Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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The interaction of gender marking and perspective-taking in German
Get PDFThis paper addresses a phenomenon regarding the interaction of perspective-taking with morphosyntactic gender that to the best of our knowledge has not been discussed in previous literature. In \u27Free Indirect Discourse\u27 (FID), a vivid style of reported speech and thought, we observe a strong preference for a \u27de se\u27 pronoun, i.e. a pronoun that refers to an individual whose thoughts or utterances are represented, to match the gender identity / biological sex (by default) of that individual rather than the morphosyntactic / grammatical gender of the DP functioning as its immediate antecedent in discourse. We propose that the preference for semantic agreement in FID is due to the interplay of three factors: First, in FID the gender features of pronouns are interpreted with respect to the protagonist’s rather than the narrator’s context. Second, the introduction of a protagonist’s context leads to a strong preference for pronouns referring to that protagonist to project interpretable gender features matching their gender identity / biological sex. Third, the overtly realized grammatical gender features of a pronous, in contrast with lexical nouns, have to agree with the interpretable gender features
Designation modality and the disposition of artifacts
Get PDFThis article is about a modal construction of German that has hardly received any attention in the literature, and I link it to the philosophical notion of the disposition of artifacts. The name that I propose for this kind of modality is designation modality. It is instantiated by the sentence \u27Dieser Wein ist zur Begleitung des Käses\u27 ‘This wine is meant to accompany the cheese.’ Being a subtype of goal-oriented modality, it features a theme or instrument oriented semantics specifying the use to which an artifact is put. A modal head underlying the preposition+determiner element \u27zu\u27+DET ‘to+DET’ combines the nominalized VoiceP in its comple ment with the external argument of the whole structure. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first proposal to trace the philosophical notion of the disposition of artifacts within a clearly delineated structure in natural language
Inference denial and concessivity: Japanese \u27karatoitte\u27 ‘just because‘
No full textThis paper focuses on the Japanese concessive conjunction \u27karatoitte\u27 ‘just because’, which shows an idiosyncratic distribution. It has been reported that Japanese \u27karatoitte\u27 typically appears with negation and in certain sentences that express negative sentiment. This paper suggests an analysis of Japanese \u27karatoitte\u27 adopting the theoretical mechanism used in the analysis for the Negative Polarity Items (NPIs). This study is expected to bring a new perspective on the nature of concessive meaning by reconsidering the semantic function of “denial of inference” that \u27just because\u27 is said to have in terms of the likelihood scalar presupposition used in NPI analysis
Anaphoric potential of cumulative dependencies
Get PDFThis paper discusses the anaphoric potential of non-quantificational plural arguments, inquiring whether cumulative readings introduce new \u27quantificational dependencies\u27. I show that (i) \u27quantificational subordination\u27 against non-distributive readings is often quite degraded, but (ii) common knowledge inference sometimes improves its acceptability, and (iii) non-distributive plural anaphora against cumulative readings may induce a co-varying reading. This suggests that cumulative readings may indeed introduce new dependencies, but their availability is limited. I propose that non-distributive readings ‘underspecify’ dependencies, while distributive readings highlight specific dependencies, and its interaction with pronoun maximality blocks quantificational subordination against cumulative readings. I implement it with \u27State-based Dynamic Plural Logic\u27 which keeps track of \u27quantificational alternatives\u27
Effects of iconicity and monotonicity on licensing complement anaphora
Get PDFComplement anaphora is generally only licensed by downward monotone quantifiers, like ‘few’ (Nouwen, 2003). Yet, sign language data suggest that the use of iconic “loci” can license complement anaphora with upward monotone quantifiers like ‘most’ (Schlenker, 2012; Schlenker et al., 2013). This paper tests the hypothesis that the iconic nature of loci would extend to iconic uses of space in co-speech gestures in English. We hypothesised that, when accompanied by iconic co-speech gestures, complement anaphora will be licensed with upward monotone quantifiers, and will be degraded with downward monotone ones. We designed an experiment testing downward and upward monotone quantifiers with and without gesture, and found a significant effect of both gesture and quantifier type, as well as an interaction between the two. Our results show that iconicity affects complement anaphora licensing, and has the inverse effect of monotonicity. We suggest that the iconicity effects are not sign language specific, but are instead more broad, having to do with how humans interpret iconicity in language. We further argue that iconic co-speech gestures trigger an iconic inference of existence, along the lines of what has been suggested for iconic loci in ASL (Kuhn, 2020)
Rhetorical question marking: German \u27schliesslich\u27
No full textThe German adverb \u27schliesslich\u27 can be used in two senses: in a sentence-internal sense ‘eventually’ and in an intersentential sense similar to justificational ‘after all’ in English. I argue that these two uses are syntactically and semantically distinct, asking for an ambiguity analysis. Next, we address the observation that questions with justificational \u27schliesslich\u27 must be interpreted as rhetorical questions (RhQ). The present analysis can predict this and offers the basis for studying general justificational RhQ in both German and English
Object mass nouns and comparative judgements
Get PDFThe mass/count distinction is often semantically manifested in comparative judgements as a difference between counting and measurement. Thus, the count nouns in \u27more stones/packs\u27 trigger counting whereas the mass nouns in \u27more stone/sugar\u27 involve measuring. \u27Object mass nouns\u27 (OMNs) like \u27furniture\u27, \u27weaponry\u27 and \u27baggage\u27 are exceptional among mass nouns in showing strong counting effects in comparatives. There is little agreement on the interpretation of this fact. Some works propose that OMNs have discrete meanings while others attribute their countability in comparatives to other reasons. Deciding between these approaches is challenging, partly because it has remained unclear if OMNs in comparatives show any semantic distinction from count nouns. In this paper we demonstrate that they do. We report experimental findings showing that in contexts that favor measurement, counting with OMNs is less frequently preferred than with count nouns. We analyze these results by proposing that although referents of both common nouns and OMNs are perceived as discrete objects, OMN denotations are continuous. The tolerant mass/count syntax of the comparative leaves the discrete perception of both kinds of nouns as the prominent factor in their interpretation. However, when the context primes measurement, the continuity of OMN denotations allows them to trigger non-discrete measures more easily than count nouns. This proposal retains the advantages of semantic theories of the mass/count distinction while employing them in a model that is also sensitive to biases coming from pragmatics and the perception of real-world objects
\u27Just\u27 as a scale widener with maximum-standard adjectives: emphatic / precisifying effects
No full textIn this paper, we propose a finer-grained classification of adjectives labeled Maximum Standard Adjectives (MSAs) in order to account for two of their properties in interaction with the particle \u27just\u27. First is the failure of non-extreme MSAs (\u27clean\u27, \u27closed\u27 etc.) to be interpreted emphatically with \u27just\u27 – in contrast to MSAs like \u27perfect\u27 (Beltrama, 2021). The second property has to do with the non-uniform availability of a precisifying reading for MSAs in combination with focused \u27just\u27. While we assume (like Rotstein and Winter, 2004 and Lassiter and Goodman, 2013) that threshold values for MSAs are uniformly provided by the context, we show that MSAs also vary with respect to how these thresholds are sourced from the context. The non-uniform behavior of MSAs with \u27just\u27 in its emphatic and precisifying uses is shown to derive from this variability
Belief-in is belief-that with affectivity and evidentiality
Get PDFBelief-in reports of the form \u27S believes in O\u27 have been taken to have at least two senses: factual and evaluative. I begin by briefly suggesting that there is no evidence for two distinct senses, then spend most of the paper developing a general semantics for belief-in reports. I explore, and use my semantics to explain, several features of belief-in reports: the context-dependence of what belief-that reports they entail, their widespread lack of equivalence with belief-that reports, and their neg-raising property. Put roughly, my semantics says that \u27S believes in O\u27 a) asserts that, for some contextually salient property F, S believes that O has F and b) presupposes that S either has a belief that O has F for which they meet an affective and evidential requirement or has a belief that O doesn’t have F for which they meet an affective and evidential requirement
Topichood and temporal interpretation of DPs guide clause-internal, causal coherence
Get PDFMost studies of discourse coherence focus on relations like Result (cause-effect) and Explanation (effect-cause) that are established between two discourse units whose size is at least a single clause. Such relationships may, however, also be clause-internal. The current study explores clause-internal coherence triggered by resultative adjectives in examples like \u27The broken window got struck with a stone\u27 ⇝ ‘the window was broken because of the stone.’ Based on the results of two comprehension tasks, we propose that topichood, signaled by definiteness and subjecthood, permits and constrains plausible causal inferences clause-internally. This analysis suggests a tighter relationship between (morpho)syntax and coherence than is currently assumed