Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Relevance-sensitive co-variation inferences of dependent indefinites
Full text linkA dependent indefinite triggers an obligatory distributive reading of the sentences it appears in. While previous literature agrees on the importance of co-variation (Brasoveanu and Farkas, 2011; Henderson, 2014; Kuhn, 2017; Guha, 2018; Law, 2022: a.o.), its behaviour under negation has received little attention (except Guha, 2018; Law, 2020: a.o.). In this paper, I present a novel observation that the co-variation inference of Turkish dependent indefinites is sensitive to contextual relevance in both positive and negative environments and argue that it is similar to the (non-)maximality inference of definite plurals. As a proof of concept, I offer an analysis with Plural Compositional DRT (Brasoveanu, 2007, 2008) in the trilateral setting, emulating Križ’s (2015; 2016) trivalent approach to (non-)maximality inferences
Demonstrative descriptions and anti-uniqueness
Full text linkDemonstrative descriptions robustly give rise to an anti-uniqueness inference, rendering them infelicitous with inherently unique nouns. Two major theoretical approaches have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. One posits that demonstratives lexically encode an anti-uniqueness presupposition in their semantics (Nowak, 2019; Dayal and Jiang, 2022; Owusu, 2022), while the other derives the inference from general pragmatic principles (Blumberg, 2020; Ahn, 2022, 2023). In this paper, I present evidence in favor of the presuppositional account and introduce a modalized implementation that addresses key limitations of prior proposals. Drawing on cross-linguistic empirical data, I further demonstrate that the anti-uniqueness approach is better suited to account for typological variation in this domain
Non-maximal telicity in English incremental theme predicates
Full text linkTypically, incremental theme predicates give rise to telicity inferences in the case when the object is quantized and an incremental mapping holds between the object and the verb. Culmination inferences can have a strange characteristic, where their default maximal meaning can be rejected in favour of a non-maximal construal. In this paper, I will present an empirical pattern for English incremental theme predicates, situate them within the broader typology of partitive accomplishments, before providing an analysis of their context-sensitive compositional properties and the source of their defeasible maximality
Shallowly accurate but deeply confused – how language models deal with antonyms
Full text linkAntonymic adjectives are subject to a variety of asymmetries regarding pragmatic inferences. The Inference Towards the Antonym (Horn, 1989; Krifka, 2007; Ruytenbeek et al., 2017; Gotzner et al., 2018) in particular, consists in deriving the antonym of an adjective A when encountering its negation (not A). Within a given antonymic pair, this inference is sup-posed to apply to a greater extent to negated positive adjective, as opposed to negated negative adjectives. This is especially true when the latter is morphologically transparent. In this pa-per, we test if recent Large Language Models capture this contrast using different probing methods. We conclude that some but not all models exhibit a contrast between positive and negative adjectives regarding the target inference, although (i) the observed contrasts are not readily interpretable at the level of word processing (ii) part of it may be explained by frequency differences (iii) more general expectations about the models’ behavior regarding antonymic ad-jectives (parsing, reversing effect of negation) are not met. This casts doubt on the ability of such models to abstractly encode the concept of antonymy
Epistemic temporal interactions in San Pablo Güilá Zapotec
Full text linkOn the basis of data from San Pablo Güilá Zapotec, this paper argues in support of the proposal that past temporal perspective is possible in epistemic contexts and that they depend on an operator that scopes over the epistemic modal. I show that San Pablo Güilá Zapotec has a variable-force epistemic modal pǎt and that sentences with this epistemic modal are judge-dependent. I also show that to create past temporal perspective, an element that scopes over the modal is required. This element (là̰z) performs two main functions: i) it allows past temporal perspective with the epistemic modal pǎt (by carrying a presupposition that the reference time t′ at which the modal is evaluated is located prior to the utterance time t), and ii) it expresses overtly the judge of the epistemic proposition by means of a personal subject clitic attached to it
Readings of pronouns across connectives are sensitive to monotonicity
Full text linkKanazawa (1994) proposed a generalization connecting the monotonicity properties of quantifiers and the preferred reading (existential or universal) of donkey sentences. We show through two experimental studies that his generalization extends to cross-conjunction anaphora.In a nutshell, we find that simple cross-conjunction anaphora like there is a circle and it is blue are read existentially (there is a blue circle) but adding negation to the second conjunct (there is a circle and it is not blue) makes an additional universal reading accessible (there is a circle and no circle is blue). These results provide a challenge to Egli’s principle, a principle validated by most existing dynamic theories, according to which only an existential reading should be found in these constructions, regardless of the presence of negation
The at-issue status of (modified) pro-speech gestures
Full text linkData from Schlenker (2021) suggests that modifications of pro-speech gestures—for example, a lifting gesture modified by trembling of the hands and facial expressions to convey effort—contribute not-at-issue meaning. If this is the case, modified pro-speech gestures convey information across two semantic dimensions simultaneously: the neutral pro-speech gesture contributes at-issue meaning, while the modification adds not-at-issue content. Presenting results from a rating study, I provide empirical support for this claim and offer novel experimental evidence confirming that pro-speech gestures contribute at-issue meaning
Aspectual shift in Romance: A preliminary study
Full text linkBare plurals in English are known to induce a shift in the aspectual properties of verbal complexes, turning telic eventualities into atelic ones. In this respect, they contrast with singular indefinites (e.g., a) and non-specific plural indefinites (e.g., some) which have been claimed to not trigger such an aspectual shift. In this work, we address two questions: (i) how much different types of indefinites vary in their ability to cause aspectual shift and (ii) what happens to aspectual shift in languages where bare plurals have a more constrained distribution than in English or are altogether unattested. We investigate these questions through two experimental studies in three closely related Romance languages: French, Italian and Romanian. We also discuss consequences of our findings for current theoretical proposals on the topic. To our knowledge, this work constitutes the first attempt to investigate aspectual shift across languages experimentally
Sorting out left-nested conditionals
Full text linkLeft-nested conditionals — those with another conditional in the antecedent — have largely been ignored in the semantic and philosophical literature. When discussed, they are usually treated as marginal or even ill-formed, even though linguistic theories of conditionals predict that they should be readily interpretable. This paper attempts to explain why they are special, and to draw out consequences for how they can be used to inform semantic theories of conditionals. Using a number of diagnostics, I show that bare left-nested conditionals are preferentially interpeted as premise conditionals. Premise conditionals are syntactically and semantically distinct from the hypothetical conditionals that the semantic literature has focused on, and they show severe restrictions in terms of the discourse contexts in which they can occur. Left-nested conditionals show the same behavior on this and a number of other diagnostics, including overt markers in Japanese and German. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of how these puzzling patterns could be explained from various theoretical perspectives, and some methodological lessons
On the distinction between amounts and degrees
Full text linkThis paper investigates copular constructions such as Five dogs is too many pets and Ten kilos of broccoli is too much food, in which a property is seemingly ascribed to an amount or quantity. We argue that the subject noun phrases in such examples do in fact denote amounts—construed as the entity correlates of quantized properties—and that amount predication is a form of predication in its own right. We further demonstrate, on the basis of a range of distributional and interpretative patterns, that amounts are distinct from degrees; that is, the place of amounts in semantic theory is not in lieu of but rather in addition to degrees