Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Adversative \u27only\u27 is only \u27only\u27
No full textThe focus particle \u27only\u27 can be used as a sentential connective, conveying a contrast between its two propositional arguments. This paper provides the ingredients required to unite this \u27adversative\u27 use of \u27only\u27 with its exclusive use. We argue that adversative \u27only\u27 is just exclusive \u27only\u27 that associates with a full CP and therefore scopes above CP-level operators. We motivate a CP-level informativity operator that enforces a non-triviality condition on utterances and determines a CP’s rhetorical function in discourse, and show that its interaction with CP-adjoining \u27only\u27 can give rise to the adversative inference described in the literature
A perfect-like stative: Icelandic \u27búinn að\u27 and pragmatic competition in the aspectual domain
No full textModern Icelandic has two “perfects”: \u27hafa\u27 ‘have’ (a canonical HAVE-perfect) and \u27búinn\u27. The latter is younger, gaining an aspectual, perfect-like usage in the 16th century. Prior to this point it is attested as an adjectival participle meaning ‘ready, prepared’, derived from the verb \u27búa\u27 ‘reside, prepare, adorn’, subsequently undergoing a meaning shift from ‘ready, prepared’ to ‘finished’ (Thráinsson 2017). In the modern language, \u27búinn\u27 has a more restricted distribution than \u27hafa\u27, especially for some predicate classes (Jónsson 1992). The aims of this paper are twofold. Firstly, I provide an account of \u27búinn\u27 in modern Icelandic, accounting for these selectional restrictions. Secondly, I show how a difference in truth-conditional meaning coupled with pragmatic reasoning can capture the three-way division of labour between \u27hafa\u27, \u27búinn\u27 and the BE-\u27resultative\u27
The Anaphoric Potential of Weak Definites
Get PDFWeak definites (WDs) as in \u27Max went to the cinema\u27 differ from regular definites insofar as \u27the cinema\u27 does not refer to a uniquely identifiable cinema. In this paper I propose that investigating the discourse properties of WDs helps us to distinguish and decide between various theories of WDs that have been proposed. I present two experiments in German. The first shows that WDs can be referred to by pronoun but less straightforwardlly than anaphoric reference to indefinites lending support to the model initially proposed by Krifka & Modarresi (2016) for anaphoric potential of pseudo-incorporated nouns. The second experiment shows that anaphoric reference to WDs is distinct from associative anaphora, in contrast to predictions that analyze weak definites as reference to kinds
Lack of access to alternatives can feed distributive inferences: The view from q-spreading in children
Get PDFThis paper engages with a recent analysis by Denić and Chemla (2020) who argue that what appears to be quantifier spreading in child language is in fact the result of children deriving the distributive inference. While such an analysis straightforwardly accounts for the child data involving q-spreading, they claim that a certain aspect of the adult data is left unexplained. The authors suggest a number of possible reasons for this divergence and in this paper I lay out yet another possible solution to this problem. This solution is in line with recent literature arguing that children have difficulties deriving inferences which involve alternatives obtained by lexical replacement
Clause-internal coherence: A look at deverbal adjectives
Get PDFHobbs (2010) introduced the term \u27Clause-Internal Coherence\u27 (‘CIC’) to describe inferences such as that in, ‘A jogger was hit by a car,’ where the jogging is understood to be implicated in the car-hitting event. Cohen & Kehler (2021) motivate an account of CIC using tools familiar from discourse coherence research. An outstanding question is how to compositionally derive CIC from coherence relations. We propose that CIC can arise as a byproduct of presupposition resolution, couching our analysis in \u27Segmented Discourse Representation Theory\u27 (Asher & Lascarides 1998) and providing motivation from experimental findings. Our findings suggest: (i) attributive adjectives, both deverbal and non-deverbal, can trigger CIC; (ii) attributive adjectives trigger weaker causal inferences, but stronger non-causal inferences, than their predicative counterparts; (iii) non-deverbal adjectives are weaker causal inference triggers than deverbal adjectives. We argue that attributive adjectives are presupposition triggers, and that they give rise to CIC inferences as a result of presupposition resolution. Thus, CIC with deverbal adjectives arises via Background (non-causal inference) or, depending on word order, Elaboration or Continuation (causal inference). For non-deverbal adjectives, non-causal inferences also arise via Background, but causal inferences arise via Explanation or Result. Finally, we show how some of the interpretative preferences observed in our studies can be modeled as interactions between independently motivated default axioms for choosing between coherence relations. Our research sheds new light on how presupposition relates to anaphora resolution and coherence, while also contributing to recent work on adjectival meaning in discourse
Questions in belief ascriptions
Get PDFRecent literature (Schmitt 2020; Haslinger and Schmitt 2021; Pasternak 2018b; Marty 2019) has discussed cases in which belief ascription to a plurality of attitude holders can be construed non-distributively. While some of these cases have been accounted for as instances of cumulativity between the attitude holders and a plurality of contents, the cases put forward in Pasternak (2018b) resist an analysis along these lines. This paper builds on Pasternak’s (2018b) account, fixing its shortcomings and in so doing argues for a semantics of belief ascriptions in which belief is always interpreted relative to a question (cf. Yalcin 2016) and belief states are not just sets of possible worlds, but sets of classical propositions (as all propositions and questions are for Ciardelli et al. 2019)
‘Articleless’ languages are not created equal
Get PDFWe adopt a translation corpus approach based on the first chapter of \u27Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone\u27 to evaluate Dayal’s updated version of the neo-Carlsonian framework and the predictions it makes for bare nouns in Hindi, Russian and Mandarin (Dayal 2004). Our Hindi data turn out to be overall in line with Dayal’s predictions but the same does not hold for our Russian and Mandarin data, leading us to explore a number of extensions and modifications of Dayal’s analysis. For Mandarin, our data lead us to hypothesize a role for the numeral \u27yi\u27 (‘one’) as an indefinite article and for demonstratives as definite articles. For our Hindi and Russian bare noun data, we argue that the only way to account for them is to reverse at least part of Dayal’s updates to the neo-Carlsonian framework and to hypothesize that Hindi – unlike Russian – is developing an indefinite article
Quantifying weak and strong crossover for wh-crossover and proper names
Get PDFDespite the status of crossover phenomena as key data in the theoretical study of pronominal syntax/semantics, crossover structures have been subjected to relatively littleexperimental testing. We investigate \u27wh\u27-crossover, quantificational crossover, and analogous structures involving proper name cataphora in behavioral rating studies, deploying a novel experimental paradigm which contrasts the acceptability of multiple readings of a target sentence. Using this more sensitive experimental task, our results favour an acceptability distinction between weak and strong \u27wh\u27-crossover, and provide a baseline against which to compare more controversial cases of crossover. We further find that proper name cataphora display a remarkably similar crossover effect, including a distinction between “strong” and “weak” cases
Against the lexical view of cumulative inferences
Get PDFIonin and Matushansky (2002) propose, based on data from comitatives in Russian, that distributivity is associated only with the spec,TP position. In this paper, I (i) present data from the Lebanese Arabic double subject construction that supports Ionin and Matushansky’s conclusion that the availability of distributive readings is sensitive to syntactic position and (ii) argue for a novel theory of how this arises. In particular, I propose that pluralization operators are the only sources of cumulative inferences and that they are restricted in distribution such that they can only apply to predicates derived by movement and never to lexical predicates. I show that this predicts a set of facts from the double subject construction all indicating that there is a relationship between the availability of a distributive reading over a DP and whether that DP moves. This proposal argues against an influential approach where cumulativity is taken to be an inherent property of lexical predicates (Krifka 1992; Kratzer 2008)
Experimental perspectives on spatial deictic expression acquisition in Thai
Get PDFThis study explored the role of perspectives on the interpretation of Thai spatialdeictic terms lˇaN ‘behind’ and nˆa: ‘in front of.’ We designed an experiment where the relativelocation of the experimenter and the participant differed across two sessions. Utilizing 5 objectsof 5 different colors arranged in a row, the experimenter asked the participant ‘The pen/balloonof which color is behind/in front of the x pen/balloon?,’ where x is the color of one of the middlethree items. Participants were native speakers of Thai, including 31 adults, 60 typicallydeveloping children, and 30 children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). We found thatfor Thai-speaking adults, the convention for \u27behind/in front of\u27 seems to involve object-basedallocentric viewpoint, relativizing the deictic notions as if the objects were facing themselves.However, the relative location of the experimenter hugely affected the adults who started offsitting opposite to the experimenter. In contrast, children with TD, egocentric interpretations,projecting their own front and back onto the objects, are preferred for non-fronted, visible objects.Verbal questions and mere presence of Speaker, i.e., without gazes nor gestures, areenough to introduce ambiguities between FoRs for adults and children with TD. Despite theirdifferences from adults in overall perspective resolution, TDs do take into account the experimenter’sviewpoint as a contextual resolution option. On the other hand, children with ASDwere not affected by experimenter’s perspective, and lacked a clear contrast between the oppositedeictic terms. They also seem to have general difficulties in grasping the basic relationalnature of the two deictic terms