Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Dual Number in Kazym Khanty: Not-at-issue content that does not project
Full text linkThe Projection Principle (Beaver et al. 2017) states that semantic content projects iff it is not-at-issue. This paper presents a counterexample to this claim: the dual number in Kazym Khanty featuring the duality implication that is not-at-issue content that does not project
A framework for performative and assertive updates
Full text linkThis article develops a framework for the representation of performative speech acts, in particular declarations (including explicit performatives) and assertions. It is a dynamic framework that treats these speech acts as updates of a common ground, modelled as a context set. It distinguishes between two kinds of updates: Informative updates restrict the indices of the context set by adding information, whereas performative updates change the indices, thus creating new facts. The article discusses the notion of index change in detail and presents an analysis of declarations as performative updates with a proposition concerning social facts. Assertions are specialized performative updates with a truth commitment by the speaker with implicated intention to bring about a corresponding informative update. It also discusses the various tense and aspect forms that are used to express declarations. Finally, it argues that locutionary acts can be modelled as performative updates as well and proposes a treatment of the performative marker \u27hereby\u27
When subjects do not agree: A semantic perspective
Full text linkIn this paper we examine a number of constructions that show lack of agreement between the subject and either the verb or some constituent within the predicate. We focus on Non-Agreeing Degree constructions (Mendia and Espinal, 2024), which we compare with so-called Pancake Sentences (Enger, 2004; Wechsler, 2011; Haugen and Enger, 2019) and Topic Categorical Sentences (Britto, 2000). All three constructions show a non-standard agreement pattern that nevertheless signals some form of semantic shift in interpretation. We argue that, despite surface similarities, these constructions do not belong to the same category
Polarity reversal questions and the semantics of prosodic incorporation
Full text linkEnglish polarity reversal questions (PRQs, e.g. \u27Gertrude mowed the lawn, didn’t she?\u27) comprise individual biased questions despite the fact they consist of two apparently independent clauses, which, if uttered as two prosodically distinct sentences (\u27Gertrude mowed the lawn. Didn’t she?\u27) give instead the sense that the speaker is backtracking on their claim. Many recent accounts stipulate the special discourse effects of PRQs into their context update potential at the level of a construction (Malamud and Stephenson, 2015; Farkas and Roelofsen, 2017; Bill and Koev, 2023: a.o.). We propose that the range of interpretations of PRQs, and their difference from string-identical sequences of two sentences, can be attributed to the fact that PRQs are prosodically integrated, packaging two syntactically independent clauses into a single Intonational Phrase and thus a single context update. We argue that this assumption, combined with a vanilla treatment of the discourse effects of uttering declarative and interrogative clauses, can derive the interpretations of PRQs, explain important limitations on their form, and account for their differences from non-integrated sequences, without relying on construction-specific stipulations
Discourse consistency and dynamic modals in commitment space semantics
Full text linkThis paper examines puzzles surrounding epistemic contradiction as well as cases known as “standoff.” To resolve these puzzles, I incorporate Veltman’s (1996) test conception of epistemic modals into Krifka’s (2021) commitment space semantics. The resulting framework is a two-pronged update semantics in which an epistemic possibility claim ♢\u27p\u27 carries the discourse effect of delimiting future developments of the discourse to those states where \u27p\u27 remains as an open possibility
Foreword
Full text linkIt is our pleasure to present the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 28 – the first-ever SuB to be held by the growing group of semanticists at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB), Germany. SuB28 took place at RUB’s Convention Center from September 5-9, 2023. The conference was jointly organized by the RUB Institute for Linguistics, the Linguistic Data Science Lab, the Institute for German Language and Literature, and the Departments of Philosophy I and II. The conference featured a three-day main session (Sept. 6-8) and a one-day special session on ‘The Semantics and Pragmatics of Co-Speech Communication’ (Sept. 5)
On the natural language metaphysics of amounts
Full text linkIn DPs like \u27the amount of nuts you ate\u27 or \u27the number of cooks you hired\u27, a quantity noun (\u27amount\u27, \u27number\u27) combines with an entity noun (\u27nuts\u27, \u27cooks\u27). Such \u27quantity DPs\u27 are surprisingly flexible: they can saturate not only quantity predicates, like \u27be 50 grams \u27or \u27be three\u27, but also predicates of ordinary entities, like \u27eat\u27 or \u27hire\u27. To explain this flexibility, Scontras (2017) takes quantity DPs to denote not primitive quantities like 50g or 3, but set theoretic constructs that somehow \u27contain\u27 the entities described by the entity noun (e.g., nuts or cooks). We explore a choice point in developing this approach: the relevant set theoretic structures—we call them \u27rich amounts\u27—can be construed either as sets of entities, given by the entity noun’s extension, or as properties, based on the entity noun’s intension. We show that this choice constitutes a dilemma. The dilemma arises with reference to quantity DPs without modifiers (e.g., the amount of nuts) and quantity DPs with relativization from an intensional context (e.g., \u27the amount of nuts you want to eat\u27). Construing rich amounts as sets of entities yields a credible analysis of the former data, but not of the latter. Construing them as properties can capture the latter data, but requires auxiliary assumptions without independent support to accommodate the former. As the two choices exhaust the relevant analytical possibilities, the dilemma questions the utility of rich amounts for semantic composition
Ideophones as iconic mixed items
Full text linkIdeophones such as the German \u27plitsch platsch\u27 ‘splish splash’, \u27holterdipolter\u27 ‘helter-skelter’ and \u27ratzfatz\u27 ‘very quickly, fast’ have long been considered exceptions to the rule ofarbitrariness in natural language. However, they have been argued to be a near universal feature of language (cf. Diffloth (1972); Kilian-Hatz (1999)) and with the increased interest in the meaning contributions of iconic forms (cf. Ebert et al. (2020); Esipova (2019); Schlenker (2018b, a) among others), this article aims to contribute to the growing literature on iconicity and meaning by presenting an analysis of ideophones as “iconic mixed items”, combining both descriptive and depictive meaning, similar to the expressive mixed items discussed by McCready (2010); Gutzmann (2011)
Indexical binding, presuppositions and agreement
Full text linkThis paper focuses on bound readings of first and second person pronouns, which challenge Kaplan’s (1977/1989) fixity theory of indexicals. It first reviews the virtues and problems of the two main previous analyses: morphosyntactic approaches exploiting binding and agreement, and semantic approaches exploiting focus and presupposition. Next, it proposes a novel account combining all these ingredients based in part on new French data
Projection variation: Is the family of sentences really a family?
Full text linkUnder the ‘family of sentences’ diagnostic for projection, the projection of content is investigated by embedding the expression that contributes the content in the scope of negation, polar questions, epistemic possibility modals, and conditional antecedents. This paper reports on the results of a set of experiments designed to investigate whether there is variation in the projection of content from under these four types of entailment-canceling operators. The contents investigated are the contents of the complements of 20 English clause-embedding predicates. The results of the experiments suggest (i) that the by-operator variation is small when aggregating over the 20 contents, but (ii) that the effect of operator differs between the clause-embedding predicates. The results of these experiments also extend a result of Degen and Tonhauser 2022, that projection ratings in polar questions do not categorically distinguish factive from non-factive predicates, to cases with negation, the epistemic possibility modal \u27perhaps\u27, and conditional antecedents. The observed by-predicate and by-operator variation is not captured by existing theoretical accounts of projection (e.g., Heim 1983, van der Sandt 1992, Abrusán 2011, Schlenker 2021). Our results suggest that an empirically adequate projection analysis must consider interactions between predicates and operators