Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 6517

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 6517"

Harriet Matthews
6 years ago
Views:

1 Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 6517 Edited by R. Goebel, J. Siekmann, and W. Wahlster Subseries of Lecture Notes in Computer Science FoLLI Publications on Logic, Language and Information Editors-in-Chief Luigia Carlucci Aiello, University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy Michael Moortgat, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Editorial Board Carlos Areces, INRIA Lorraine, France Nicholas Asher, University of Texas at Austin, TX, USA Johan van Benthem, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Raffaella Bernardi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy Antal van den Bosch, Tilburg University, The Netherlands Paul Buitelaar, DFKI, Saarbrücken, Germany Diego Calvanese, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy Ann Copestake, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom Robert Dale, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia Luis Fariñas, IRIT, Toulouse, France Claire Gardent, INRIA Lorraine, France Rajeev Goré, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Reiner Hähnle, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden Wilfrid Hodges, Queen Mary, University of London, United Kingdom Carsten Lutz, Dresden University of Technology, Germany Christopher Manning, Stanford University, CA, USA Valeria de Paiva, Palo Alto Research Center, CA, USA Martha Palmer, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA Alberto Policriti, University of Udine, Italy James Rogers, Earlham College, Richmond, IN, USA Francesca Rossi, University of Padua, Italy Yde Venema, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom Ian H. Witten, University of Waikato, New Zealand

2 Rick Nouwen (Eds.) Vagueness in Communication International Workshop, ViC 2009 held as part of ESSLLI 2009 Bordeaux, France, July 20-24, 2009 Revised Selected Papers 13

3 Series Editors Randy Goebel, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada Jörg Siekmann, University of Saarland, Saarbrücken, Germany Wolfgang Wahlster, DFKI and University of Saarland, Saarbrücken, Germany Volume Editors Rick Nouwen Utrecht University, Utrecht Institute for Linguistics OTS Janskerkhof 13a, 3512 BL Utrecht, The Netherlands University of Amsterdam, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) Oude Turfmarkt , 1012 GC Amsterdam, The Netherlands Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Schützenstraße 18, Berlin, Germany Fraunhofer FIT, Schloss Birlinghoven Sankt Augustin, Germany ISSN e-issn ISBN e-isbn DOI / Springer Heidelberg Dordrecht London New York Library of Congress Control Number: CR Subject Classification (1998): I.2.7, I.2, H.3, H.4, F.4.1, F.4.3 LNCS Sublibrary: SL 7 Artificial Intelligence Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the German Copyright Law of September 9, 1965, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Violations are liable to prosecution under the German Copyright Law. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Typesetting: Camera-ready by author, data conversion by Scientific Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (

4 Preface Most of the papers in this volume originate from the workshop Vagueness in Communication that was held during the 2009 European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information in Bordeaux, France. Although vagueness has long since been an important topic in philosophy, logic and linguistics, some recent advances have made the functions of vagueness in natural language communication an exciting and timely research area. This renewed interest has a distinct cross-disciplinary character and has spawned many new research questions. The workshop brought together researchers whose work contributes to the cross-disciplinary line of inquiry, in particular by broadening the empirical base for the study of vagueness, by offering a synthesis of theories from different disciplines, and by addressing the pragmatics of vagueness. It thereby provided a forum for lively discussions on recent and on-going work. The workshop was organized by the four editors of the present volume and Manfred Krifka, who unfortunately could not participate in the editorship of this volume because of other commitments. We would like to thank all the workshop participants for their contributions to the success of the workshop and the quality of the papers in this volume. Specifically, we thank the Program Committee, Graeme Forbes, Peter Gärdenfors, Hans Kamp, Stefan Kaufmann, Chris Kennedy, Ewan Klein, Manfred Krifka, Manfred Kupffer, Louise McNally, Christian Plunze, Marieke Schouwstra, Markus Schrenk, Yoad Winter and Thomas Ede Zimmermann for their help in selecting suitable contributions. We would also like to acknowledge the additional referees that were willing to advise us and the authors on the papers for this volume: Marta Abrusan, Anton Benz, Chris Kennedy, Sveta Krasikova, Chris Potts, Diania Raffman, David Schlangen, Kristen Syrett and Frank Veltman. We would like to thank Matthias Daubitz for TEXnical and editorial support during the preparation of the final version of this volume. Rick Nouwen acknowledges support from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientic Research (NWO) for the Degrees Under Discussion project. Robert van Rooij is supported by the NWO for the On Vagueness And How to Be Precise project as well as the ESF VAAG project. thanks the German Research Foundation DFG for its financial support through grants SA/925-1 and SA/925-4, the latter within the Eurocores LogiCCC program as part of the research project VAAG. The completion of this volume was furthermore aided by a grant from the ESF within the Eurocores LogiCCC program for editorial support. November 2010 Rick Nouwen

5 Table of Contents Introduction... 1 Rick Nouwen,,, and On the Psychology of Truth-Gaps Sam Alxatib and Jeff Pelletier The Rationality of Round Interpretation Harald Bastiaanse Supervaluationism and Classical Logic Pablo Cobreros Perceptual Ambiguity and the Sorites Paul Égré Context-Dependence and the Sorites Graeme Forbes Temporal Vagueness, Coordination and Communication Ewan Klein and Michael Rovatsos Vagueness as Probabilistic Linguistic Knowledge Daniel Lassiter The Relative Role of Property Type and Scale Structure in Explaining the Behavior of Gradable Adjectives Louise McNally Contradictions at the Borders David Ripley Notes on the Comparison Class Stephanie Solt Author Index

Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 6042

Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 6042 Edited by R. Goebel, J. Siekmann, and W. Wahlster Subseries of Lecture Notes in Computer Science FoLLI Publications on Logic, Language and Information Editors-in-Chief