Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Exploring the existential/universal ambiguity in singular donkey sentences
Get PDFAlthough widely discussed in the semantics literature, donkey sentences have been the subject of very little experimental study. In this paper, we present experimental work that is aimed at addressing somewhat open questions around donkey sentences with determiners other than ‘every’ and their susceptibility to both Universal and Existential readings. Our experiments test donkey sentences with ‘every’, ‘no’, ‘some’ and ‘more than two’. By using both verification and act-out tasks, we are able to show that Universal readings are available for donkey sentences with existential determiners (specifically, ‘more than two’), as well as Existential readings. However, our studies fail to show that sentences with ‘no’ have a Universal reading, and they also provide some evidence against the idea that ‘no’ sentences have dual readings
Content vs. function words: The view from distributional semantics
Get PDFoai:sub.ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de:article/2Counter to the often assumed division of labour between content and function words, we argue that both types of words have lexical content in addition to their logical content. We propose that the difference between the two types of words is a difference in degree. We conducted a preliminary study of quantificational determiners with methods from Distributional Semantics, a computational approach to natural language semantics. Our findings have implications both for distributional and formal semantics. For distributional semantics, they indicate a possible avenue that can be used to tap into the meaning of function words. For formal semantics, they bring into light the context-sensitive, lexical aspects of function words that can be recovered from the data even when these aspects are not overtly marked. Such pervasive context-sensitivity has profound implications for how we think about meaning in natural language
Embedded implicature in a new interactive paradigm
Get PDFPrevious research on scalar implicature has primarily relied on metalinguistic judgment tasks and found varying rates of such inferences depending on the nature of the task and contextual manipulations. This paper introduces a novel interactive paradigm involving both a production and a comprehension component, thereby fixing a precise conversational context. The main research question is what is reliably communicated by some in this communicative setting, when the quantifier occurs in unembedded positions as well as embedded positions. Our new paradigm involves an action-based task from which participants’ interpretation of utterances can be inferred. It incorporates a game–theoretic design, including a precise model to predict participants’ behaviour in the experimental context. Our study shows that embedded and unembedded implicatures are reliably communicated by some. We propose two cognitive principles which describe what can be left unsaid. In our experimental context, a production strategy based on these principles is more efficient (with equal communicative success and shorter utterances) than a strategy based on literal descriptions
Ever free relatives crosslinguistically
Get PDFBased on a sample of seven languages, I show that the so-called modal inferences in ever free relatives (ignorance and indifference) are not universally available. The primary reading of ever free relatives crosslinguistically turns out to be a “non-modal” one, which is available to all languages under investigation. The implication is that if there is a modal inference triggered by the use of the ever-morpheme in FRs, the inference is likely to have a source external to the ever free relative (Lauer, 2009; Condoravdi, 2015; Hirsch, 2016). In line with this conclusion, I propose to generalize Hirsch’s (2016) analysis of ignorance ever free relatives, suggesting that all ever free relatives, no matter how they are ultimately interpreted, are instances of (un)conditionals + donkey-anaphoric definite descriptions
Shared mechanism underlying unembedded and embedded enrichments: Evidence from enrichment priming
Get PDFIn this paper, we use a priming paradigm to explore the mechanisms underlying unembedded and embedded scalar enrichments. In particular, the aim is to see if local pragmatic enrichment could be a shared mechanism, involved in both. The two experiments presented adopt Bott & Chemla\u27s (2016) enrichment priming paradigm and test whether unembedded and embedded enrichments could prime each other. The goal is to investigate whether local pragmatic enrichment is indeed being accessed for the interpretation of the unembedded scalar and whether local enrichments, like other lexical semantic phenomena, are susceptible to priming
Implicatures of modified numerals: quality or quantity?
Get PDFThis paper presents a theory of modified numerals that derives a three-way distinction in the implicature profile between superlative modifiers, comparative modifiers, and bare numerals. In contrast to the recent proposal by Schwarz (2016a), and drawing on elements from Coppock and Brochhagen’s (2013) inquisitive analysis, the proposal decouples ignorance implicatures from upper-bounding implicatures, and thereby captures an important difference between more than and at least, which differ in their ignorance implicatures but both lack an upper-bounding implicature. At the same time, it accounts for the context-sensitivity in the ignorance implicatures of modified numerals found by Westera and Brasoveanu (2014), and addresses a problem with Coppock and Brochhagen (2013) pointed out by Schwarz (2016b). The key feature of the proposal is the fact that ignorance implicatures may arise in two different ways, namely, both from the Maxim of Quantity and from the Maxim of Quality
Two strategies of reopening QUDs— evidence from German auch & noch
Get PDFThis paper argues for a domain restriction account for wh-words in questions using resource situations, in parallel with the domain restriction of quantifiers proposed in Kratzer (2011). It is argued that under a situation semantic account assuming resource situations, the different behaviour of additive particles can be explained: Under a question under discussion account, additive particles like too and also are used when a (possibly covert) question is ‘reopened’ in order to add a further true answer (Beaver and Clark 2008, i.a.). This paper suggests that there are two ways in which a question can be re-addressed: it can either be reopened with (i) a different resource situation or (ii) with a different topic situation. This can explain the different behaviour of the additive particles auch and noch in German
Common nouns as variables: Evidence from conservativity and the temperature paradox
Get PDFCommon nouns and noun phrases have usually been analyzed semantically as predicates. In quantified sentences, these predicates take variables as arguments. This paper develops and defends an analysis in which common nouns and noun phrases themselves are treated as variables, rather than as predicates taking variables as arguments. Several apparent challenges for this view will be addressed, including the modal non-rigidity of common nouns. Two major advantages to treating common nouns as variables will be presented: Such an analysis predicts that all nominal quantification is conservative, rather than requiring conservativity to be stipulated as a constraint on determiner denotations; and it makes possible some improvements to the analysis of the temperature paradox, allowing for quantificational examples without adding a spurious layer of modal variability
Modal subordination of propositional anaphora: On the role of tense and the modal particle ook in contextual counterfactuals in Dutch
Get PDFThis paper examines a variant of modal subordination that involves reference to propositions that have been introduced in the scope of a negative operator. In the dialogues under consideration, this kind of reference is most reliably established if the modal particle (MP) ook and past perfect morphology are present in the response, which contains the anaphor (Meijer 2016). We provide experimental evidence that supports this empirical claim and provide a theoretical explanation for the data. We assume that the discourses at issue involve contextual counterfactuals (CFs) whose antecedent may be positive or negative and provides the antecedent for the anaphor. CFs with a negative antecedent ‘doubt’ the truth of the previous utterance, whereas CFs with a positive antecedent do not. As a consequence, the MP, which presupposes that the epistemic modal base already entailed the previously uttered proposition, is incompatible with the former but not the latter type of CF (Meijer 2016). For the tense marking we propose that the effects are due to the local interpretation of the non-fake tense in the consequent of the CF (cf. Ippolito 2013)
An Experimental Investigation of the Binding Options of Demonstrative Pronouns
Get PDFThis paper discusses three reading time studies which, first, provide empirical evidence for the claim made by Hinterwimmer (2015) that German demonstrative pronouns can in principle be bound under c-command as long as their binders are not grammatical subjects (Experiments 1 – 3). Second, Experiment 3, which compares demonstrative and personal pronouns, shows that demonstrative pronouns can not only be used in binding configurations in order to avoid ambiguity (as claimed in Patel-Grosz and Grosz, to appear). Rather, sentences containing them are processed as easily as ones containing personal pronouns, provided that the respective binders are direct or indirect objects