Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Presupposition projection from \u27or\u27 vs. \u27and\u27 – an experimental comparison
No full textWe present experimental evidence that conjunction and disjunction differ in terms of presupposition projection: Presuppositions project asymmetrically from conjunction; a presupposition in the first conjunct projects regardless of any information in the second conjunct that could be used to satisfy the presupposition. Disjunction on the other hand shows a radically different profile, which points to symmetric behavior: as long as there is one disjunct which carries information that can filter the presupposition, no projection occurs. This result strongly argues against accounts that take all projection to be asymmetrically determined by linear order in a uniform way across connectives
Empathetic attitude reports
Get PDFThis paper discusses a range of syntactic and semantic properties of what I call ‘empathetic attitude reports’, attitude reports which contain a direct or indirect object in addition to a clausal complement such as I believe you that you will come back and I understand you that you are not in the mood. The paper argues that empathetic attitude reports cannot be analyzed in terms of two-place attitudinal relations but involve an essential interpersonal relation of trust or understanding
Use-conditional licensing of strong negative polarity items
Get PDFNegative polarity items like lift a finger are widely assumed to occur in a subset of contexts in which NPIs like ever are licensed. However, Sedivy (1990) points to contexts in which lift-finger-type NPIs but not ever-type NPIs can occur. The paper adds German rising declaratives to these contexts. It is argued that the relevant contexts have a use-conditional meaning and that lift-finger-type NPIs, in contrast to ever-type NPIs, can be licensed through use-conditional meaning. This idea is formalized as occurrence constraints of NPIs within semantic representations
The discourse function of adversative conjunction
Get PDFThis paper examines some discourse uses of adversative conjunctions ma in Italian and but in English: the discourse uses we analyze are occurrences of ma/but with only one clause, which can be a declarative, interrogative, imperative, or exclamative sentence. We limit our discussion to occurrences of ma/but with declaratives and interrogatives, and focus primarily on the latter. We observe that, while they can both appear with declaratives, ma and but differ with respect to what kinds of interrogative sentences they are compatible with: both ma and but are infelicitous in out-of-the-blue information-seeking questions, but while ma is acceptable in polar questions and in constituent questions, but is only acceptable in negative polar questions. We provide a semantic analysis of these particles that accounts for their distribution in both languages and for the cross-linguistic differences we discovered
Coherence-driven predictability and referential form: Evidence from English corpus data
Get PDFTo refer to a discourse entity, speakers need to choose from a variety of expressions, such as a name Donald Trump or a pronoun he. While evidence has accumulated that more predictable words are more likely to be phonologically reduced, there is a long-standing debate regarding whether more reduced referring expressions (e.g., pronouns) are more frequently produced for more predictable referents. This study contributes to this debate with new evidence in two aspects. 1) Rhetorical relation-driven predictability: while the cases that have been studied in previous psycholinguistic studies have been fairly restricted to some particular verbs types, this study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt of broadening the empirical base with expectation primarily driven by rhetorical relations; 2) Naturally-occurring language in corpus data: instead of using constructed language to elicit production, we make use of natural coreference chains that can be automatically retrieved from corpora developed in the field of Computational Linguistics. We found uniform pronominalization rates across rhetorical relations despite the different next-mention rates, supporting a dissociation between likelihood of next mention and pronoun production
Metaphorical measure expressions
Get PDFWe present an analysis of measure phrases such as heap/ounce of information in which the measure expression receives a non-literal, metaphorical interpretation. We present evidence that these metaphorical measure expressions, as we call them, exhibit a puzzling in- complete countability pattern insofar as their grammatical reflexes fall between count and mass nouns. We show that nouns/NPs with such an incomplete countability pattern are predicted by, and are easily captured within, the theory of the count/mass distinction presented in Sutton and Filip (2019b, 2020)
Temporal and intensional pictorial conflation
Get PDFThis paper proposes accounts in possible worlds semantics of temporally conflated pictorial narratives, and intensionally conflated pictorial narratives. The semantics for film shots and panels in comics that are embedded under attitudes such as imagining and dreaming uses de se interpretation and existential modality, strengthened by a normality condition
Morphological tenselessness and SOT: Evidence for a covert relative pronominal tense in Gitksan
Get PDFGitksan (Tsimshianic) is morphologically tenseless. Simple matrix clauses in Gitksan are compatible with both past and present contexts, and attitude complements and relative clauses are compatible with both simultaneous and back-shifted contexts, similar to the Sequence of Tense (SOT; Comrie, 1985; Enc, 1987) in English. Despite this similarity, an account of SOT in English does not extend to morphologically tenselessness clauses in Gitksan in light of data from before/after clauses. I argue that this in turn supports the existence of a covert non-future tense in Gitksan (Jóhannsdóttir and Matthewson, 2007) and that this tense is specifically a relative pronominal tense. After a brief overview of the Gitksan data (Section 1), I introduce my analysis of SOT in English involving a temporal pronoun with no tense restriction, which I call a ‘tense operator-less’ account (Section 2). This analysis is applied to the puzzling temporal interpretations of present-under-will relative clauses (Abusch, 1998) as well as before/after clauses in English (Section 3). I then introduce data from matrix and embedded clauses in Gitksan (Section 4) and demonstrate the existence of a temporal pronoun as a semantic primitive in the language (Section 5). I develop an analogous tense operator-less account of Gitksan (Section 6), but this account is challenged by data from before/after clauses (Section 7). I argue for an alternative analysis of Gitksan involving a relative pronominal non-future tense (Section 8) and conclude (Section 9)
An interactivist approach to slurs: \u27Piefke\u27 in Austrian German
No full textThis paper investigates the use of the anti-German slur Piefke by speakers of Austrian German, especially concerning their identity management. It is argued that the Austrian autostereotype is constructed in opposition to the hostile German heterostereotype, embodied by the associations of Piefke. An interactivist account of the pragmatic effects of slurring is presented, couched in the framework of Schulz von Thun. I also present an account of the meaning of a slur inspired by Nunberg and Hess, combining the ideas of expressive commit- ment with a version of Nunberg’s ventriloquistic implicature, assuming with Whiting that slurs are expressive of a negative attitude, but do not express it
Two notions of de se in desire reports
Get PDFI argue that de se-interpretations of infinitival complements in attitude reports may involve different notions of de se depending on the type of attitude predicate: ascriptive de se or evaluative de se. While in the case of ascriptive de se, the infinitival denotation is predicated to be true of every centered world in a set of Hintikka-alternatives, in the case of evaluative de se the infinitival denotation is used to characterize a set of centered worlds of which desirability above a certain threshold is predicated. The standard explanation for the de se-constraint on PRO does not carry over to the case of evaluative de se. The grammar of de se has a second source: de se measure functions