Du tout au rien:libre-choix et polarité negative

This monograph proposes a general model for the analysis of polysemy. The underspecified content of polysemic items produces interpretations in relation with characterised contextual indicators. This ternary set of schematic representations applies to the meaning organisation of French indefinite qui que ce soit ('any'). Universal positive readings, existential and opposition readings are generated by modalised predicate, a modalised proposition and syntactically adjoined functions. "Affective" contexts yield a negative polarity interpretation, the interpretation is generated through concessive reasoning, which explains how scalar values can be evoked by an item representing arbitrary selection. Such contextual reasoning and characterised contextual indicators are the two modes for the calculation of the contextual interpretation of polysemous items.

L'association négative:depuis la syntaxe jusqu'à l'interprétation

This book untangles the old grammatical paradox allowing for several negations within the same negative clause through his work of the scope of negations. The scope of each negation over the same predicate is what allows for concordant values. The frequent co-occurrence of negative items, cases of double negation and the expletive negative, as compared to constituent negation, help to demonstrate this. Analysis of these phenomena is based on a large body of data of different varieties of French considered in the light of historical, typological, and psycholinguistic tendencies. While extensive reference is made to current analysis, independence is maintained from any particular model. Starting from syntactic generalisations, the work provides an innovative solution to a classic interpretative issue.

L'interprétation des phrases négatives:portée et foyer des négations en français

The organization of linguistic meaning is animated by the duality between the sense of signs and the reference to the experience of speakers. How the presuppositions communicated by speakers emanate from the conventional value of signs and their cotextual dependencies is explored in this monograph on the scope and focus of negation. Negation can have scope over the predicate of the sequence in which it is used. The body of data brought together show that a variety of configurations preclude command of the predicate by the negative scoping over it, and that scope is a semantic rather than structural relation. Scope defines the domain in which an item can be focused by negation. Negative focus is dependent on the evocation of an alternative value, which may be generated by lexical antonymy, syntactic determination or contextual corrections. The study of focus and scope of negation on the basis of attested examples from different varieties of French demonstrates how the independently motivated semantic principles of relation to predicate and reference to an alternative value account for the observed effects.

BOWL:augmenting the semantic web with beliefs

As the Semantic Web is an open, complex and constantly evolving medium, it is the norm, but not exception that information at different sites is incomplete or inconsistent. This poses challenges for the engineering and development of agent systems on the Semantic Web, since autonomous software agents need to understand, process and aggregate this information. Ontology language OWL provides core language constructs to semantically markup resources on the Semantic Web, on which software agents interact and cooperate to accomplish complex tasks. However, as OWL was designed on top of (a subset of) classic predicate logic, it lacks the ability to reason about inconsistent or incomplete information. Belief-augmented Frames (BAF) is a frame-based logic system that associates with each frame a supporting and a refuting belief value. In this paper, we propose a new ontology language Belief-augmented OWL (BOWL) by integrating OWL DL and BAF to incorporate the notion of confidence. BOWL is paraconsistent, hence it can perform useful reasoning services in the presence of inconsistencies and incompleteness. We define the abstract syntax and semantics of BOWL by extending those of OWL. We have proposed reasoning algorithms for various reasoning tasks in the BOWL framework and we have implemented the algorithms using the constraint logic programming framework. One example in the sensor fusion domain is presented to demonstrate the application of BOWL.