maintainedwhether

Maintainedwhether is a term used in contemporary linguistics and natural-language processing to denote an operator or annotation that indicates the truth-conditional content of a proposition should be preserved across certain discourse transformations, such as negation, modulation, or the formation of questions. The term is a neologism and not yet widely standardized, appearing in a small body of theoretical work and experimental NLP studies since the early 2020s.

Definition and concept. At its core, maintainedwhether marks a proposition P with the instruction that the content of P be treated as stable under embedding. In formal semantics, it can be treated as a functional operator Mw applied to a proposition P, producing Mw(P). The operator is designed to interact with standard operators like negation and the interrogative mood, preserving core truth conditions while allowing surface form changes.

Illustrative use. Consider a base proposition P: “The sensor reports normal readings.” Mw(P) signals that this content is intended to remain the reference point in analyses where the sentence is negated or turned into a question. In practice, researchers annotate corpus data with Mw to study entailment and the robustness of inference under transformations.

Applications. Maintainedwhether is used in semantic parsing, discourse analysis, and evaluation of robust question-answering systems. It helps researchers distinguish content that is systematically invariant under discourse shifts from content that changes with scope or modality.

Critique. Some linguists view maintainedwhether as an auxiliary annotation that complicates models without adding clear predictive power, while others see value in explicit annotation for training robust NLP systems. See also: negation, whether operator, truth-conditional semantics, discourse annotation.