- Lori S. Levin. 2014. Keynote Lecture 3: Modeling Non-Propositional Semantics. Abstract: By non-propositional semantics, we mean things other than semantic roles that are expressed in a single sentence and tend to be grammaticalized. These include tense, aspect, modality, existence, possession, causality, conditionality, comparison, quantification, and definiteness. Non-propositional semantic categories evade definition because they are prototypes, not discrete categories. The centroids match across languages, but the extensions of the prototypes do not match. Furthermore, the grammaticalization of non-propositional semantics varies widely, including lexical items, affixes, and syntactic constructions, making cross-linguistic models difficult. In this talk we will focus on definiteness. Definiteness differs widely in grammaticalization across languages. We will present an annotation scheme that captures the semantic points that are relevant for definiteness across languages and logistic regression model of definiteness for English.
