Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
Not a member yet
1139 research outputs found
Sort by
Reichenbach’s E, R and S in a Finite-State Setting
Get PDFReichenbach’s event, reference and speech times are interpreted semantically by stringing and superposing sets of temporal formulae, structured within regular languages. Notions of continuation branches and of inertia, bound (in a precise sense) by reference time, are developed and applied to the progressive and the perfect
Competition Between Word Meanings: The Polysemy of (A)Round
Get PDFThe preposition (a)round can be used to describe a wide variety of spatial paths, ranging from perfectly circular to slightly curved. This polysemy is approached from a formal semantic perspective, building on the descriptive work of cognitive semanticists. The different uses are defined in model-theoretic terms, using a vector-based model, and shown to be entailments, i.e. weaker versions or supersets, of the prototypical circle meaning of round. The different spatial senses of round can then be ordered according to strength. The interpretation that is chosen in a particular context is determined in an optimality-theoretic fashion from the interaction of a small number of general principles: STRENGTH, FIT and V AGUENESS, of which the last two are more important than the first. The strongest sense of round is chosen that fits the linguistic context. If the context does not favour a weaker meaning, a weaker meaning still results because of a preference for vagueness
Minimize Restrictors! (Notes on Definite Descriptions, Condition C and Epithets)
Get PDFFollowing a general line explored by Bolinger, Reinhart, Levinson and Schein, we seek to derive Condition C of the Binding Theory from a Gricean maxim of minimization (Minimize Restrictors!), which specifies that a definite description the A B is deviant if A could be dropped without affecting (i) the denotation of the description, and (ii) its various pragmatic effects. Thus the small (American) President is deviant if it is assumed that there is a single (American) President, as small contributes neither to (i) nor to (ii). By contrast, the stupid (American) President is entirely natural: although stupid does not affect (i), it contributes pragmatic information about the speaker\u27s (negative) attitude towards the denotation of the description. If pronouns are treated as short descriptions and if the semantics is set up in a slightly non-standard fashion, Part (i) of Minimize Restrictors! can derive the standard cases of Condition C. Furthermore, Part (ii) accounts for some exceptions to Condition C. First, an element may contribute expressive information about the speaker\u27s attitude towards the denotation of the description, as is the case of epithets (e.g. the idiot expresses the speaker\u27s negative attitude towards the person in question). Second, an element may serve a disambiguating function, as happens in very long sentences in which a definite description is acceptable in violation of Condition C (e.g. the linguist in: [A linguist working on Binding Theory]i was so devoid of any moral sense that hei forced [a physicist working on particles]k to hire [the linguist\u27s]i girlfriend in hisk lab.
Anaphoric Restriction of Alternative Sets: On the Role of Bridging Antecedents
Get PDFThis paper addresses the problem of how to restrict the set of alternatives evoked by focus to obtain a subset relevant for quantification by focus-sensitive adverbs. The paper focusses on definite noun phrases. It is argued that most definite NPs, if they include a focus, have to make use of a bridging antecedent to achieve uniqueness. The bridging antecedent is shown to provide the relevant set of alternatives, which may in addition be constrained by the backgrounded part of the descriptive content. Moreover, NPs of the form "the OTHER [p]" are shown to relate to the (proper) alternatives induced by a preceding focus. The analysis is spelled out on the basis of DRT
Non-dynamic Analyses of Anaphoric Pronouns: Do things look better in 2-D?
Get PDFThis paper compares pragmatic accounts of anaphoric relations between indefinites and pronouns. We argue that Stalnaker’s (1998) account which exploits features of his two dimensional framework for representing context and content is too weak. We suggest that the definiteness of anaphoric pronouns can be captured only if we consider them E-type
Factors licensing embedded present tense in speech reports
Get PDFAccording to Ogihara (1995), the usage of the embedded present in a speech report such as John said that Mary is in the room is restricted by the cause of John’s belief (the state that made John think that Mary is in the room): the present tense can be used only if this cause still holds at the time that John said that Mary is in the room is uttered. This paper presents experimental evidence demonstrating that this is only one of the factors that licenses a felicitous usage of the embedded present tense. In particular, we show that the cause of belief still holding is not a necessary condition, and identify two additional, sufficient (but not necessary) factors: in cases of false belief, who is aware of the falsity of the belief and duration of the reported state. While these factors are independent, they collectively support the idea that the present tense encodes ‘current relevance’, even in embedded contexts (e.g. Costa 1972; McGilvray 1974). This gives rise to the question of how we can derive ‘current relevance’ and, in particular, whether previous analyses of the embedded present tense are adequately equipped to do so
Decomposing cornering effects: an experimental study
Get PDFAlternative Questions with “or not” (NAQ) convey a cornering effect, which is not found with they polar counterparts (PQ). This effect has been claimed to consist of two parts (Biezma 2009): NAQs (i) cannot be used discourse-initially and (ii) they do not license followup questions/subquestions. In this paper, we ask the following: Are both parts of cornering linked to the same property of NAQs? Or do they reflect distinct linguistic phenomena? We explore the issue by comparing the behavior of NAQs to Complement Alternative Questions (CAQ), a type of question that, like NAQs, presents logically opposite alternatives but, unlike NAQs, fully spells out the second one. Results from two experiments suggest that both parts of cornering can instead be explained in terms of independent semantic and pragmatic principles,which operate beyond the domain of alternative questions
QUD effects on epistemic containment principle: An experimental study
Get PDFThe Epistemic Containment Principle (ECP) requires that epistemic modals take wider scope than strong quantifiers such as every or most (von Fintel and Iatridou, 2003). Although fairly robust in its realization, a few systemic classes of counterexamples to the ECP have been noted. Based on these, previous work has argued for two claims: subjective modals obey the ECP, whereas objective ones don’t (Tancredi, 2007; Anand and Hacquard, 2008); and every respects the ECP, whereas each violates it (Tancredi, 2007). This paper argues that explicit Questions Under Discussion (QUDs; Roberts, 1996; Ginzburg, 1996) also systematically influence the ECP: scopal orderings that provide relevant answers to the given QUDs are preferred, and this tendency can override the ECP. To support this claim, the paper presents an experimental study. The results corroborate the existence of systematic QUD effects on the ECP, and support the view that the ECP is derived from a confluence of various pragmatic and lexical biases
Responsive predicates are question-embedding: Evidence from Estonian
Get PDFThe proper semantic treatment of the complements of Responsive Predicates (ResPs), those predicates which may embed either declarative or interrogative clauses, is a longstanding puzzle, given standard assumptions about complement selection. In order to avoid positing systematic polysemy for ResPs, typical treatments of ResP complements treat their arguments either as uniformly declarative-like (propositional) or interrogative-like (question). I shed new light on this question with novel data from Estonian, in which there are verbs think-like meanings with declarative complements and wonder-like meanings with interrogative complements. I argue that these verbs’ meaning is fundamentally incompatible with a proposition-taking semantics for ResPs, and therefore a question-taking semantics is to be preferred
Operating over (internal) ‘covert-based’ alternatives with scalar focussensitive particles: Evidence from Modern Hebrew
Get PDFThis paper examines a range of readings found with the Hebrew focus sensitive particle bixlal and its accented version BIXLAL observed in Migron 2003, and in a series of works by Greenberg and Khrizman. Following ideas in these works the paper argues that bixlal is a member of the typology of even-like operators in Hebrew, along the unmarked particle afilu, and that the range of readings found with BIXLAL results from the fact that the same even-like operation is done over ‘covert-based’, and in particular degree-based and domain-based, alternatives. This parameter of variation is shown to be relevant for other scalar particles, both even-like and only-like, cross linguistically. The paper is finished by briefly examining another non-standard type of alternatives operated over by some scalar particles, namely speech act alternatives. The general conclusion is that ‘type of alternatives’ is a relevant parameter for scalar focus particles in natural language