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International Conference on Formal Grammar

International Conference on Formal Grammar

FG 2015, FG 2016: Formal Grammar pp 3–18Cite as

Frames as Records

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9804))

Abstract

We suggest a way of formalizing frames using records in type theory. We propose an analysis of frames as records which model situations (including events) and we suggest that frame types (record types) are important in both the analysis of the Partee puzzle concerning rising temperatures and prices and in the analysis of quantification which involves counting events rather than individuals likes passengers or ships passing through a lock.

Our original inspiration for frames comes from the work of [13, 14] and work on FrameNet (https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu). An important aspect of our approach to frames, which differs from the Fillmorean approach, is that we treat them as first class objects. That is, they can be arguments to predicates and can be quantified over. The proposal that we have made for solving the Partee puzzle is closely related to the work of [22, 23] whose inspiration is from the work of [1–3] rather than Fillmore.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An expanded version of this paper with a more detailed formal development is available as Chap. 5 of a book draft [7]. This book draft also gives a general introduction to TTR (the type theory with records that we are using here). For a published introduction see [6].

  2. 2.

    Our treatment of the Partee puzzle here represents an improvement over the proposal presented in Cooper [6] in that it allows a more general treatment of the type of rising events.

  3. 3.

    The idea of events as strings is taken from an important series of papers by Fernando, [8–12] among others.

  4. 4.

    Although in astronomical terms, of course, even a location like London is a relative location, that is, where London is according to the rotation of the earth and its orbit around the sun. Thus the simple cases are not really different from the cases apparently involving paths.

  5. 5.

    As of 13th May 2015.

  6. 6.

    It is possible to code up a notation for quantification in feature structures but that is not the same as giving a semantics for it.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg, Box 200, 405 30, Göteborg, Sweden

    Robin Cooper

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  1. Robin Cooper
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Correspondence to Robin Cooper .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IRISA, University of Rennes 1 , Rennes, France

    Annie Foret

  2. Department of Computer Science, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya , Barcelona, Spain

    Glyn Morrill

  3. Tilburg University , Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Reinhard Muskens

  4. Department of General Linguistics, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf , Düsseldorf, Germany

    Rainer Osswald

  5. INRIA Nancy, Villers-lès-Nancy, France

    Sylvain Pogodalla

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Cooper, R. (2016). Frames as Records. In: Foret, A., Morrill, G., Muskens, R., Osswald, R., Pogodalla, S. (eds) Formal Grammar. FG FG 2015 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9804. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53042-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53042-9_1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-53041-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-53042-9

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