Workshop & Conference on Linguistic, Computational, and Philosophical Aspects of Generic, Habitual and Mass Terms to be held Summer 1987 at Stanford University

抽象叙事语言学理论的一个关键组成部分是语义学，研究语言表达的含义和方式。这在某种程度上是语言学中最难的部分，因为意义是所说的和所说的之间的关系，所谈论的原则上可以是宇宙中的任何东西，真的或假的，真的或不真实的。在语言语义学的工作中取得的大多数成功，主要是由于对要研究的意义类别设置了严格的限制。因此，进一步的进展取决于逐步放宽这些限制，将更广泛的语言表达纳入一般的语义理论。这里提出的研讨会的目的是将语义学的覆盖范围扩大到一类现象，这些现象在现有的理论模型下对语义分析提出了越来越大的挑战。这些现象是一般的、习惯性的和大量的术语。泛型表达表达了事物的类别，例如，“狗是毛茸茸的。”习惯性表达描述了一种经常发生的活动，即使它可能不是现在正在发生的，例如，“Max阅读时代杂志。”质量术语指的是那些没有区别的物质，它们可能以或多或少的数量存在，但不能被计算在内，如“水”或“盐”。有理由相信，所有这些类型的表达在语义上都是相关的，对处理一种类型的语义理论进行适当修改，原则上也可以处理其他类型的表达。这些表述特别重要，因为它们是科学陈述的典型形式，而我们迄今未能对它们进行令人满意的语义分析，因此无法在计算环境中处理此类陈述。参加研讨会的是语言学家和逻辑学家，他们一段时间以来一直试图从自己的角度来处理与这一组现象相关的语义问题。虽然他们取得了一些显著的进展，但每个人都遇到了重大问题，他们认为，从另一个人的角度来看，这些问题可能是可以攻击的。研讨会将提供一段较长的密集互动时间，使他们能够全面跟进这些线索，并向对这些问题感兴趣的社区其他人报告他们的调查结果。

Abstract Narrative A key component of linguistic theory is semantics, the study of what and how linguistic expressions mean. This is in some ways the most difficult part of linguistics, because meaning is the relationship between what is said and what is talked about, and what is talked about can in principle be anything in the universe, true or false, real or unreal. Most of whatever success there has been in work in linguistic semantics has come about primarily by virtue of setting strict limitations on the classes of meanings to be studied. Further progress depends, then, on progressive relaxation of these limitations, to incorporate broader ranges of linguistic expressions into a general semantic theory. The aim of the workshop proposed here is to accomplish such a broadening of the reach of semantics, to a class of phenomena which have been presenting increasing challenges to semantic analysis under currently available theoretical models. These phenomena are the generic, habitual, and mass terms. Generic expressions say something about classes of things, for example, "Dogs are furry." Habitual expressions describe some kind of activity which happens regularly, even though it may not be happening at the moment, for example, "Max reads Time magazine." Mass terms are those which refer to undifferenti- ated stuff which may be present in greater or lesser quantity, but can't be counted, like "water" or "salt". There is reason to believe that all of these types of expressions are related semantically, and that a proper modification to semantic theory dealing with one type could in principle deal with the other types as well. These expressions are of particular importance because they are the typical form of scientific statements, and our failure so far to be able to perform a satisfactory semantic analysis of them has made it impossible to deal with such statements in a computational environment. The participants in the workshop are linguists and logicians who have been trying to cope with the semantic problems related to this set of phenomena from their own respective perspectives for some time now. While they have made some notable progress, each has encountered significant problems, which they believe may be amenable to attack from the perspective of one of the others. The workshop will provide an extended period of intensive interaction to allow them to follow up these leads fully, and report their findings to the rest of the community interested in these problems.