Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Evaluativity in \u27even\u27-comparatives via presupposition accommodation
No full textSentences involving the scalar particle even result in positive or negative inferences when combined with gradable predicates, which is unexpected assuming the classic (un)-likelihood analysis of even. I observe that these evaluative inferences arise when (i) the likelihood presupposition of even is not already entailed in the common ground, and (ii) the comparison class is not explicitly given. Hence, this paper gives a pragmatic account of the puzzle and demonstrates that the evaluative inferences can be derived systematically with the help of two general pragmatic principles, what I call the “Presupposition Accommodation Condition” and “Alternative-sampling Hypothesis.” The basic intuition is that given the pressure to reason in the absence of sufficient evidence – in these cases, without specified reasons for the likelihood orderings – comprehenders make the most out of the information they have, assume normality, and commit to their best guess for the speaker’s intended common ground
Really: Ambiguity and question bias
Get PDFWe discuss two empirical puzzles about English really: (i) really is ambiguous between an intensifier use akin to very (cf. Zelda is really tall) and a conversational use that expresses definite certainty (cf. Zelda REALLY is tall); (ii) polar questions with conversational really convey a negative speaker bias towards the question prejacent (cf. Is Kai REALLY from Hawaii? ? The speaker doubts that Kai is from Hawaii). We propose a single lexical entry according to which really combines with a gradable property P and states that the degree to which P applies meets all relevant standards. The ambiguity hinges on whether P ranges over degrees of individual properties (as in the case of intensifier really) or degrees of commitment (as in the case of conversational really). In addition, we propose to derive the question bias associated with conversational really from its obligatory contrastive focus marking, a feature that it shares with other polar elements that give rise to a similar effect
Internal reading and the comparative meaning
Get PDFIn this paper, I argue that the existing compositional accounts on the internal reading of same/different can’t directly extend to scalar comparatives. I also develop a new theory that explains away this empirical challenge and extends to the many uses of comparatives beyond the internal reading. The implementation crucially requires characterizing sentence meanings as relations between pairs of parallel information states
Reciprocal questions and the pragmatics of argument reversing verb phrase ellipsis
Get PDFAdding to the literature on pragmatics-sensitive ellipsis, the current paper examines cases of argument mismatches in verb phrase ellipsis involving pairs of participants, termed argument reversals (ARs), and argues that they are primarily possible in situations involving implicit questions of reciprocity or actuality. The analysis put forth captures this generalization by arguing that ellipsis in these cases may be pragmatically licensed by accommodating a reciprocal or actual Question Under Discussion (r/aQUD) structure (Roberts, 2012). The emergence and resolution of these implicit questions is operationalized using the Table model (Farkas and Bruce, 2010). In light of their unique structural and pragmatic characteristics and the observation that existing theories of AR, which implement standard licensing conditions on ellipsis, are insufficient for capturing their pragmatics, some directions forward for addressing the issue of the grammaticality of these constructions are discussed
Demonstratives in ?ay?aǰuθəm: Managing joint attention through gesture and salience
Get PDFIn this paper, we provide the first detailed description and analysis of the demonstrative system in ?ay?aǰuθəm (a.k.a. Comox-Sliammon; ISO 639-3: coo), a Coast Salish language spoken in British Columbia, Canada. Drawing from original fieldwork with five speakers, we show that the demonstratives in ?ay?aǰuθəm not only encode deictic distance, evidentiality, gender, and number, but also whether or not joint attention (cf. Diessel, 2006) has been established between the speech participants. The gesture demonstratives rely on the use of co-speech gesture to establish joint attention, while the salience demonstratives are used where joint attention is already established and, consequently, do not require gesture. To analyze the former, we incorporate gesture into the semantic analysis as the means of identifying the referent (following Ebert, Ebert and Hörnig, 2020). We analyze the latter as relying on contextual salience to establish reference (inspired by Roberts, 2002; Schwarz, 2009). In more provisional terms, we also present less common uses of demonstratives, where gesture is used to refer to manners, qualities, or degrees (cf. König & Umbach, 2018). This research adds to the growing body of super-semantic literature which argues that the contribution of gesture belongs within the compositional semantics, indicating that certain demonstrative forms may even require gesture to establish reference
A seeming violation to the monotonicity constraint in Spanish verbal comparatives
Get PDFSpanish verbal comparatives with (correr más ‘run more’) can be interpreted in terms of SPEED with a subset of manner of motion predicates. This fact poses a challenge to the monotonicity constraint (Schwarzschild, 2006) because SPEED is not a part-whole structure preserving dimension unlike DURATION. I argue that the data are best explained if más combines with an underspecified measure function that is not restricted to be only resolved by quantity part-whole tracking dimensions. I argue that the resolution of this null measure function is syntactically determined
Testing Bayesian measures of relevance in discourse
Get PDFDespite their popularity among linguists, categorical notions of relevance based on partial answerhood have well-known problems. Gradient information-theoretic measures of utility adopted in cognitive modeling, on the other hand, have not been tested as measures of relevance in discourse. We begin to fill this gap by experimentally evaluating two gradient measures of question under discussion (QUD) relevance in question-answer pairs in comparison to the categorical theory: entropy reduction, which measures the degree to which an answer decreases uncertainty about the resolution of the QUD; and KL divergence, which measures the degree to which an answer changes the probability distribution over the alternatives. Our experiments provide decisive evidence against the categorical theory of relevance, but do not give strong support to any one gradient measure. Both KL divergence and entropy reduction have systematic failure modes, and are less predictive of relevance judgments than comparatively unmotivated measures like the difference between prior and posterior. We outline several criteria for an adequate gradient theory of relevance, and identify candidate measures for future investigation
Sentence-final particle \u27de\u27 in Mandarin as an informativity maximizer
No full textWe propose that the Mandarin sentence-final particle de is attached to answers with maximal utility. We quantify this utility as informativity by drawing on a cross-entropy model, and explore the plausibility of applying cross-entropy methods (as well as related Kullback- Leibler divergence-based methods) across languages, as a precise model of understanding the subtle pragmatic meanings of sentence-final particles
Is the Mano a Tulipano gesture compatible with canonical questions? An empirical study of a speech act marking gesture
Get PDFIn this paper, we present two experimental studies on the co-speech Mano a Tulipano (MAT), a gesture that is extensively used by native speakers of Italian and that typically accompanies interrogative speech acts. While there is broad consensus, in both the descriptive and the more formal literature, that MAT has a question meaning, there is no consensus on what kind of question is conveyed or marked by this gesture. Some researchers argue that co-speech MAT is ambiguous and can occur with both canonical and non-canonical questions. Other researchers have argued that MAT is presuppositional in nature and is only compatible with non-canonical questions. To test the hypothesis that MAT is fully compatible with non- canonical questions only, we conducted two acceptability judgment studies in which the participants’ task was to evaluate the appropriateness of the MAT gesture associated to two types of questions: a canonical question (i.e., a context in which, according to the presuppositional account of MAT, the presupposition is not satisfied), and a non-canonical (biased) question. We ran a binary forced-choice sentence evaluation task (Study 1) and a gradient acceptability judgment study (Study 2) to test if and at which rate Italian participants accepted the MAT gesture accompanying canonical questions. Our results show that MAT is fully acceptable only when the presupposition that the question is non-canonical is satisfied, compatibly with the presuppositional account. When this presupposition is not supported by the context, judgments on MAT were more variable across participants when a binary judgment was requested (Study 1); moreover, MAT received intermediate ratings by all the participants when a gradient judgment was required (Study 2)
Nonspecific promises: Restitutive \u27again\u27 and intensional transfer-of-possession verbs
No full textIn this paper I describe a novel pattern of infelicity, in which the restitutive reading of the adverbs again and back is infelicitous when combined with intensional ‘transfer-of- possesion’ verbs (e.g. promise, offer) that take nonspecific objects. I offer one possible analysis of this phenomenon under the so-called “‘re’-domain” framework of Zwarts (2019), a lexical analysis of the again ambiguity that describes the restitutive presupposition with reference to a semantic path. This predicts a key role for the theme of the modified event, leading to presupposition failure in cases where no unique theme can be identified