Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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A Semantic Analysis of Negative Islands with Manner Questions
Get PDFDayal (1996) has proposed that a question presupposes that it has a most informative true answer. In this paper I argue that the reason for the unacceptability of negative manner questions is that this requirement can never be met in the case of these questions. This is because the domain of manners contains atoms that are not independent from each other: contraries. Therefore the truth of an (atomic) proposition in the Hamblin denotation of such questions has consequences for the truth of other atomic propositions. This state of affairs in the case of negative questions results in a situation in which it is not possible to select a maximal answer
Stating the obvious: Of course as a focus-sensitive marker of uncontroversiality
Get PDFThe English discourse particle of course, part of a cross-linguistic class of elements that express the ‘uncontroversiality’ of a proposition, has received little attention from theoretical linguists. Studies in the domain of uncontroversiality, particularly of the German particles doch and ja, typically treat uncontroversiality as a property that holds of a proposition for all participants in a discourse. We first show that of course cannot be folded into prior treatments of doch and ja. Furthermore, we argue that of course motivates a finer-grained notion of uncontroversiality that is focus-sensitive and relativized to individual discourse participants. While our analysis in principle allows for relativizing uncontroversiality to multiple discourse participants, we argue that of course is semantically relativized only to the speaker. Rather than being lexically specified, we argue that the apparent addressee-oriented uncontroversiality conveyed by of course follows from general pragmatic reasoning about shared knowledge in a discourse
A modular approach to intensionality
Get PDFThis paper introduces a procedure that takes a simple version of extensional semantics and generates from it an equivalent possible-world semantics that is suitable for treating intensional phenomena in natural language. This process of intensionalization allows to treat intensional phenomena as stemming exclusively from the lexical meaning of words like believe, need or fake. We illustrate the proposed intensionalization technique using an extensional toy fragment. This fragment is used to show that independently motivated extensional mechanisms for scope shifting and verb-object composition, once properly intensionalized, are strictly speaking responsible for certain intensional effects, including de dicto/de re ambiguities and coordinations containing intensional transitive verbs. While such extensional-intensional relations have often been assumed in the literature, the present paper offers a formal sense for this claim, facilitating the dissociation between extensional semantics and intensional semantics
Constraints on quantificational domains: Generic plural des indefinites in French
Get PDFThe current literature on pluralities is mainly concerned with definite plurals in existential contexts and the implicit assumption is that indefinite plurals are to be analyzed in the same way, as sums of individuals (Link 1983, Landman 2000) in the general case or as groups in more specific cases (see in particular collective readings). We will argue that although plural indefinites can be modeled as sums of individuals in those contexts in which they are either bound by existential closure or indirectly bound by an operator that quantifies over events, they cannot do so when they are directly bound by an adverbial quantifier; in the latter context, plural indefinites can only be represented as groups: binary quantifiers cannot denote a relation between two sets of sums, but only a relation between two sets of groups. This generalization will be shown to follow from an individuability constraint on quantification. Quantification requires individuability and, as argued by Landman (1989a,b) only groups, but not sums, are individuable entities. But one may still wonder whether the generic quantifier can access the members of sums, which are known to be accessible to distributive predication. To put it differently, one should explain why it is not possible to randomly fix a sum and to allow the generic adverb to quantify over its members. We will claim that it is impossible for generic sentences to restrict the generalization to a particular domain. Quantification over (groups of) individuals will be distinguished from quantification over events combined with the indirect binding of a variable supplied by an indefinite (plural). Such indirectly bound plural indefinites can be modeled as sums of individuals. The generic readings of French plural indefinites headed by des ‘some’ will provide us with the core testing ground. The analysis will shed new light on the generic readings of English bare plurals
Functional topics
Get PDFIt has long been observed that DPs containing a bound pronoun can occur left-dislocated in the German pre-field (see e.g. Vat 1981, Frey 2004b) while at the same time (Frey 2004b) argues that a left-dislocated DP has to be understood as the aboutness topic of the respective sentence. As the pronoun in the left-dislocated DP is bound from within the clause, this seems to be add odds with the claim that topicality of a DP results in a wide scope reading of this DP (as proposed e.g. by Cresti 1995, Ebert and Endriss 2004). We show that those examples in fact have functional wide scope readings as opposed to narrow scope readings and propose an extension of the approach of (Ebert and Endriss 2004) that can derive those readings and account for the occurrence restrictions of certain DPs w.r.t. left-dislocation and other topic positions
Implicature as a discourse phenomenon
Get PDFStandard implementations of Grice’s theory of conversational implicature assume that the derivation an implicature always begins with a single proposition expressed by means of a sentence in a given context. Against this received view, I argue that, in at least three ways, implicatures are discourse-based rather than proposition-based. First, in some cases an implicature can only be derived from an ensemble of two or more utterances. Secondly, some implicatures can only be explained on the assumption that the hearer takes into account the discourse referents that were introduced by the speaker’s utterance. Thirdly, I claim that presupposed material may give rise to conversational implicatures
Indefinite proper names and quantification over manifestations
Get PDFStarting from the observation that in German proper names can be determined by the indefinite article without apparently shedding their original referent, this paper presents a range of “non- standard” uses of proper names, among them one we will call the “manifestation use”. It will be suggested that certain occurrences of proper names cannot be adequately analysed without assuming manifestations as a basic unit of quantification
Proper names as rigid presuppositions
Get PDFSince Kripke introduced rigid designation as an alternative to the Frege/Russell analysis of referential terms as definite descriptions, there has been an ongoing debate between ‘descriptivists’ and ‘referentialists’, mostly focusing on the semantics of proper names. Nowadays descriptivists can draw on a much richer set of linguistic data (including bound and accommodated proper names in discourse) as well as new semantic machinery (E-type syntax/semantics, DRT, presupposition-as-anaphora) to strengthen their case. After reviewing the current state of the debate, I argue for a referentialist semantics that incorporates some modern insights from the side of the descriptivists in order to account for the new data in a principled fashion
On frequency adjectives
Get PDFFrequency adjectives like occasional can occur, unexpectedly, in connection with nouns which do not denote events: Agent Cooper likes an occasional cup of coffee. I provide a full classification of these adjectives and formulate a solution in terms of event semantics which keeps the core semantic contribution of frequency adjectives constant for normal uses and marked uses with non-event nouns. This distinguishes my approach from previous approaches which are merely partial and use non-standard ontologies and semantics for the marked constructions
Quantifying question particles in German: syntactic effects on interpretation
Get PDFThe paper presents an analysis of the German quantifying question particles (QQPs) w-so and w-alles. It is shown that the syntactic position of these particles, i.e. their formal association with a particular wh-item, is relevant for their semantic representation, contrary to claims in Beck (1996). The effects of syntactic structure on semantic interpretation are captured by treating QQPs as modifiers on structured propositions that place additional restrictions on the question domain introduced by the wh-item: w-so introduces a plurality condition on the answer space, whereas w-alles has two meaning components: next to adding a plurality condition, it indicates that the question requires an exhaustive answer. The existence of explicit markers of exhaustiveness in wh-questions has important consequences for the analysis of wh-questions as inherently exhaustive (Groenendijk & Stokhof 1982, 1984) or not (Beck & Rullmann 1999)