Английская Википедия:Conservativity

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In formal semantics conservativity is a proposed linguistic universal which states that any determiner <math>D</math> must obey the equivalence <math>D(A,B) \leftrightarrow D(A, A\cap B)</math>. For instance, the English determiner "every" can be seen to be conservative by the equivalence of the following two sentences, schematized in generalized quantifier notation to the right.[1][2][3]

  1. Every aardvark bites. <math>\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \rightsquigarrow every(A,B)</math>
  2. Every aardvark is an aardvark that bites. <math>\ \ \rightsquigarrow every(A,A\cap B)</math>

Conceptually, conservativity can be understood as saying that the elements of <math>B</math> which are not elements of <math>A</math> are not relevant for evaluating the truth of the determiner phrase as a whole. For instance, truth of the first sentence above does not depend on which biting non-aardvarks exist.[1][2][3]

Conservativity is significant to semantic theory because there are many logically possible determiners which are not attested as denotations of natural language expressions. For instance, consider the imaginary determiner <math>shmore</math> defined so that <math>shmore(A,B)</math> is true iff <math>|A|>|B|</math>. If there are 50 biting aardvarks, 50 non-biting aardvarks, and millions of non-aardvark biters, <math>shmore(A,B)</math> will be false but <math>shmore(A, A\cap B)</math> will be true.[1][2][3]

Some potential counterexamples to conservativity have been observed, notably, the English expression "only". This expression has been argued to not be a determiner since it can stack with bona fide determiners and can combine with non-nominal constituents such as verb phrases.[4]

  1. Only some aardvarks bite.
  2. This aardvark will only [VP bite playfully.]

Different analyses have treated conservativity as a constraint on the lexicon, a structural constraint arising from the architecture of the syntax-semantics interface, as well as constraint on learnability.[5][6][7]

See also

Notes

Шаблон:Reflist

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