Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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I thought pointing is rude: A dialogue-semantic analysis of pointing at the addressee
Get PDFA pilot corpus study on the use of pointing gestures in dialogue yielded 44 instances of pointing at the addressee. In none of these instances is the addressee the gesture’s referent, however. Rather, such discourse pointings are bound up with dialogue management: they control the addressee’s attention and her view of the status of these referents in the incrementally emergent context. We distinguish four classes of addressee pointings, descriptively glossed utterance anaphora, common ground, something’s coming to mind, and grab turn. We exemplify each class by means of empirical data and provide a dialogue semantics analysis. In this way, we extend the taxonomy of uses of pointings currently discussed in semantics and argue that the linguistic competence revealed by discourse pointings is inherently dialogical, adding evidence for extending the domain of grammar from well-formedness and truth conditions to include micro–level elements of conversational interaction
Dependent Numerals in Bengali: A Case for Covert Adverbial D-operators
Get PDFThe semantic analysis of adnominal dependent numerals is much debated among two theoretical positions regarding the extent of distributivity involved. One school of analyses proposes that a covert Adverbial D operator is key to the licensing of these numerals and another school claims that the D operator is part of the lexical meaning of the numerals. In this work, I use lack of cumulative interpretations of nominals as a diagnostic for distributivity. This is implemented by probing the interpretation of nominal co-arguments of dependent numerals in ditransitive constructions and thereby finding that distributivity can be traced beyond the immediate bounds of the dependent numerals. Based on that evidence, I argue in favor of the covert Adverbial D operator based analysis, against recent influential lexicalist proposals. Thus the work provides a crucial piece in this on-going debate about the semantics of these numerals
\u27Believe\u27 is Strong but Subjective: Experimental Evidence from Hedging
No full textThis paper contributes to the debate concerning whether the attitude verb believe has a weak or a strong semantics. According to Hawthorne et al. (2016), believe is weak and akin to the probability operator likely, typically receiving an “agent finds it more likely than not” interpretation. Alternatively, Koev (2019) proposes that believe conveys high certainty but qualifies this certainty as subjective or lacking evidence, in contrast with modals that convey high objective certainty, like sure (see also Lyons 1977; Kratzer 1981; Nuyts 2001; Papafragou 2006; Portner 2009). We focus on the use of believe as a hedge (e.g. I believe the Giants will win, but I’m not sure they will) as allegedly the most convincing argument for the weak view, and argue that, in fact, it favors the strong-but-subjective view. We show experimentally that the availability of the hedging use of believe is affected by certain grammatical and discourse factors. Experiment 1 reveals that participants rate hedging sentences with combinations of third person/past tense/embedded features as less natural than canonical first person/present tense/main clause forms. In turn, Experiment 2 reveals that hedging sentences with at-issue prejacents are judged as more natural than sentences in which the belief component is at-issue. The observed variability posits a challenge to the weak view, which establishes a purely logical contrast in modal strength between likelihood vs. certainty. However, it is in line with the strong-but-subjective view, which establishes a contrast in modal content between certainty without evidence vs. certainty with evidence and predicts a more restricted distribution of the hedging reading
A superlinguistics of hyperlink ‘pointing’
Get PDFWe present a ‘superlinguistic’ analysis of hyperlinks, building on parallels with cospeech pointing gestures. We show that one is able to give acceptability judgments for hyperlink placement and use, allowing us to define a precise syntax and semantics of hyperlinks. We show that these patterns interact with core linguistic systems, including constituent structure, semantic type, veridicality, and information structure
Characterizing the Simplex vs. Complex Adjectives in Mandarin Chinese
Get PDFThe article develops and defends a novel kind-based analysis for Mandarin adjectives. We argue for a semantic distinction between adjectival heads (A/A0) and their projections (AP/AMAX): A0s denote Cresswell-style state-subkind predicates, while APs denote properties of states. Degree morphemes (DEG) have a particularizing function that provide apoint of view against which the state-kind is evaluated. The “A-to-AP” process, a special instance of the “type-to-token” conversion, underlies the famous distinction between the simplex vs. complex adjectives proposed by Zhu (1956), a topic that has plagued Chinese linguistics for more than half a century. Adopting a kind-based account for adjectives has notonly enabled us to explain a range of empirical generalizations concerning adjectival modification in Mandarin which would otherwise remain elusive, but also brought the semantics in the adjectival domain closer to that of the nominal and verbal domains, where a similar “type-to-token” conversion is also proposed and defended
Why one can kill Rasputin twice in Mandarin
Get PDFMandarin Chinese allows so-called zero-change (failed-attempt) construals of causative monomorphemic verbs when the subject refers to an agent. However, while for nongradable causative simple verbs, this reading is generally available only when the verb is modified by a cardinality adverbial (e.g., li?ang c`? ‘twice’), with gradable causative simple verbs, thezero-change reading is readily available even in the absence of a cardinality adverbial, though the presence of such an adverbial does indeed facilitate it. We account for this puzzle by arguing that the source of non-culmination differs for gradable vs. non-gradable causative simple verbs: it lies in the partitive semantics of perfective le for non-gradable causative verbs, and/or the degree argument tracking the degree of event realization for gradable causative verbs
Emojis and gestures: a new typology
Get PDFThis paper addresses the question of how emojis are integrated into the text that they occur with. I use the typology of gestural iconic enrichments proposed by Schlenker (2018a, 2018b) to investigate the hypothesis that emojis denoting objects (e.g.
M-modifiers, attenuation and polarity sensitivity
Get PDFModerate-degree modifiers (M-modifiers) such as fairly, somewhat, rather and kind of and their cross-linguistic counterparts have received relatively little attention in the formal semantics literature. The present paper seeks to address this gap by pursuing three goals: first, to profile the distribution and interpretation of M-modifiers in English; second, to propose semantic analyses for individual M-modifiers; and finally, to provide an account of the consistent status of M-modifiers as positive polarity items, which we argue derives from competition with simpler unmodified forms. These results provide evidence that there are multiple compositional routes to (apparent) degree modification, as well as other sources of polarity sensitivity beyond those responsible for the behavior of better-studied items such as any and ever
Testing the distribution of pair-list questions with quantifiers
Get PDFQuestions with quantifiers such as ‘Which book did every student read?’ can receive a pair-list reading, but the availability of this reading depends on the quantifier, as well as the environment of the question (matrix or embedded under various predicates), with possible interactions between these factors. The details of these interactions have been a subject of debate in the literature. We tested the acceptability of pair-list readings with 5 quantifiers (most, two, no, every, and fewer than three) in 4 different environments (matrix, find out, be certain, and wonder). Our results confirm that the availability of pair-list interpretations for questions with quantifiers depends heavily on both the quantifier and the environment in which the question appears, and more specifically that there is a qualitative divide between responsive and rogative predicates, not between intensional and extensional predicates
Karttunen logic for presupposition projection
Get PDFPresuppositions of complex sentences are empirically distinguished from the propositional contexts that render a sentence coherent. This distinction is at the heart of the proviso problem for presupposition projection. Here we show that Karttunen’s inference-based approach in his proposals from the early 1970s can be used to directly avoid the proviso problem. Inference-based projection is different from trivalent accounts or satisfaction-based methods in distinguishing presuppositions from admittance conditions on contexts. This distinction is used within a new propositional fragment, whose rules for updating local contexts and satisfying presuppositions are explained using the same Incrementality principle of previous accounts, but without any of the additional assumptions that have been used to tackle the proviso problem