Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Brazilian Bare Nouns in Subject Position of Episodic Predicates
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Toward a Structural Account of Conservativity
Full text linkIn this paper I propose a structural account of conservativity, which derives it as a byproduct of the syntax-semantics interface. In this approach, the reason for the absence of non-conservative determiners from natural languages is that in entering chain relations in the syntax, they would either lead to trivial meanings (in a sense to be made precise) or to quantificational clauses truth-conditionally equivalent to ones created by regular conservative determiners. In the latter case, I will argue that they do in fact exist but they are undetectable. As for the former case, I will argue that they are excluded because they lead to triviality, either formulated in terms of a constraint against ‘pointless’ lexical items, or with a notion of logical triviality which leads to ungrammaticality (Gajewski, 2002). Finally, I will explore two possible principles that should be coupled with either of the two: (1) DPs always move (2) DPs should always be moveable and will give some arguments for adopting the first principle in (1)
Pragmatic Rationalizability
Full text linkWe present a formal game-theoretic model towards the explanation of implicatures based on the computation of iterated best responses: literal meaning of signals constitutes their default interpretation, and rational communicators decide about their communicative strategies by iteratively calculating the best response to this default strategy. We demonstrate by means of several examples how the resulting pragmatically rationalizable strategies account for different types of implicatures. 
The role of the particle -oo in wh-exclamatives in Telugu and Kannada
Full text linkA non-degree approach like d’Avis (2002) doesn’t work for degree readings of wh-exclamatives since it is based on a Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984) denotation of questions. The Widening account of Zannutini and Portner (2003) doesn’t work for individual/event read- ings of wh-exclamatives because of a Karttunen (1977) denotation of questions. Degree deno- tation approaches to wh-exclamatives can’t explain the variability either. We propose a solution such that the widening account works if we start with Hamblin alternatives. Evidence for the widening mechanism comes from wh-exclamatives in Telugu/Kannada –the particle -oo which imposes a join requirement on the semantic content of its immediate context (Szabolcsi 2015). We propose that the semantic/pragmatic mechanism of wh-exclamatives involves the following three steps –Generating alternatives: wh-focus or other focus mechanisms; Scale to order the alternatives: lexical degree scale/degree morpheme or a likelihood scale; Widening & Dynamic update: Widening of domain from ES to D2 and Add {p} to FCspkr
Partial Semantics for Iterated if-Clauses
Full text linkThis paper argues in favor of a partial semantics for indicative conditionals, along the lines of a proposal made by Belnap in the seventies: conditionals only have a truth value if their antecedent is true, and in this case, their truth value equals the truth value of their consequent. I argue that this semantics offers a way outof the impasse following Gibbard’s (1981) famous proof that if ??(???) and (???)?? are equivalent, ?cannot be stronger than material implication
Final appositives at the right frontier: An experimental investigation of anaphoric potential
Full text linkThis paper presents two experiments testing two—not mutually exclusive—accounts of the special status of final appositive relative clauses (Syrett and Koev, 2015; Anderbois et al., 2010/2015). The speech act account (Frazier et al., 2017) argues that appositives—in contrast to restrictive relative clauses—contribute a quasi-independent speech act and are available for discourse continuations by virtue of constituting the most recent speech act when in final position. The discourse structure account (Jasinskaja, 2016; Hunter and Asher, 2016) frames the problem in terms of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher and Lascarides, 2003), arguing that only sentence-final clauses make discourse segments at the right edge of the discourse structure available and more so with coordinating relations such as NARRATION. The experiments manipulated the type of relative clause and the type of discourse relation holding between the matrix clause and the final relative clause to test the distinct predictions of these accounts. Both relative clause type and discourse relations affected the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns, providing support for both accounts. The experiments also explored differences between personal and propositional pronouns but found no conclusive evidence for an interaction of anaphora type with the other factors
\u27De Re/De Dicto\u27 Ambiguity and Presupposition Projection
No full textThe purpose of this paper is to compare three existing theories of de re/de dicto ambiguity: (i) the scope theory, (ii) the intensional variable theory and (iii) the presupposition projection theory. We will conclude that the presupposition projection theory is the conceptually most desirable among these, although all three are expressive enough to describe the data. In particular, we will present novel data suggesting that the intensional variable theory is too expressive and hence lacks explanatory power