Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Constraining (shifting) types at the interface
Get PDFThis paper argues that traces only range over individual semantic types and cannot be type shifted into higher types to circumvent this restriction. The evidence comes from movement targeting positions where DPs must denote properties and the behavior of definite descriptions in these positions. These constraints on possible traces demonstrate that syntactic operations impose active restrictions on permissible semantic types in natural language
On acquiring a complex personal reference system: Experimental results from Thai children with autism
Get PDFReference of pronouns may be constrained via lexical presuppositions, including marked F-features, implicated presuppositions, and deictic center shifting in certain languages. This paper explores the acquisition of personal reference terms in Thai, a language that has a highly complex personal reference system. The participants of the study were 67 typically-developing children (TD) and 29 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), a population which has long been observed to have difficulties with pronouns. The children were asked to complete simple production and comprehension tasks on personal reference terms. Overall, ASD children performed on par in production but significantly poorer in comprehension than TD children. Given the freedom of choice in the production task, ASD children preferred using fixed referential terms for self-reference, whereas TD children opted for personal pronouns. In terms of comprehension, ASD children were shown to generally be able to detect the person features but they seemed to struggle the most with the pragmatic aspects of personal reference terms. Our results support previous literature that lexical presuppositions are acquired earlier than implicated presuppositions. We add to the literature that the types or the amount of implicated presuppositions matter in acquisition
Partition by exhaustification: Comments on Dayal 1996
Get PDFIn this paper I argue for a new constraint on questions, namely that a question denotation (a set of propositions) must map to a partition of a Stalnakerian Context-Set by point-wise exhaustification (point-wise application of the function Exh). The presupposition that Dayal attributes to an Answer operator follows from this constraint, if we assume a fairly standard definition of Exh (Krifka, 1995). But the constraint is more restrictive thereby deriving the sensitivity of higher order quantification to negative islands (Spector, 2008). Moreover, when combined with recent proposals about the nature of Exh – designed primarily to account for the conjunctive interpretation of disjunction (e.g. Bar-Lev and Fox, 2017) – Dayal’s presupposition follows only in certain environments. This observation allows for an account of the “mention-some” interpretation of questions that makes specific distributional predictions
Split-antecedent relative clauses and the symmetry of predicates
Get PDFThis paper presents the results of two experiments in German testing the acceptability of (non-) restrictive relative clauses (NRCs/RRCs) with split antecedents (SpAs). According to Moltmann (1992), SpAs are only grammatical if their parts occur within the conjuncts of a coordinate structure and if they have identical grammatical functions. Non-conjoined SpAs that form the subject and the object of a transitive verb are predicted to be ungrammatical. Our study shows that the acceptability of such examples improves significantly if the predicate that relates the parts of the SpA is symmetric. Moreover, it suggests that NRCs and RRCs behave differently in these cases with respect to the SpA-construal. We can make sense of this observation if we follow Winter (2016) in assuming that transitive symmetric predicates have to be analyzed as unary collective predicates and thus provide a collective antecedent for the RC at the semantic (not the syntactic) level. As we will argue, this accounts for some of the disagreement we found in the literature and gives us new insights into both the semantics of symmetric predicates and the semantics of NRCs
The pa/wa of imperative alternatives
Get PDFThis paper deals with topic markers interacting with discourse information in imperatives. It compares two topic markers from Slovenian (‘pa’) and Japanese (‘-wa’) and shows that while they mostly match in terms of the foci they associate with, their functions differ in imperatives: only ‘pa’ may yield a concessive imperative reading. It is shown that this reading can be derived while keeping a single entry for ‘pa’ by making attitudes of discourse participants part of the focus ‘pa’ associates with. The split between Slovenian and Japanese can then be attributed to minor differences in terms of which foci ‘pa’ and ‘-wa’ may associate with
Generics and typicality
Get PDFCimpian et al. (2010) observed that we accept generic statements of the form ‘Gs are f ’ on relatively weak evidence, but that if we are unfamiliar with group G and we learn a generic statement about it, we still interpret it in a much stronger way: (almost) all Gs are f . This paper makes use of notions like ‘representativeness’ and ‘contingency’ from (associative learning) psychology to provide a semantics of generics that explains why people accept generics based on weak evidence. We make use of the Heuristics and Biases approach of Tversky and Kahneman (1974) and the Associative Theory of Probability Judgements to explain pragmatically why people interpret generic statements in a much stronger way. The spirit of the approach has much in common with Leslie’s (2008) cognition-based ideas about generics, but the semantics is grounded on Cohen’s (1999) relative readings of generic sentences. The basic intuition is that a generic of the form ‘Gs are f ’ is true, not because most Gs are (or tend to have) f , but because f is typical for G, which means that f is valuably associated with G
Clefts: Quite the contrary!
Get PDFMuch of the previous literature on English it-clefts—sentences of the form ‘It is X that Z’— concentrates on the nature and status of the exhaustivity inference (‘nobody/nothing other than X Z’). This paper concerns the way in which it-clefts signal contrast. We argue that it-clefts signal a type of contrast that does not merely involve a salient antecedent, as on more traditional characterizations of contrast such as those of e.g. Kiss (1998) and Rooth (1992), but also involves a conflict between the speaker’s and the hearer’s beliefs, as under the characterization of contrast given by Zimmermann (2008, 2011), which we term contrariness. Results of a felicity judgment experiment suggest that clefts do have a preference for contrariness, and one which has a gradient effect on felicity judgments: the more strongly interlocutors appear committed to an apparently false notion, the better it is to repudiate them with a cleft
The proper treatment of the wide scope or reading of the English either ... or ... construction
Get PDFThe main concern of this paper is the availability of the wide scope or reading in the English either ... or ... construction and its interaction with the behavior of either. I propose that a hybrid analysis consisting of an ellipsis analysis (Schwarz, 1999), which directly arises from the requirement of or that it connect disjuncts of the same type, and a choice function analysis of either (cf. Winter (2001); Schlenker (2006) for a choice function analysis of or) explains the whole data set. I also discuss a prediction the present analysis makes and some remaining issues, including a data issue in which the judgments made by my informants differ from the ones observed in a previous study
An anti-intellectualist treatment of German wissen (‘know’)
Get PDFGerman wissen (‘know’) can embed both finite clauses (‘wissen-FIN’) as well as infinitives (‘wissen-INF’). Based on novel empirical observations, we argue that wissen-INF cannot be reduced to the standard analysis of wissen-FIN, i.e. that wissen with infinitival complements does not involve a propositional attitude. As cross-linguistic evidence suggests that German wissen is not ambiguous, it follows that wissen-FIN cannot denote a propositional attitude, either. Accordingly, we require a new, uniform meaning for wissen. We derive this meaning by first considering wissen-INF, arguing that it combines semantic properties of ability modals with semantic properties of implicative verbs and enough to-constructions. We then show that these properties can also be used to characterize wissen-FIN, as long as certain nonstandard assumptions are made about the denotation of the complement. This gives us a new, unified analysis of wissen and also helps to explain some properties of this verb (with both kinds of complements) that traditional analyses cannot account for
On the similarity between unless and only-if-not
Get PDFThis paper discusses the semantics of unless-conditionals and compares them to only-if-not-conditionals. I propose that the meaning of unless-conditionals can be derived from the same ingredients as the meaning of only-if-not-conditionals: a negative conditional (where conditionals are understood as restrictors on quantifier domains as in the Kratzer-Lewis tradition) and an exhaustifier that, like only, negates all of the focus alternatives for a modal claim built by substitution of the element marked with focus with other elements of the same semantic type (but unlike only also asserts its prejacent). I propose that the two constructions are similar in the following sense. First, in both cases a negative conditional and the exhaustifier are separated syntactically. Secondly, focus alternatives are constructed in the same way: a set of focus alternatives for a proposition denoted by an if-clause (or a complement of unless) includes any other possible proposition. I suggest that this way of constructing alternatives resolves a long-standing puzzle about only with conditionals: it allows us to derive the right interpretation for only with conditionals in a compositional manner without making any special assumptions about the nature of the covert modal