Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Bayes nets and the dynamics of probabilistic language
Get PDFThis paper is about a shared concern of linguistic semantics and pragmatics, epistemology, and many other areas of cognitive science: the formal representation of information and uncertainty. It is common in many of these areas, and increasingly in linguistics, to represent agents’ information using probability—an enrichment of classical semantics. However, each application of probability must answer difficult questions about whether a probabilistic representation is rich enough to capture the nuances of our information states. Two such problems—the epistemological distinction between uncertainty and ignorance, and the dynamic effects of probabilistic language in formal pragmatics—seem to suggest a negative answer, and to support a more complicated model that repesents uncertainty in terms of sets of probability measures. Following insights due to Judea Pearl (1988), I argue that the simplest probabilistic approach may be sufficient to handle these problems if we pay close attention to the hierarchical structure of information states, as encoded explicitly in the graphical representation of relationships among questions known as “Bayesian networks” or “Bayes nets”
A lexical marker of degrees of answerhood
Get PDFQuestions and their answers have been discussed at length over the past few years. In this paper we present and analyze a Hebrew hedger, be-gadol, roughly translated as basically. We use the literature on questions, answers and the relation between them to suggest that be-gadol is an item which conveys a restriction on the context of utterance. This restriction concerns the relation between answers to the QUD on an answerhood scale, which is characterized as involving two notions, informativity (Roberts 1996) and resolution, defined using tools from decision theories (Ginzburg 1995; van Rooij 2003). This significantly supports the linguistic reality of these notions
Cointensional questions, fragment answers, and structured meanings
Get PDFI discuss ‘cointensional questions’, questions which appear to have the same sense as each other, e.g. how many fives ten contains and how many times ten contains five. Fragment answers are sensitive to the distinction in form between these questions: the first of these can be answered by two but not twice, and vice-versa for the second. I argue that this casts light on the identity condition in (clausal) ellipsis, and in particular, requires a semantics for questions and focus which is more structured than propositional/Hamblin alternatives. Building on a proposal in Krifka (2006), I propose that the backgrounds of short answers must be in a subset relation to the background of their antecedent questions. I show that this proposal makes additional welcome predictions, capturing so-called ‘inheritance of content’ effects in clausal ellipsis
NPI Intervention of too
Get PDFThe additive focus particle too has an intervention effect on NPI licensing (Homer 2008, 2009). While Homer argues that it is the non-DE additive presupposition that intervenes, this analysis contrasts with generalizations that presuppositional components of licensers do not affect NPI licensing, especially weak NPIs like anything (von Fintel 1999, Chierchia 2004, Gajewski 2011, a.o.). By arguing that too asserts a conjunction between the host proposition and a propositional anaphor that refers to some salient antecedent, this paper provides an explanation of too’s intervention effect while maintaining the generalization made in Gajewski 2011 that only strong NPIs are sensitive to non-truth conditional meanings of their licensers. Noting that a fully parallel intervention effect is also found with an overt conjunction in English (Chierchia 2013), it is argued that the analysis provided for the overt conjunction can be applied directly to explain why too, a covert conjunction, intervenes with NPI licensing
Deontic and Epistemic Modals in Suppositional [Inquisitive] Semantics
Get PDFIn Groenendijk and Roelofsen (2015) a suppositional semantics for implication is proposed within the general framework of inquisitive semantics. Our aim is to extend this semantic approach to epistemic and deontic modals, but, for the purposes of this short paper, we bracketed off inquisitive aspects of meaning. To illustrate the semantics we discuss a semantic solution to a Jackson inspired puzzle which involves the interaction of implication and both types of modals.
The polysemy of container pseudo-partitives
Get PDFIn a series of experimental studies, we investigate the nature of the meaning multiplicity associated with container pseudo-partitives, e.g., glass of water can refer to the container (the glass) or the containee (the portion of water), asking if its distinct interpretations are available simultaneously in copredication environments or if they are in competition. The studies compare the acceptability of container pseudo-partitives to lexical polysemes (book) and homonyms (date), for which copredication has been claimed to be licit and anomalous respectively, and show that pseudo-partitives behave more like polysemes than homonyms, which is unexpected for current accounts. But we also see that copredication with pseudo-partitives is acceptable to a lesser extent than with polysemes, pointing to the possibility that copredication should be rethought in terms of the gradient costs it imposes, and that the multiple meanings of phrasal polysemous expressions like pseudo-partitives might be asymmetrically available in copredication environments
On the morphosyntactic representation of dependent quantification: distance distributivity, dependent indefinites, and Skolemization
Get PDFIt is commonly assumed that distance distributive elements like binominal each are operators that may or may not be related to other instances of the word each (e.g., floated each). We propose instead that binominal each is a bound variable in the Skolem term denoted by the indefinite noun phrase that each appears adjacent to. We argue that this approach captures various generalizations about the distribution of distance distributive elements within and across languages, and in particular it unifies distance distributivity with dependent indefinites as instances of the more general idea that languages sometimes morphologically mark ‘dependent quantification.
Emotive predicates and the subjunctive: a flexible mood OT account based on (non)veridicality
Get PDFWe address flexible embedded mood patterns, i.e. cases where (a) the same type of verb selects indicative in one language but prefers subjunctive in another, or (b) both moods may be allowed in a single language. We focus on emotive predicates as an illustration of our approach. Emotive predicates allow subjunctive and indicative (with preference for the former) in Italian. Such flexible patterns have not been discussed much in the literature because they are problematic for existing theories which predict the facts of one language but not the other. We propose that the correct account of embedded mood choice is sensitive to both what the embedding predicate asserts and what it presupposes. We argue that mood morphemes have definedness conditions that make them sensitive to aspects of the (non)veridicality of the embedding predicate, and implement an optimality theoretic account that captures opposing tendencies in Greek and Italian
Deriving the temporal properties of future markers from aspect
Get PDFLanguages vary in whether or not their future markers are compatible with non-future modal readings (Tonhauser, 2011b). The present paper proposes that this variation is determined by the aspectual architecture of a given language, more precisely if and how aspects can be stacked. Building on recent accounts of the temporal interpretation of modals (Matthewson, 2012, 2013; Kratzer, 2012; Chen et al., ta), the paper first sketches an analysis of the temporal readings of the English future marker will and then provides cross–linguistic comparison with a selected, typologically diverse set of languages (Medumba, Hausa, Gitksan, and Greek)
Nominal Ellipsis and the Interpretation of Gender in Greek
Get PDFMerchant (2014) observes that Greek has three classes of masculine-feminine noun pairs that differ in whether nominal ellipsis with gender mismatches is possible . We put forward an account of this observation, building on the idea that while certain gendered nouns have their gender inferences as part of their lexical semantics, others are underspecified and only obtain a gender inference via competition with the opposite gender. We claim that the behavior of the three classes of nouns under nominal ellipsis with gender mismatches falls out straightforwardly from their semantics under an auxiliary assumption that gender competition does not happen under nominal ellipsis