Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Discourse Conditions for Conditional Perfection: Extending Beyond QUDs
Full text linkThis paper develops an account of conditional perfection (CP), the inference that strengthens conditionals from sufficiency (if p, q) to necessity and sufficiency (if and only if p, q). CP follows clear patterns across speech acts: it reliably occurs in inducements, varies in assertions, and is absent in advice (Van Canegem-Ardijns and Van Belle, 2008). I argue that this distribution follows from two discourse conditions: (1) the Exhaustivity Condition (speakers provide complete specification of sufficient conditions) and (2) the Epistemic Authority Condition (speakers are well-positioned to make exhaustive claims). Unlike previous accounts that tie exhaustivity to Questions Under Discussion (von Fintel, 2001), I propose that speech acts themselves structure discourse to satisfy or block these conditions. Commitment-based conditionals impose asymmetric discourse structures that guarantee both conditions, thus reliably triggering CP. Assertions satisfy these conditions only in specific contexts, while advice systematically resists CP by identifying possibilities rather than necessities. This framework explains inconsistent experimental results with QUD manipulations (Cariani and Rips, 2023; Grusdt et al., 2023) and offers a more comprehensive understanding of how diverse communicative functions can shape pragmatic inferences beyond purely informational contexts
At the frontier of quantification: Correlatives, movement and scope
Full text linkThe main goal of this paper is to take a further look at correlatives (CRs), focusing on Hindi and the classic work on it (especially, Dayal (1991a,b, 1996), Bhatt (2003)). Despite the progress in our understanding of these constructions, there are some hard questions pertaining to at least two of their key features, namely bijectivity and locality, that remain in need of satisfactory answers. I’d like to propose a new take on them, based on a movement analysis of all CRs, including multiple ones, something that prima facie appears to be hopeless.Yet, a movement analysis of multiple CRs not only turns out to be viable and make correct predictionsfor Hindi, to an extent that arguably goes beyond the empirical reach of the classical analyses, but it also extends to other languages (e.g. Romanian) and, importantly, enables us to place CRs appropriately in the space of UG quantifiers
Perspective on individuals
Full text linkDavidson’s proposal that action verbs contain a hidden event argument, later refined by Parsons and others, has provided a powerful framework for understanding the logical form of sentences, in particular those involving adverbial modification. In this paper, we parallel this approach in the nominal domain by introducing the notion of perspectives, which function analogously to events. Our goal is to develop a logical account of adnominal modification that mirrors the insights of event semantics.We propose a compositional framework in which adjectives and undetermined noun phrases are interpreted as sets of perspectives rather than sets of individuals or modifiers of sets of individuals. This approach synthesises Fine’s concept of qua objects and Larson’s suggestion that Davidsonian event semantics should be applied to adjectival modification. Our analysis captures entailment relations and intensional aspects of modification without recourse to meaning postulates or possible world semantics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our perspective-based semantics naturally accommodates different adjective classes, including subsective, intersective, modal, and privative adjectives
A propositions-as-types approach to the generalized crossover effect
Full text linkIt has recently been suggested that the crossover effect, standardly understood as a constraint on anaphoric dependencies between quantifiers and pronouns, extends to presupposition projection. Although this observation calls for a unified account of how presupposition can interact with quantifier scope and anaphora, existing theories fail to provide one. We address this challenge by adopting Dependent Type Semantics, a type-theoretical framework that represents propositions as types. In this approach, the interactions among quantifier scope, anaphora, and presupposition are analyzed through a process called type checking, based on which the generalized version of the crossover effect can be uniformly derived
On the diverse interpretations of bare plural generics
Full text linkBare plural generics display varying quantificational force. Previous work (e.g., Krifka et al., 1995; Chierchia, 1998; Leslie, 2007) treats examples like ‘Ravens are black.’, ‘Mosquitoes carry malaria.’, and ‘Ducks lay eggs.’ as distinct cases with distinct semantic analyses. However, these examples are structurally the same; they all display distributive generic predication over a bare plural in an out-of-the-blue context. In this paper, we argue that an adequate account of bare plural generics must (i) treat the bare plural constituent as a plural-object (e.g., in the sense of Link (1983)), (ii) have a uniform logical form, and (iii) advance our understanding about the underlying meaning of bare plural generics. In order to achieve such a treatment of bare plural generics, we propose that generics come with inquisitive content. The inquisitive content updates a sustained discourse context and is meant to be behaviorally relevant. Within the proposed analysis, a sentence like ‘Ravens are black.’ is conveying that we are to ask for each unfamiliar raven individual whether it is black and act as if it were. Accordingly, generic sentences are understood as a tool to convey behaviorally guiding information
The contradiction puzzle for logicality
Full text linkWe submit a new puzzle for logicality. It has been argued that the logicality of language is reflected both in the exclusion of contradictions and tautologies, and in the tendency to maximize information in various interpretive phenomena, such as scalar implicatures. We discuss that these two lines of research take on different and intimately conflicting notions of information. This becomes apparent when we focus on contradictions, that are treated as uninformative on the first line, but would qualify as (maximally) informative assuming the second. We suggest that a more adequate and unitary notion of information for logicality is halfway between the one famously introduced by Bar-Hillel and Carnap and the one defended more recently by L. Floridi, namely stronger than the former but weaker than the latter. Adopting this solution, both tautological and contradictory constructions turn out to be uninformative, but for different reasons. This, in turn, grounds the novel prediction of a differentiated speaker reaction as a function of whether the triviality in question is a contradiction or a tautology, both in grammatical and in ungrammatical cases
Clause-internal causal inferences: Evidence from nouns
Full text linkA substantial body of pragmatics research has explored discourse-level coherence inferences — the links between clauses and even larger units that bind a series of utterances into a narrative. Hobbs (2010) proposed that there are also Clause-internal Coherence (CIC) inferences, such as that in, ‘A jogger was hit by a car,’ where one is likely to infer that the car accident occurred while the jogger was jogging. Recently, Sasaki and Altshuler (2022, 2023) and Yao et al. (2024) have provided experimental evidence that CIC inferences can be drawn between verbs and adjectives. We provide further evidence for CIC inferences, this time between verbs and nouns. Our findings from three ratings studies in English suggest that both deverbal nouns like ‘jogger’ and non-deverbal nouns like ‘widow’ can give rise to causal CIC inferences. This result is significant because it demonstrates the robustness and pervasiveness of CIC inferences, and raises the question of how proposition-like content may be extracted from a nominal element. We propose a formal analysis of CIC inferences with nouns that adopts the key claim of Pure Event Semantics (Schwarzschild, 2024), namely that nouns always describe eventualities. We synthesize this with a core assumption of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher & Lascarides, 2003), namely that the arguments of coherence relations are eventuality descriptions. We argue that this provides us with at least two pathways to formally model CIC with nouns
A non-Boolean analysis of conjunction in additive numerals: A mereotopological approach
Full text linkIn this paper, I investigate the underlying meaning of additive numerals such as two hundred and three. Cross-linguistically, additive numerals often involve a conjunction marker (e.g., Hurford, 1975; Ionin and Matushansky, 2018), which indicates a deep relationship between the expression of arithmetical addition and mereological sum formation. Inspired by the classical results in ontology of numbers showing that numbers are not primitives, but rather complex derived objects, and the ideas concerning the spatial metaphor for numbers by Nouwen (2016) and Matushansky and Zwarts (2017), I propose a mereotopological approach (Grimm 2012 et seq.) to the part-whole structure of additive numerals. I argue that in language numbers are conceptualized as vertically-oriented 1-dimensional maximally self-connected entities (type e) of a given height that can be fused by mereological sum formation. Given the nature of space they occupy and the adopted mereotopological framework, the result is a new greater maximally self-connected object that can be mapped onto its higher point. By utilizing ontological assumptions that were developed independently, the proposed systems allows to capture conjunction in additive numerals as non-Boolean ‘and’
Shifted face emoji in indirect discourse: A mixed-quotational approach
Full text linkFace emoji standardly receive an author-oriented interpretation (Grosz et al., 2021). Moreover, Grosz et al. (2023) claimed that they normally cannot receive a shifted interpretation in indirect discourse (ID). In this paper, we present the results of a rating study showing that emoji can receive a shifted interpretation, i.e., from the matrix subject’s perspective, in ID utterances. Following a suggestion by Ebert and Hinterwimmer (2022), we advocate for an analysis of ID treating it as mixed quotation. Crucially, as we are dealing with multimodal data, we view quotation as an instance of demonstration (Clark and Gerrig, 1990)
Why \u27regret\u27 and \u27realize\u27 can embed false beliefs
No full textVerbs of emotion (e.g., regret) and discovery (e.g., realize) presuppose factivity, but they can felicitously follow false-belief statements that suspend their factivity (Klein, 1975; Gazdar, 1979), in contrast to know. This paper addresses this puzzle by proposing a believe-based account with two ingredients: (i) a lexical semantics of regret and realize that contains a backgrounding operator turning at-issue meanings into presuppositions, and (ii) a theory of presupposition projection in attitude contexts (Karttunen, 1974; Heim, 1992; Sudo, 2014). The factivity of regret and realize is derived as a context-sensitive pragmatic implicature, while the factivity of know is a lexical presupposition that holds across contexts