Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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The Cameleontic Nature of French Ni: Negative Coordination in a Negative Concord Language
Get PDFThe main goal of this paper is to defend the claim that ni, the Frenchcounterpart of neither and nor is always a negative conjunction which takes part in the negative concord system of French. The interpretation one seems to get for this negative concord ni varies depending on the environment where it occurs: depending on its scope position with respect to other negative expressions in the sentence it may alternate with and, or and and not. The paper considers some consequences of this cameleontic behaviour for theories of negative concord
Salience, Inference and Plural Anaphora
Get PDFIn this paper, I argue that the DRT Construction Rules for plural antecedents are redundant, because they are subsumed by an inference mechanism that must be made generally available for anaphora resolution. While Kamp and Reyle originally argued against a general inference mechanism for plural anaphora, I argue that the facts of compset anaphora require inference. Furthermore, I observe that compset anaphora is blocked by refset anaphora. I consider an alternative DRT account, in which inference coexists with Construction Rules. I argue that the Construction Rules are not necessary to capture the blocking generalization; rather, I argue that refset descriptions are semantically primed, thus deriving the blocking generalization in terms of general inference, together with an independently required mechanism of semantic priming. I argue that this alternative is to be preferred on grounds of theoretical parsimony. Furthermore, I present an argument that the general inference account correctly captures the fact that plural descriptions can be interpreted at the position of the plural pronoun, while the DRT account incorrectly requires that they be interpreted at the position of the antecedent
Pragmatic Control of Specificity and Scope: Evidence from Dutch L1a
Get PDFIn this paper I argue, on the basis of intuitional and psycholinguistic evidence, that a grammatical constraint on scope ambiguity found in Dutch and some other languages, but not in English, is a rule of pragmatic competence. After showing that this constraint cannot be derived from the obligatory specificity of indefinites in certain contexts, nor from core syntactic properties of Dutch that distinguish it from English, I present experimental evidence that the Dutch scope constraint is not fully acquired by Dutch monolingual speakers until after the age of 12. Given standard assumptions about L1A, this can only be the case if this constraint does not derive purely from UG. I propose a construction-based account of it and suggest that this is generated by the same general cognitive processes that are primarily responsible for adult L2A
Feature-Placing, Localizability, and the Semantics of Existential Sentences
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The Semantics of Rising Intonation in Interrogatives and Declaratives
Get PDFWe analyze rising declaratives in English as modal expressions of epistemic uncertainty and argue that their question-like behavior is a secondary effect derived from maxims of rational conversation. In order to express the meaning with formal semantics, we combine Veltman’s update semantics with the test operator with a simple semantics for polar questions
Truth, Belief and Knowledge in Epistemic Logic
No full textStandard logic tends to reduce propositions to their truth conditions. However propositions with the same truth conditions are not the contents of the same thoughts just as they are not the senses of synonymous sentences. I will first define a much finer criterion of propositional identity that takes into account predications that we make in expressing propositions. In my view, propositions have a structure of constituents. We ignore in which possible circumstances most propositions are true because we ignore real denotations of their attributes and concepts. In understanding them we just know that their truth in each circumstance is compatible with certain possible denotation assignments to their constituents and incompatible with others. So propositions have possible in addition to real truth conditions. I will explain why strictly equivalent propositions can have a different cognitive value. I will define the notion of truth according to an agent and a strong propositional implication that is known a priori. I will also formulate a logic of belief that is compatible with philosophy of mind. Human agents are minimally rather than perfectly rational in my logic. Epistemic paradoxes are solved
Comparative Paths to an Optimal Interpretation
Get PDFIn this paper we discuss a particular type of comparatives, that we call reflexive comparatives. These reflexive comparatives have the property that they compare an object with itself, but with respect to different temporal, spatial or scalar indices. We argue that this property can be viewed as the optimal outcome of a conflict between two general constraints on the arguments of a semantic relation. A semantics of reflexive comparatives is proposed which is based on paths in scalar and other domains
Exceptional-Scope Indefinites and Domain Restriction
Get PDFThis paper argues that the apparent exceptional scope behaviour of indefinites can be accounted for just by supposing a unitary analysis of indefinites as existential quantified noun phrases. It is argued that it is consistent with the meaning and use of quantificational indefinite noun phrases that, on occasion, their domain is implicitly contextually restricted by an identifying condition which the speaker has in mind. In order to explicate what the idea of having such things ‘in mind’ might amount to, some proposals in Perry (2001) are drawn on. The account is extended to deal with intermediate scope effects
Topical Restriction and Answerhood
Get PDFInformation structure is the term designating a very lively and active branch of work, which deals with various topics such as anaphora, topical restriction, questions, congruence and exhaustification. This work tends to diverge in many directions which hardly can be seen to be compatible with one another. In this paper we attempt to improve the situation by trying to develop the minimal formal tools required to study the logical properties of the various issues involved and integrate them step by step. We successively deal with anaphoric connections between pronouns and other terms in terms of individual satisfaction by possible witnesses; with questions and topics in terms of sets of possible witnesses; with topical restriction and answerhood in terms of topical satisfaction; we conclude with a compositional deconstruction of Henk Zeevat’s exhaustification operation
Individuals and Predication - A Neurosemantic Perspective
Get PDFIn this paper we reflect on the constraints that current knowledge and assumptions in the neurosciences impose on theories of concepts and of linguistic meaning. We focus on the operation of predication. A central contention of this paper is that at the neural level there is no fundamental difference between predicate and predicable - representations of individuals and representations of categories are both feature complexes with basically the same structure. We discuss the structure of such representations and the ways in which they interact in certain simple situations of perception and verbal communication