(Non)culmination by abduction

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3989004
AutoresZsófia Gyarmathy (GNW Kft , Szépvölgyi út 56 , Budapest, 1025 , Hungary), Daniel Altshuler (0000-0003-4017-8412, Hampshire College, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen58
Número5
Páginas1373-1411
Fecha de publicación2020-11-26
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLinguistics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0024-3949 • E-ISSN: 1613-396X
EditorialWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/ling-2020-0103
OpenAlexW3082134152
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas42

Recent literature has aimed to explain (non-)culminating accomplishment inferences, which often involve the perfective aspect, but can also involve the imperfective. The goal of our paper is to explore how these inferences come about with the Hindi perfective and the Russian imperfective. We propose thatabduction, that is, inference to the best explanation, is ideally suited for this task. We show how the occurrence of a (non-)culminated event is abduced in the relevant cases based on a semantic analysis which adopts the distinction betweenculminatedandmaximalevents, as well as a set of non-defeasible rules encoding general mereological principles. We also show how our abductive framework can take into account facts about the conversation. This, among other things, allows us to make more nuanced predictions about what speakers will infer and when, thereby addressing possible worries of overgeneralization that an abductive framework inevitably faces. We end the paper with two outstanding issues warranting further research. First, we raise questions about the nature of (non-)culminating accomplishment inferences, which have previously been taken to be conversational implicatures. Second, we take some preliminary steps towards extending our analysis to defeasible causatives in Germanic and Romance languages

Abductive reasoning · Defeasible estate · Epistemology · Event (particle physics) · Inference · Linguistics · Mereology · Set (abstract data type) · Task (project management) · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation