Monotonicity (Summary)

Thu Jun 6 07:42:34 UTC 1996

Dear listers:

A while back I posted an inquiry on monotonicity of quantifiers
(particularly Spanish comparatives). This is a brief account of what I
have been answered for the moment (N.B.: I posted the message in various
lists, so information coming from various lists is mentioned below). Many
thanks are due (for references and/or judgements and/or comments) to
(order irrelevant. Hope I did not miss anyone, who, in that case, is
begged to forgive me (or my server)): 

Matti J. Kinnunen, David Dowty, Steven Schaufele, Emily Bender, Rosie 
Jones, Richard Winters, Jennifer Arnold, Michael Israel, William Byrne, 
Karl-Erik Paasonen, Michael Calcagno, Cathryn Donohue, Fernando J.S. 
Martinho, Paul de Lacy, Guillermo Lorenzo, Annabel Cormack, Victor 
Balaban, Nancy De Pas and Hans Smessaert. 

Although not as a reaction to my posting but somewhat as a consequence of 
it, I benefited from information by Ton van der Wouden, Victor Sanchez 
Valencia and Gertjan Postma, to whom thanks must go, too.

These are the references or links I was given; I do not distribute the 
judgements or comments, beeing irrelevant, to my view, out of context. Anyway,
I will send them to anyone interested.

##Matti J. Kinnunen mentioned Westerstahl's paper on Handbook of 
Philosophical Logic, IV, pp. 1-131. 

##David Dowty directed me to a paper of his "on downward monotone context and
negative polarity/negative concord that was published in the proceedings 
of the 1994 SALT (conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory); it 
includes a provisionary analysis of the differences in concord triggering 
among several Romance languages, including Spanish and Catalan. (...) The 
paper is available on line by anonymous ftp:

	ling.ohio-state.edu/pub/dowty/salt-iv.dvi.Z"

##Michael Israel suggested "Ton van der Wouden's 1994 dissertation, 
"Negative Contexts" from the University of Groningen. His focus is on 
negative and positive polarity, but he covers a lot of 
ground and has a very useful bibliography.  It should be appearing in 
book form (or be out, but I (Israel) don't know the publisher)." 
(It is available on

	freya.let.rug.nl/Linguistics

and a revised version will be soon published by Routledge, as Ton van der 
Wouden subsequently informed me).

Michael Israel continues: "There's in fact been a lot of work at 
Groningen on monotonicity. Other dissertations to look at include Mark 
Kas (1993) Essays on Boolean Functions and Negative Polarity, and Victor 
Sanchez (1991) "Studies on natural Logic and Categorial Grammar."

You might also be interested in the work of Loebner, in particular,
"Quantification as a Major Module of Natural Language Semantics"
in Studies in Discourse Representation Theory and the Theory of
Generalized Quantifiers"  Groenendijk, de Jongh and Stokhof (eds),
1987.

These are all very formal approaches to the subject.  If you are
interested in less mathematically based discussions (and even if
you're not, actually)  I'd also recommend going back to the early
papers of Gilles Fauconnier (refs can be found in Ladusaw 1980, I 
believe) for an early formulation of the insights.

My own work, "Polarity Sensitivity as Lexical Semantics" (to appear
in Linguistics and Philosophy, hopefully soon) argues that monotonicity
based accounts of polarity sensitivity, while on the right track,
are empirically inferior to an account based on a more pragmatic
conception of scalar inferencing.  Of course, my work suffers the
drawback of not being rigidly formalized, at least not yet.
(...)
... Which reminds of one more reference on "any", again by me:
"Negative Polarity and Phantom Reference" from BLS 21, 1995.

Also, if you're interested in "any" you should check out Kadmon
and Landman's article, "Any", in Linguistics and Philosophy 16:353-422
(1993)."

## Michael Israel, as well as William Byrne, also suggested me
to contact Raul Aranovich.

##Michael Calcagno "would start with victor sanchez-valencia's work on 
"natural logic," being done within categorial grammar, and david dowty's 
salt iv paper on negative polarity and negative concord..." 

##Fernando J.S. Martinho directed me to Cherchia/Partee/Turner (1989),
"Properties, types and meaning", Dordrecht, Kluwer and to the work done by
Greg Carlson. 

##Ton van der Wouden pointed to "other papers by me that may be relevant
for you are "Polarity and `Illogical Negation'", published in a 1994 CSLI
volume edited by Makoto Kanazawa and Christopher J. Pinon entitled
Dynamics, polarity, and quantification (pages 17-45), and "A Semantic
Analysis of Negative Concord" (together with Frans Zwarts), presented at
SALT III 1993 and published in the proceedings edited by Utpal Lahiri and
Adam Zachary Wyner and published by the Cornell University Department of
Modern Languages and Linguistics (202-219). Jack Hoeksema's paper on
"Monotonicity Phenomena in Natural Language" (Linguistic Analysis 16
(1986), 25-40) may be interesting for you as well. The same holds for a
recent special issue on negative polarity of Linguistic Analysis (vol. 25,
number 3-4, 1995), edited by Hoeksema. Gertjan Postma of Leiden University
has recently tried to analyze downward monotonicity in structural terms." 

##Victor Sanchez Valencia included this bibliography in his response

@article {Carden:Comparative,
 author = {Guy Carden},
 title = {Comparatives and Factives},
 year = 1977,
 journal = li,
 volume = 8,
 pages = {163--167}
}

@incollection {Clark:Comparatives,
 author = {Herbert H. Clark},
 title = {Comprehending comparatives},
 year = 1970,
 editor = {Flores d'Arcais, G. and Levelt, W.J.M.},
 booktitle = {Advances in psycholinguistics},
 address = {Amsterdam},
 publisher = {North Holland}
}

@article {Hoeksema:83,
 author = "Jack Hoeksema",
 year = 1983,
 title = "Negative Polarity and the Comparative",
 journal = "Natural Language and Linguistic Theory"
 volume = 1,
 pages = "403--34"
}

@article {Hoeksema:Comparative-continued,
 author = {Jack Hoeksema},
 journal = {Journal of Semantics},
 title = {To be Continued: The Story of the Comparative},
 volume = 3,
 annote = {uit diss. Zwarts},
 year = 1984,
 pages = {93-107}
}

@incollection{klein2,
author = {E. Klein},
title = {The Interpretation of adjectival, nominal and adverbial
comparatives},
booktitle = {Formal Methods in the Study of Language},
editor = {J.A.G. Groenendijk, T.M.V. Janssen and M.B.J. Stokhof},
volume = {2},
pages = {381--398},
publisher = {Mathematical Centre Tracts},
year = 1980}

@article{klein1,
author = "E. Klein",
year = 1980,
title = "A Semantics for Positive and Comparative Adjectives",
journal = " Linguistics and Philosophy",
volume = 89,
pages = {1--45}
} 

@incollection {Seuren:Graduable,
 author = {Seuren, Pieter A.M.},
 booktitle = {Chicago Linguistic Society},
 publisher = {Chicago Linguistic Society},
 volume = 14,
 year = 1978,
 pages = {336--346},
 title = {The Structure and Selection of Positive and Negative
Graduable Adjectives}
}

@incollection {Seuren:Comparative,
 author = {Seuren, Pieter A.M.},
 title = {The Comparative},
 editor = {Ferenc Kiefer and Nicolas Ruwet},
 booktitle = {Generative Grammar in Europe},
 publisher = {Reidel},
 address = {Dordrecht},
 year = 1973,
 pages = {528--564}
}

@article {Seuren:Comparative-rev,
 author = {Seuren, Pieter A.M.},
 journal = {Journal of Semantics},
 title = {The Comparative Revisited},
 volume = 3,
 annote = {uit diss. Zwarts},
 year = 1984,
 pages = {109--141}
}

@article {Stechow:Comparing,
 author = {Arnim von Stechow},
 title = {Comparing Semantic Theories of Comparison},
 journal = {Journal of Semantics},
 volume = 3,
 year = 1984,
 pages = {1--77}
}

@phdthesis {Laka:Negation,
 author = {Laka Mugarza, Itziar},
 title = {Negation in syntax: On the nature of functional categories
                  and projections}, 
 year = 1990,
 note = {(MIT working papers in linguistics, Cambridge, MA.)},
 school = {MIT}
}

@incollection {Laka:Sigma,
 author = {Laka Mugarza, Itziar},
 title = {Negative fronting in {R}omance: Movement to {$\Sigma$}},
 booktitle = {Linguistic Perspectives on the Romance languages.
                  Selected papers from the 21st linguistic symposium
                  on Romance languages (LSRL XXI), Santa Barbara,
                  California, 21-24 Februari 1994},
 editor = {William J. Ashby and Marianne Mithun and Giorgio
                  Perissinotto and Eduardo Raposo},
 pages = {315--33},
 year = 1993,
 address = {Amsterdam},
 publisher = {John Benjamins}
}

@article {Laka:NELS92,
 author = {Laka Mugarza, Itziar},
 title = {Negative complementizers: interclausal licensing of negative
                  polarity items}, 
 year = 1992,
 journal = {NELS},
 volume = 22,
 pages = {275--89}
}

@incollection {Laka:Basque,
 author = {Laka Mugarza, Itziar},
 title = {Sentence Negation in {B}asque},
 year = 1990,
 booktitle = {Homenaje a Luis Mitxelena},
 editor = {J. Lakarra},
 address = {Bilbao, Spain}
}

@article {Laka:Constraints,
 author = {Laka Mugarza, Itziar},
 title = {Constraints on Sentence Negation},
 journal = {MIT Working Papers},
 volume = 10,
 year = 1989,
 pages = {199-216}
}

@book {Bosque:Sobre,
 year = 1980,
 title = {Sobre la negaci\'on},
 author = {Bosque, Ignacio},
 address = {Madrid},
 publisher = {C\'atedra}
}

@phdthesis {Oviedo,
 author = {Oviedo, Tito Nelson},
 title = {Mood and negation in Spanish noun clauses},
 note = {Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1985 (UB Utrecht)},
 school = {UCLA},
 year = 1974
}

##Guillermo Lorenzo referred me to his own dissertation: Geometria de las
Estructuras Nominales. Sintaxis y Semantica del SDet. Publicaciones del
Dpto de Filologia Espanola, Oviedo, 1995. 

##Gertjan Postma told me to "see my dissertation chapter 3. Some
interpretive effects of ACD are discussed in chapter 4.4.4 You can
find/order it through my home page".
http://www.xs4all.nl/~guian/postma.html
http://oasis.leidenuniv.nl/hil/faculty/students/postma.htm

##Nancy de Pas pointed to Intensional Logic
and Logical Grammar, vol 2 by LTF Gamut, U of Chicago press 1991.

##Annabel Cormack announced an article on monotonicity and comparatives in 
Linguistics and Philosophy, 19:3.

##Hans Smessaert directed me to a paper by him also in the last issue of 
Linguistics and Philosophy. An abstract is available on 

http://www.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/~hans/monlpsum.htm

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Thank you all very much. See you on the net.

Jose Luis Sancho