This paper analyses phenomena of argument reduction with dative and reflexive clitics, as well as clitic doubling, in Bulgarian, arguing that both types of phenomena reflect values of what we call the Completedness Parameter, a cross-linguistically attested parameter involving a combination of diathesis and aspectual properties. For the representation of values relevant to this parameter, we introduce the construct of a (propositional) GESTALT, understood as follows: the gestalt of a sentence S is a conceptual model of the “situation-in-the-world” referred to by S, reflecting the perspective on this situation imposed by S, and aspectual and other properties induced by S.

This paper argues that pragmatic processes and syntactic constraints interact, that we can nevertheless retain the assumption that the natural language faculty is fully encapsulated, and that the problems posed by the phenomenon of gapping (bare argument ellipsis) can be resolved by analysing gapping as an instance of such interaction. A new model of language is sketched out, a model which is a formal reconstruction of assumptions about the language faculty and its relation to central cognitive processes made by Fodor. and Sperber and Wilson. A fragment is defined to cover pronominal anaphoric dependency and quantifier binding, and a new analysis of bare argument ellipsis (gapping) is presented.

Because of the attention given to overt language structure at the expense of associated cognitive constructions, the importance of domain mappings in theories of meaning and language has too often been overlooked. This paper gives a brief outline of the general issues, and studies one intriguing example in more depth: how we talk and think about the cultural notion of schedule in terms of a motion schema with moving points on imaginary scales. At the abstract level considered, it turns out that ‘strange’ reflexives occurring in grammatical constructions linked to this phenomenon are triggered by the same double target configuration found in cases of metonymy, counterfactuals, and mental space connections.

This article deals with the basic issues of the nature of linguistic meaning and the place of semantics in linguistic theory. First, there is a discussion of the implications for semantics of the research paradigm based on formal simulation, concluding that it involves a risk of misrepresenting the place of semantics in linguistics. Second, there is a discussion of the truth-conditional approach, which, although in one important respect it involves a more adequate conception of the role of semantics in language theory, is seen as misrepresenting linguistic meaning in a way that has been pointed out within the cognitive approach to semantics. Third, however, it is argued that the cognitive approach does not sufficiently account for the external anchoring of meaning. Fourth, it is argued that meaning ‘outside the head’ must be understood as basically interactive. A crucial element in the view argued here is the distinction between linguistic, potential meaning, which functions as instructions to the addressee, and actual meaning or ‘message’, which the addressee works out as part of the actual process of interpretation. Within such a picture, the importance of both cognition and truth can be accounted for, and both aspects are seen as dependent on the fundamental embeddedness of language in a shared social universe.

This paper integrates several related lines of research in an implemented model. Its main aim is to show how principles of situation semantics concerning meanings, constraints and the preferred ontology can be represented and mapped onto expressions of natural language in a straightforward way. For assembling larger chunks of information a unification-based approach is used. The semantics is grafted upon a shift- reduce parser which does the main work in associating expressions with meanings. In order to capture the much debated difference between sentence and utterance meaning the whole machinery provides first an abstract meaning (conceived as a constraint) where the parameters are non-anchored. Subsequently, a model in the technical sense provides anchors for parameters and thus yields the utterance meaning of the sentence parsed. Finally, it is checked whether this semantic representation of the parsing result can be regarded as a genuine situation semantic object. This is done by showing that it confirms to the axioms of a situation theoretic model. As a result, parses are far more constrained and theory-guided than usual. The idea of parsing used goes back to work originally done by Barwise and Perry, the coding of semantic entities owes much to proposals issued by K. Devlin and D. Westerdåhl. The whole model is implemented in PROLOG