Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Evidentials in Interrogatives: A Case Study of Korean
Get PDFThis paper concerns a puzzle about the interpretation of Korean directevidential -te- in interrogatives which I call evidential perspective shift in questions (‘origo shift of evidentials’ in quesitons in Garrett 2001). This puzzle consists in the evidential being interpreted as regarding a source of information of the answerer rather than the questioner. Here I introduce a novel semantic approach to this phenomenon which derives it as a consequence of the interaction of the meaning of questions and of evidentials. I will also illustrate the conceptual and empirical advantages of this view over previous accounts
The Role of the Imperfect in Romance Counterfactuals
Get PDFThe Imperfect in Romance is used in an array of constructions: progressives, habituals, generics and counterfactual conditionals. The first three share all hallmarks of the Romance Imperfect: they describe something ongoing, in the past, and which requires contextual framing. Counterfactual uses, however, do not, and thus present an important challenge for a unified semantics of the Imperfect. In this paper, we try to explain the presence of the Imperfect in counterfactuals. We take counterfactuals to involve both a Future and an Imperfect (Iatridou 2000), but with the modal contribution of the latter neutralized, such that counterfactuals amount to future conditionals. The Imperfect is not entirely vacuous, however: it contributes presuppositions of framing and anteriority, which lead to counterfactual interpretations
Copular Questions and Concealed Questions
Get PDFThis paper aims at explaining a contrast in meaning between CQs and embedded whquestions. Greenberg (1977) observe that while a CQ-sentence like John discovered the murderer of Smith can only convey that John solved the question who murdered Smith?, the sentence John discovered who the murderer of Smith is has an additional reading, compatible with John not knowing about the murder, according to which he found out some essential fact about the person referred to as the murderer. In this paper, I argue that the ambiguity of embedded copular questions follows from the ambiguity of the copular clause they contain, which can have a predicational or a specificational interpretation (Higgins, 1973). On the other hand, assuming that CQs do not contain a copular clause at any level of representation, the ambiguity is not expected here
Framing effects as a semantic puzzle: Putting the alignment-assumption account to a test
Get PDFFraming effects are effects of linguistic variation (e.g. stating the amount of lives saved vs. lives lost) on judgments and decisions. This paper deals with a semantic-pragmatic account of framing effects as offered by Geurts’ (2013) alignment-assumption account. The account radically differs from extant accounts by explaining framing effects in terms of counterfactual alternatives and alignment of scales. I report two experiments that tested predictions derived from the alignment-assumption account and that related to the effect of upward- vs. downward entailing comparative quantifiers. The results provide preliminary experimental support for the alignment-assumption account and pose challenges for other accounts of framing effects
High negation questions and epistemic bias
Get PDFHigh negation questions—questions like “Isn’t it nice out?”—necessarily convey that the speaker is epistemically biased, i.e., the speaker has a prior belief about the correct answer to the question. In particular, the speaker necessarily expresses bias toward the proposition embedded under the high negation. Low negation questions, on the other hand, do not necessarily convey this bias. Romero and Han (2004) demonstrate that this asymmetry holds in several languages, some unrelated. This remarkable crosslinguistic fact merits explanation. In particular, what role does the structural height of negation play in triggering this epistemic bias? In this paper, I present novel evidence demonstrating that high negation questions lack propositional negation. This evidence is taken to support Ladd’s (1981) suggestion that high negation is somehow outside of the proposition, and is used to motivate an analysis in which high negation scopes above an epistemic operator. I argue that this analysis of high negation enables a novel account of epistemic bias that predicts its context insensitivity
An experimental investigation of (non-)exhaustivity in es-clefts
Get PDFWe present an empirical study on exhaustivity inferences in German es-clefts compared to definite descriptions (pseudoclefts with an identity statement), exclusives, and focus constructions. Our study uses a novel mouse-driven picture-verification task in which the incremental updating of the context allows one to determine at which point participants take exhaustivity into consideration. Our results are compatible with a parallel analysis of clefts and definite pseudoclefts (see Percus 1997; Büring and Križ 2013; cf. DeVeaugh-Geiss et al. 2015), in so far as both structures are indeed interpreted on a par. In striking contrast to these analyses, however, we found that clefts do not systematically receive exhaustive interpretations, nor do definite pseudoclefts. We conclude that exhaustivity is not conventionally coded in either clefts nor definite pseudoclefts but rather arises through the anaphoric existence presupposition in both constructions together with a number-based implicature
Control, logophorocity, and harmonic modality in Gengbe desire reports
Get PDFWith a special focus on jussive clauses, we present and account for a puzzling interaction between mood choice, embedding verb choice, and antecedent choice for logophoric subjects in attitude reports in Gengbe (a Niger-Congo language closely related to Ewe, spoken in southern Togo and Benin). The account draws on the property theory of control (Chierchia, 1984; Dowty, 1985), the property theory of imperatives (Portner, 2004), and the view that logophors abstract to yield derived properties (Pearson, 2015). Insofar as Gengbe jussive clauses are similar in distribution and function to Romance subjunctive clauses, a primary theoretical contribution of the paper is in showing that Portner’s property analysis of imperatives can be fruitfully extended to subjunctive clauses, thereby achieving a theoretical unification of sentence mood and verbal mood. We also a sketch a variant of the account couched in Kratzer’s (2013) decompositional approach to embedding, whereby jussive clauses in Gengbe desire reports instantiate harmonic modality
Let’s talk about the future: An investigation of temporal reference in Kaqchikel
Get PDFThis paper provides an analysis of temporal reference in the understudied language, Kaqchikel (Mayan). Building on results from recent studies of temporal reference in languages that lack overt grammatical tense by Matthewson (2006) for St’át’imcets and Tonhauser (2011) for Guaraní as well as the distantly related language Yucatec Maya by Bohnemeyer (1998), I consider both a tensed and tenseless analysis for Kaqchikel. Testing first for whether or not the obligatory aspect/mood markers on finite verbs contribute temporal reference and then testing for the possibility of covert tense, I show that Kaqchikel lacks the non-future temporal restriction present in St’át’imcets and Guaraní. Instead, I argue that Kaqchikel behaves more like Hausa as discussed in Mucha (2013), and ultimately I conclude that Kaqchikel is a tenseless language where temporal reference is determined by context and temporal adverbials
Restrictions on subkind coercion in object mass nouns
Get PDFRothstein (2015) raises the following puzzle. Why should it be the case that mass nouns like rice receive a coerced taxonomic plural reading when directly modified by a numerical expression, but object mass nouns like furniture, jewellery and crockery do not? For example, three rices can mean THREE KINDS OF RICE, but three furnitures cannot mean THREE KINDS OF FURNITURE. We attempt to solve this puzzle by providing an analysis of kind readings for concrete count and mass nouns generally, which is based on the analysis of their nonkind predicate readings in Sutton and Filip (2016a). The key property driving our analysis is the extensional overlap of subkinds at each level of categorisation. Object mass nouns have extensionally overlapping subkinds relative to a level of categorisation, while other mass nouns do not. We also differentiate between count and mass nouns in terms of counting contexts. Artefact denoting count nouns such as vehicle have a felicitous taxonomic plural, because, on our account, count nouns are linked to specific counting contexts, which force the resolution of potential overlap between objects in their denotation. Artefact denoting mass nouns such as furniture do not have a felicitous taxonomic plural, because mass nouns are saturated with the null counting context which leaves any overlap in the noun’s subkind structure unresolved