Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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From perfectivity to performativity in conditionals
Get PDFThis paper documents a novel pattern in the expression of conditional statements about future in Farsi. When both p and ¬p are equally plausible future events, the antecedent of conditional statements about future can either be marked with imperfective or perfective. Conditionals whose antecedent is marked with \u27perfective\u27 necessarily give rise to \u27performative\u27 interpretations in the consequent. I propose an analysis that derives the differences between the two conditionals from their sole linguistics difference, i.e. the semantics of aspectual heads, and general principles of pragmatic reasoning
Modifying the ordering source – unstressed \u27überhaupt\u27 in German purpose clauses
No full textMy goal is to reconcile the seemingly unrelated meanings of the two variants of the German particle \u27überhaupt\u27, stressed \u27überhaupt\u27 (≈ ‘at all’, ‘in general’) and unstressed \u27überhaupt\u27 (≈ ‘even’) in one specific embedded case: purpose clauses with the complementizer \u27um\u27. I propose an account of \u27überhaupt\u27 in purpose clauses that does justice to its focus-sensitive scalar meaning but keeps intact the domain widening meaning, as argued for by Anderssen 2006 for the stressed variant. I claim that unstressed \u27überhaupt\u27 modifies the bouletic ordering source in purpose clauses by excluding all higher ranked focus alternatives of the embedded proposition \u27q\u27 in \u27p in order to q\u27. The result is a wider domain which is quantified over by a bouletic modal included in the purpose clause with um
Meiosis and hyperbole as scalar phenomena
Get PDFMeiosis and hyperbole are phenomena that involve deliberate under- and overstatements that are uttered without the intention to deceive or otherwise break with cooperative communication. Much of the literature on these figures of speech concerns the specific rhetorical roles they play as well as their relation to other tropes, like metaphor and irony. In this work, I intend to study meiosis and hyperbole from a truth-conditional perspective. In particular, I look at how we can define under- and overstatement in terms of the relation between the propositional content and a contextually salient scale. The resulting theory is empirically grounded by empirical tests and formalized in a standard framework of possible world semantics. The advantage of doing this is twofold: (i) it will become possible to provide formal clarity on how to classify certain untruthful utterances and (ii) we can make explicit the role semantic content plays in the deliberate utterance of untruthful statements
Exceptives and cardinality
Get PDFThere are two schools of thoughts on exceptives. The “Fintelians” take exceptives to be modifiers of the NP argument of the determiner, while the “Anti-Fintelians” take them to be something else. I present the observation that exceptives do not tolerate cardinal determiners. I then discuss the problem it poses for two Anti-Fintelian analyses and propose a Fintelian account. The main idea of the account is that exceptives introduce subdomain alternatives
Conditional \u27then\u27 and the QUD-approach to conditional perfection
No full textIn this paper, we (re)consider the role of conditional \u27then\u27 in bringing about conditional perfection (CP; Geis and Zwicky (1971) and much subsequent work): the pragmatic step from a conditional \u27if p, q\u27 to \u27if and only if p, q\u27. Our starting point is von Fintel (2001), according to whom CP depends on the type of question under discussion (QUD) preceding the conditional. Particular attention is devoted to focus placement on conditional \u27then\u27 in German (\u27then_F\u27), which we argue to come with an exhaustive presupposition (Bassi et al., 2021): \u27if p, then_F q\u27 exhaustively presupposes no previously considered antecedent p′ to make the consequent q true. A challenge is raised by cataphoric uses of German \u27then_F\u27, where said presupposition does not (always) seem to be triggered
On the Cross-Linguistic Variation of \u27One-Step Past-Referring\u27 Tenses
No full textThis paper proposes a new look at the so-called \u27present-perfect puzzle\u27. It suggests that it is in fact part of a bigger problem, concerning all tenses in a language situating an event one step before the moment of utterance.I argue that present perfects compete with simple past tenses, and that the distribution of these tenses shows signs of the impact of this competition. The outcome of the competition is argued to be heavily dependent on which of the two tense-forms is the default.A pragmatic theory is proposed which accounts for the reduced distribution of the present perfect in languages like English and Spanish, and the reduced distribution of the simple past tense in languages like French and German
A four-way distinction in English definite expressions
Get PDFAnalyses of pronouns, definite descriptions, and demonstratives range from treating them to be independent of each other to treating them with parallel semantics. In this paper, I compare the semantic contribution of different building blocks of these expressions and propose to delineate the semantic space of definite descriptions along two dimensions: between the form of the content (pronominal vs. description) and the mechanism of reference (anaphoric vs. deictic). To support this, I provide two pieces of evidence. First, I show that deictic and anaphoric pronouns have distinct semantic and distributional properties. Second, I show that the NP content of a definite description makes the same semantic contribution as the gender inference of a pronoun
Perfective in Eastern Armenian
Get PDFIn this paper I investigate the -c’ perfective in Armenian addressing two puzzles related to its semantics. First, it is possible to cancel the culmination inference of an accomplishment VP in -c’ perfective only if the event started a short while ago, and second, likewise, some stative verbs in the -c’ perfective allow cancelation of the culmination inference. I propose that -c’ perfective is the realization of two operators; a \u27ER\u27 operator that establishes \u27a process\u27 or \u27transition\u27 relation between eventualities and events, and a \u27Result\u27 operator that introduces a relation between a state and the event that caused it. The major contribution of this paper is to advance our understanding of the cross-linguistic options for encoding completed events and to show how micro-variation between languages can be captured by breaking down perfective aspect into component parts
On the semantics of unit fractions
Get PDFWe present two novel observations concerning the linguistic behavior of unit fractions, e.g., ‘half‘, ‘third‘ etc., which challenge their analysis as proportional quantifiers/modifiers, arguing instead that in certain environments fractions presuppose ‘contextually salient‘ partitions over individuals. We distinguish environments that require a salient partition from those that do not, and propose a syntax and semantics for fractions that derives the distinction
Semantic opposition coordination: An argument for question settlement
Get PDFThis paper studies coordination by \u27whereas\u27 and “semantic opposition" \u27but\u27, and asks to what extent the conjuncts should parallel and differ from each other. I argue for a question-based analysis in line with Jasinskaja and Zeevat (2008, 2009) and Toosarvandani (2014) but also with key differences from them: the conjuncts of \u27whereas\u27 should \u27settle\u27 a question under discussion (QUD), with \u27question settlement\u27 being defined in the partition theory of questions as selecting precisely one of the cells created by the partitioning question, or a subpart of the cell. This analysis is based on novel data that point to a strong correlation between the felicity of \u27whereas\u27-sentences and the felicity of its conjuncts as direct answers to the QUD. The finding of a dedicated lexical item \u27whereas\u27 for semantic opposition suggests that semantic opposition is a distinct use of \u27but\u27 and differs from its other uses, supporting Toosarvandani (2014). \u27Whereas\u27- and \u27but\u27-coordination shows the linguistic and cognitive reality of the notion of question settlement proposed in this paper, which the felicity of these coordinated structures depends on. This paper also provides a new diagnostic of question-answerhood that relies not on question-answer pairs, but on \u27whereas\u27- and \u27but\u27-sentences, declarative sentences that are nevertheless closely related to question-answering