Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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English Comparative Correlatives, Conditionals, and Adverbs of Quantification
Get PDFThis paper argues that the similarities long observed between English Comparative Correlative sentences (CCs) such as the bigger they are, the harder they fall and English conditionals are the result of the conservativity of generalized quantification and not the identity of the quantifiers involved in conditionals and CCs. I review the similarities, noted by Thiersch (1982), Fillmore (1987) and Beck (1997), inter alia, before presenting new data showing differences in both the kind of quantification (universal/generic v. proportional) and the defeasibility of quantification on the basis of what kinds of Adverbs of Quantification are found with each and how they affect interpretation. I conclude that CCs are not merely a subclass of conditionals as previously theorized (cf. Beck 1997, Lin 2007 and Brasoveanu 2008), positing an alternative theory in which a proportional quantificational force is part of the lexical meaning of the first the in the CC
On negative antecedents in deontic conditionals
Get PDFThis paper investigates the semantics of deontic modals. It focuses on the interplay between primary and secondary duties. The paper pays particular attention to secondary duties reported in conditionals with negative antecedents. It is claimed that this kind of example provides relevant insights into the semantics of deontic modals, shedding light on the relation between facts and ideals that is relevant to the evaluation of deontic claims. The paper proposes a semantics for deontic modals (exemplified by should). At the heart of the proposal is a notion of revision (similarity) that is argued to be analogous to that found in counterfactuals. Building on work by Kratzer and Veltman, it is claimed that there is a common core to the semantics of deontics and counterfactuals
Quoted imperatives
Get PDFI show how, contrary to recent claims, so-called embedded imperatives are better analyzed in terms of mixed quotation. To this end I extend the presuppositional analysis of mixed quotation to include quotations of constructions
How to do comparison in a language without degrees: a semantics for the comparative in Fijian
Get PDFKennedy (2009) distinguishes between implicit and explicit comparison (IC/EC): IC is exemplified by ‘Compared to John, Mary is tall’, and EC is of form, ‘Mary is taller than John’. Kennedy goes on to ask whether there are IC-only languages. We show that Fijian is an example of one. Along the way, we demonstrate that not all of Kennedy’s diagnostics for IC can be reliably applied across languages, and offer some novel diagnostics of our own. We propose a semantics for Fijian comparatives that makes no appeal to degree arguments, and discuss possibles source of the cross-linguistic variation
Reverse proportionality without context dependent standards
Get PDFIn the so-called reverse proportional reading (Herburger, 1997), the truth conditions of statements of the form many/few ? ? appear to make reference to the ratio of the individuals that are in the extensions of both ? and ? to the individuals that are in the extension of ? . The analysis of such readings is controversial. One prominent approach (Büring, 1996; de Hoop and Solà, 1996; Romero, 2015, 2016; Solt, 2009) assumes that they are a symptom of many and few making reference to a context dependent standard of comparison. Elaborating on remarks in Partee (1989), we observe that this initially attractive approach systematically undergenerates, failing to capture pervasive reverse proportionality in environments that remove context dependency of the standard. Instead, we propose that reverse proportionality in such cases reflects the underspecification of the measure function underlying the meanings of many and few (Bale and Barner, 2009; Wellwood, 2014; Solt, 2018)
On the Cross-Linguistic Interpretation of Embedded Tenses
Get PDFWe propose a semantic analysis of cross-linguistic variation in the distribution and interpretation of tenses embedded in propositional attitude complements and temporal adjunct clauses in English, Japanese and Russian. We compare our analysis to previous ones proposed by Ogihara (1994, 1996) and Arregui and Kusumoto (1998), which attribute the variation to syntactic differences between the languages, and argue that the semantic analysis is preferable on both empirical and conceptual grounds
Iterated \u27de re\u27: A New Puzzle for the Relational Report Semantics
No full textI present and solve a puzzle involving iterated de re reports in a relational attitudes framework. The investigation shows that de re reporting is even more noncompositional than hypothesized earlier