statement i.e. declarative clause (sentence) has a truth value (true or false or maybe other value?) i.e. logic as its semantics?
What does a question (yes-no, or ...
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Formal semantics of the coordination of tense and modality
There seems to be a good amount of work on the formal semantics of tense, e.g. statements of the form "Dave ate the cookie," and also of modality, e.g. statements of the form "Dave ...
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Are there languages with a third term describing the relationship between opposites?
Languages have binary opposites such as
Term
Negation
Third Term
this
that
?
black
white
?
up
down
?
left
right
?
but are there languages that have a third term describing the relationship ...
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What contemporary theories attempt to explain why languages have phonotactic restrictions instead of permitting any phonemic combinations?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics
As to why we see some combinations of phonemes allowed vs. not allowed, in some human languages, like how in English we have the phoneme clusters “sn”, “sm”...
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Is propositional logic present in all languages?
I wonder whether propositional logic could be formed in all languages. I can imagine some could have problems to construct phrases based on the rules of the logic (e.g. Quechua), but I wonder if there ...
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Relationship of spoken and written language and truth of sentences
I am not entirely sure if this is the appropriate site and whether these are the appropriate tags for this topic, so if that is not the case, please feel free to let me know.
I never thought twice ...
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Does epistemic modality include logical possibility?
Are all epistemically necessary propositions necessarily logically possible?
According to the definitions used in common by McCawley's 1993 'Everything that linguists have always wanted to know about ...
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What is the purpose of "x" in the Venn-diagrams depicting categorical propositions?
See the I- and O-diagrams of this article. The "x" does not make sense the way it is formulated. Every member of the intersection is a member of the intersection, obviously.
The "x"...
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What is the difference between an implicature and a presupposition
I have been reading on pragmatics from Levinson, Yule, Cadzar etc. English is not my native language, though i can understand basic concepts such as maxims, implicatures and its types(generalized, ...
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What is the logic behind "I am X years old"?
(I posted this on the English Language Learners SE but apparently it isn't a good fit because it's a "why" question, so it was suggested by multiple users I post it here instead.)
In some ...
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Formalizing Natural Languages
I've been interested in the subject of metalanguages [in mathematical logic] and how (if) we can formalize them. Most metalanguages I've encountered use some variation of a natural language (such as ...
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“An orange is more more delicious than an apple than grapes”: Is there a logical error?
“An orange is more more delicious than an apple than grapes.”
Delicacy level
Orange: 10
Apple: 5
Grapes: 3
An orange is 5 degrees more delicious than an apple. (10-5=5) An orange is 2 degrees more 5 ...
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Is Hebrew more efficient and more grammatically logical than English? [closed]
Grammatically logical - this is possible, vs zeh yachol lhiyot. Let's break down the English way for a moment -- the words don't actually connect with each other in a logical sequence. 'This is' has ...
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(how) do natural languages distinguish classes and instances of things?
In data modeling and other areas of knowledge organization there is often a strict separation between abstract classes of things and individual objects. For instance I am an instance of the class ...
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The verb "to hit" does not change the form between active voice and passive voice - implications [closed]
As adults we confidently grasp the concept of searching for context when information in a few words spoken to us is not enough. Moreover, we apply logic and cause-effect dependencies, filtering out ...
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When are 'or' and 'unless' exclusive in (daily) English?
I have two questions since I saw this SE answer.
First, for the following sentence:
English 'or' is only exclusive when only one premise is possible: 'You hydrate or you don't hydrate.' or 'I saw a ...
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Is it true that neologisms (loaned words) have a more limited and specific meaning?
My impression was that many neologisms tend to provide a more specific meaning than the original, have a more limited application, and a less large sense than the origin-word.
But I have seen some ...
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rules of syllogistic logic in an OVS or OSV language
I am looking to write the present the rules of Aristotelian syllogistic logic in a language that would be unfamiliar to my mostly-American students. So I thought I would do it in an OVS or OSV ...
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Inverse scope reading
It is well known that any sentence with two or more quantifiers will result in in multiple possible readings depending on the ordering of the quantifiers. To take a known example (1), there will be ...
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Conditional clauses, use of 'if, then, else' in major non-English languages?
Are there major languages in the world that construct conditional clauses differently than English? That is, the translation of "if" and associated words would not be direct due to different ...
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truth condition of 'uniqueness' in the (neo) Russellian theory
I'm trying to work out how (∀y (student(y) → y = x) represents uniqueness. How come we need that formula there? Doesn't just ∃x student(x) ⋀ met(j,x)) suffice? Or, would it be the expression for I ...
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Predicate logic and always?
How do I translate a sentence like this into predicate logic?
Always if an amateur chef bakes a burnt cookie, then nobody eats that burnt cookie.
My attempt is something like this
∀[chef’(x)∧ ...
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Is there a "logical background" theory to explain control-flow similarity in virtually all human languages?
In programming there are two very common aspects of logical operators and conditioning (I assume the border between the two isn't always well defined).
Logical operators would include, for example:
...
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Discrepancy between Classical Logic, Set Theory, Propositional Logic and Languages [closed]
In logic, "Or" strictly refers to logical disjuntion, while "And" strictly refers to logical conjuction.
But in common parlance, both can fill the role of Logical Disjunction
I understand that one ...
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Carrying a mistake in a sentence until contradiction
I am new to the field of linguistics so please forgive any ignorance or naivety, but there is something I have been thinking about recently and cannot find anything about it online. I suppose there ...
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Data set for reasoning?
I am looking data set for reasoning. Basically, more examples like this one:
1. I like food.
2. Cake is food.
Conclusion: I like cake.
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Necessity and Possibility, Domain Widen, Indeterminate Phrase
I wanna ask a question about semantics. It's on page 20 in the paper "Indeterminate Pronouns: The View from Japanese" (Kratzer & Shimoyama, 2002).
What I don't understand is the part Computing ...
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Are there any computational linguists who still use prolog?
My understanding is that in the 90's and early 2000's, expert systems and logical rules dominated the field of natural language processing/computational linguistics, but that for the last 10 years, ...
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Neural Net advances in textual entailment and mathematical semantics/logic view on it
I wonder if researchers working on textual entailment using explicit modelling tools (mathematical semantics / logic /formal semantics) have an explanation of recent success of neural networks in ...
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Software for finding syllogisms in treebank data?
Is there treebank search software that can locate a syllogism, identifying its major and minor premises and terms?
cf. Eyal Mozes, “A Deductive Database Based on Aristotelian Logic,” Journal of ...
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directed graph representation of LF
I am a logician new to linguistics. I am curious if there has been any work on using the formalism of directed graphs (as opposed to, say, lambda-calculus or first-order logic) to represent LF of ...
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Is there a linguistic notion of a "static" vs "dynamic" noun?
I would have typed a clearer question in the title, but it would have been way too long.
By "static," I mean a word or phrase that refers to one object, and one object only. ex.
The Eiffel Tower
The ...
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What do the semicolon and period mean in semantics?
What do the semicolon and period mean, please?
For context, this is from Truswell's 'Events, Phrases and Questions' and this section in particular is talking about the causal ordering of events
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How to write 'x said they would do y but...' in predicate logic?
How do I write "X said to Y that they would do A today, but B happened yesterday" in predicate logic?
So for example;
Bart said to Lisa that he would braid her hair today, but he chopped his hand ...
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Motivation behind the definition for existential quantifiers such as *some* in compositional semantics
Natural language quantifiers such as some and a are formalised for compositional semantics as λP.λQ.∃x.P(x)∧Q(x). Compared to the formalisation of quantifiers such as every or all I do not quite ...
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Database of formalized english sentences?
(Not sure if this is the right site to ask)
Is there an online (preferably free) database of English sentences and the corresponding first-order representations?
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What are technical terms and treatments in the literature for the exactly the following special kind of pleonasm?
Question. What is an attested technical term for the following kind of pleonasm? Has this been described scientifically and where? What are other examples than the one I give below?
Let N be a noun. ...
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What is the best/state-of-the-art logic for representing English language?
I know people have used lambda terms which "compile into" first-order logic, but based on what I have seen that is not particularly great for representing complex sentences with causal or temporal ...
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Truth-conditions of predicate-logic formulas for donkey sentences
I'm current learning about compositional semantics, quantifier raising and scope ambiguity in my semantics class and I'm having trouble answering some questions. I've attempted to answer the questions ...
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Louis Couturat on inclusive disjunction in Ido
In Ido, the constructed language he helped to build, Louis Couturat attempted to introduce vel, a conjunction that would express inclusive disjunction—so that, in logical sentences, the conjunction o(...
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What's the difference between metonymy, meronymy, meronomy and mereology?
I know that these terms are used in different subfields of linguistics:
Metonymy and metonyms are used in rhetorics and metaphor theory.
Meronymy and meronyms are used in lexical semantics.
Meronomy, ...
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Is the Logical meaning of 'only if' produced by 'only' (that widens 'if')?
I'm asking for multiple languages, and use grey colour to refer to the concepts denoted by the English words.
Abbreviate Necessary Condition to NC, Sufficient Condition to SC. I already know that:
...
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Universal/commonsense knowledge bases (OpenCog, OpenCyc) for representation of meaning in natural language processing (computational linguistics)
What is the status, endeavours and prospects for the use of universal/commonsense knowledge bases (KB) for the representation of the meaning of the natural languages in natural language processing / ...
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Truth-neutral, truth-indifferent, & truth-committed verbs?
In English,
I go to the store.
is understood to mean
It is true that I go to the store.
Suppose I want to succinctly express
I am indifferent to whether it is true or false that I go to ...
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Does Syntactic Category determines Position in the sentence and the Position in the sentence determines Category?
Source: p 48, Syntax, A Generative Introduction (3 ed, 2012) by Andrew Carnie.
The following is NOT a homework question as I am not studying Linguistics but I have endeavoured to evidence my effort.
...