Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Binominal \u27each\u27 as an anaphoric determiner: compositional analysis
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Adverbial Quantification and (Un)Reducibility: The \u27Quantification at a Distance\u27 Construction in French
No full textIn this paper, I present a compositional semantic analysis of the Quantification at a Distance (QAD) construction in the standard dialect of European French. I argue that quantification in a QAD sentence is done by a binary adverbial quantifier over the verb’s event argument and the direct object argument at the same time. I argue that the modeling of the interpretations assigned to QAD sentences necessarily involves a polyadic quantifier, since such a quantifier is unreducible to any iterations of unary quantifiers. I provide a compositional analysis of the construction based on previous treatments of the indefinites that appear in it as semantically incorporatednominals
Constructing Concessive Conditionals: In Case of Japanese
Get PDFThis paper presents a compositional analysis of concessive conditionals in Japanese, which consists of a gerundive clause and the particle mo. Unlike the English even if sentences, there is no morpheme like if that apparently signals conditionality. On its surface, it looks as if the existence of mo serves as a combination of ‘even’ and ‘if’. I propose that mo can have a quantificational force over possible worlds. By interacting with the meaning of gerundive clause, it derives the conditionality ‘if ’ and the unlikeliness ‘even’ meaning. In addition to a general understanding of concessive conditionals in a cross-linguistic view, this study also leads to further questions about mo which has a wide range of properties from additivity to quantification
On the Temporal Use of the Focus Particle \u27gerade\u27
No full textIn this paper, we demonstrate that the analysis for the non-temporal uses of the German particle gerade developed in Schaden & Tovena (2008) applies to the temporal use of the particle as well. We also show that the non-temporal uses of gerade display a conventional association with focus (cf. Beaver & Clark (2007)), and explore the hypothesis that the same type of focus dependency is at stake with the temporal use, namely the ‘progressive’ and the ‘immediate anteriority’ readings. These readings are analysed as cases of association with Aspect-Phrase and Perfect-Phrase, respectively
Evidentiality and Determination
Get PDFThis paper investigates the semantic properties of the French determiner quelque. It is shown that quelque conveys inferential evidentiality, that is, it selects interpretations in which the speaker infers the proposition conveyed by the sentence that hosts the determiner. This accounts for several other properties, for instance the fact that quelque is anti-specific and does not combine freely with negation. A notable consequence of the analysis is that the free choice and positive polarity behaviour of quelque are reduced to its basic semantics. 
Intonation and Expectation: English Mirative Contours and Particles
Get PDFThis paper proposes a novel account of the English discourse particles oh and huh. First, these particles are analyzed as being inherently mirative, betraying a speaker’s (violated) expectations in a discourse. Second, these particles are systematically paired with idiomatic prosodic contours and contexts to observe how their pragmatic interpretation shifts. Mirativity in English, it turns out, is not limited to particular particles, but can also be a property of prosodic contours. Sag and Lieberman (1975)’s Surprise-Redundancy Contour, is one of them. I propose that understanding the contribution of discourse particle requires intricate pragmatic reasoning strategies which enriches basic meaning of a discourse particle with the pragmatic discourse effects contributed by prosodic variation
The CommitmentBank: Investigating projection in naturally occurring discourse
Get PDFThis paper describes a new resource, the CommitmentBank, developed for the empirical investigation of the projection of finite clausal complements. A clausal complement is said to project when its content is understood as a commitment of the speaker even though the clause occurs under the scope of an entailment canceling operator such as negation or a question. The study of projection is therefore part of the study of commitments expressed by speakers to non-asserted sentence content. The content of clausal complements has been a central case for the study of projection, as there is a long-standing claim that clause-taking predicates fall into two classes—factives and nonfactives—distinguished on the basis of whether the contents of their complements project. This claim identifies the embedding predicate as the primary determinant of the projection behavior of these contents. The CommitmentBank is a corpus of naturally occurring discourses whose final sentence contains a clause-embedding predicate under an entailment canceling operator. In this paper, we describe the CommitmentBank and present initial results of analyses designed to evaluate the factive/nonfactive distinction and to investigate additional factors which affect the projectivity of clausal complements
Towards a unified account of degree achievements and change of location verbs: the case of Spanish verbs with en-
Get PDFThis paper discusses Spanish verbs that are prefixed with en-, e.g., en-suciar ‘to dirty’ and en-carcelar ‘to jail’ (the former is a degree achievement and the latter is a change of location verb). The aim of this paper is to make explicit what the parallels between both kinds of verbal predicates are and provide a semantics that captures these parallels. To this end, I propose that the prefix en- has a core meaning, which is based on the locative preposition en in Spanish (which roughly translates in English as ‘in/inside, on’) that can be used in the domain of degrees (in the case of degree achievements) and space (in the case of change of location verbs). My account makes an initial attempt to bridge two different domains focusing on verbal predicates of change. This proposal is, in principle, extensible to (at least) other Romance languages, which display a similar pattern
Use-conditional meaning in Rational Speech Act models
Get PDFMotivated by shortcomings in the modeling of repeated utterances in Burnett’s Rational Speech Act (RSA) model of social meaning, we propose an alternative analysis in terms of use-conditional meaning, which we implement in an extended RSA framework. We show that it can not only model the production of a sequence of utterances throughout a discourse, but also captures the similarities between social and expressive meaning