Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Recovering gestured and spoken material in VP ellipsis and pro-forms
Get PDFThis contribution is concerned with the at-issueness status of co-speech gestures expressing manner modi?cation. While such gestures are typically considered to be non-at-issue, they can be made to be at-issue by the German demonstrative intensi?er SO. We discuss the potential of an anaphoric relative of this intensi?er, so in so do pro-forms, to shift the content of a co-speech gesture to at-issue status. We propose a formal analysis along the lines of Ebert et al., 2020, and sketch the design for an acceptability judgment experiment to test our predictions
Decomposing Necessity — The Hausa exclusive particle sai as a window into the building blocks of modal meaning
Get PDFWe discuss the modal uses of the Hausa exclusive particle sai (? only). We argue that the distribution of sai in modal environments provides evidence for the following claims on the composition of modal meaning that have been independently made in the literature: i) Future-oriented modality involves a prospective aspect operator that can be realized covertly in some languages (e.g. English, Kratzer 2012b) and overtly in others (e.g. Gitksan, Matthewson 2012, 2013). ii) Necessity interpretations arise from exhaustifying possibilities, i.e. an exhaustivity operator applying to existential modality (e.g. Kaufmann 2012 for the case of im-peratives and Leffel 2012 for a relevant analysis of necessity meaning in Masalit). We show that future-oriented necessity in Hausa decomposes into EXH(?(PROSP )), with sai contributing exhaustivity
Counterfactual attitude contents and the semantics of plurals in belief contexts
Get PDFIndefinites in the complement clause of believe may participate in cumulative relations with a plural attitude subject, even under an intensional reading (Schmitt 2020; see also Pasternak 2018). Schmitt (2020) provides a compositional semantics for such constructions, where indefinites introduce pluralities of partial individual concepts. Crucially, however, such pluralities can only be formed if, intuitively, the concepts are ‘distinct enough’ (Haslinger and Schmitt to appear). We here implement this ‘distinctness constraint’ compositionally, combining Schmitt’s (2020) ideas with a new proposal concerning the semantics of plural indefinites: We argue that the latter introduce a distinctness requirement that appeals to the attitude subjects’ counterfactual beliefs – a requirement that is visible in cumulative belief sentences, but is trivialized (and thus unnoticeable) in extensional contexts. To compose our new DP-denotations with other material in the sentence, we use a version of Yalcin’s (2007) ‘domain semantics’
Modal wh-indefinites in Mandarin
Get PDFMandarin wh-indefinites have been long been analyzed as Negative Polarity Items (Huang 1982; Cheng 1991; Li 1992; Lin 1998; Xie 2007) that cannot occur in positive sentences. In this paper, we challenge this view by presenting naturally-occurring examples in various positive contexts. We find that in these positive contexts, wh-indefinites are usuallyassociated with an “ignorance” or “indifference” inference, similar to modal indefinites like Spanish alg´un and German irgendein (Alonso-Ovalle andM´endez-Benito 2010, Aloni and Port 2010). We propose to analyze Mandarin wh-indefinites in the alternatives-&-exhaustificaiton framework (contra Giannakidou 2018), where they trigger individual alternatives (contra Chierchia and Liao 2015), and the various inferences arise through the interaction between exhaustificationand modals
A unique operator for verbal pluractionality and numeral distributivity
Get PDFCardinal numerals in Seri (isolate, Mexico) are verbs, which, like most verbs in this language, can express pluractionality, i.e. multiplicity of events. I argue that pluractional numerals are interpreted as distributive numerals and give a description of their distributive properties. I propose a fully compositional analysis of pluractionality which can combine with numerals and other verbs to derive the observed effects of each
A unified analysis of Vietnamese m?i ‘just/only’ as a scale-sensitive particle
Get PDFWe present a unified analysis of the Vietnamese particle m?i ‘just, only’ as an underspecified scale-sensitive exclusive particle, following work by Beck (2020) on German additive noch ‘still’. The particle m?i ranges alternatively over temporal or other focus-induced scales. In its aspectual guise, m?i ranges over temporal scales, excluding all times before the reference time, whereas in its exclusive guise, m?i operates over focus scales triggered by its focus-associate, thereby excluding all larger plural individuals containing the focused entity
On deriving and canceling ignorance
Get PDFThe goals of this paper are two. First, it argues for a distribution requirement (DR: ? ¬ p? ? ¬ q, derived with respect to the worlds epistemically accessible to a speaker) to account for the ignorance implicatures (IIs) of -hari and -do marked disjunctions and indefinites in Sinhala (Indo Aryan, Sri Lanka). Second, it claims that the choice of non/cancelation of these IIs does not depend on whether they are conversational or not, but rather on the differences in the positive polarity (PP) behavior (weak vs. strong: cf. Spector, 2014) of the two particles. It casts its proposal in the grammatical approach to derivation of implicatures (cf. Fox, 2007; Chierchia et al., 2012; Meyer, 2013; Nicolae, 2017; a.m.o.)
Modalized normality in pictorial narratives
Get PDFAn analysis of pictorial free perception using universal quanti?cation over worlds that are consistent with the embedded picture is incorrect, because it entails that depicted characters pick up all of the information in a scene they look at. Human agents typically do not. This is corrected by replacing universal quanti?cation over epistemic alternatives with existential quanti?cation, and by introducing a normality condition
On tropes, states, and the combinatorics of the copula \u27werden\u27 in German
No full textThis paper provides an ontology-based approach to the combinatorics of copula verbs. First, we argue that werden ‘become’ in German can be combined with trope ascriptions (e. g., groß ‘tall’), but not with state ascriptions (e. g., im Garten ‘in the garden’, tot ‘dead’). The approach is spelled out in terms of a (mis)match between the typing presuppositions of werden and the proffered ontological type of its predicative argument. Second, we relate our results to the combinatorics of stative copulas, focusing on the ser/estar alternation in Spanish. It is shown that the sensitivity of the alternation to a comparison between vs. within individuals can be recast in ontological terms. This captures striking combinatorial analogies between ser and werden and sheds new light on the ontological foundation of comparison classes
Objecting to discourse moves with gestures
Get PDFThis paper explores the role of the visual modality in marking objections in spoken languages. It describes a facial expression that signals particularly strong objections. In the context of discourse, this gesture can serve as a marker of conversational breakdown