Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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The case for the strong and conditional analysis of permission
Full text linkThe classic analysis of permission modals involves existential quantification over a modal base. This analysis fails to account for many parallels between conditionals and permission, including non-monotonic and order-sensitive behavior in the scope of permission. An alternative-sensitive strict dynamic homogeneous conditional account of permission is given, which captures the parallels with conditionals, while also delivering simple and complex free choice patterns semantically. The semantic derivation of free choice makes it easier for the experimental evidence for the asymmetry between free choice and scalar implicatures to be accounted for than under the implicature approach to free choice
Beyond \u27yes\u27 and \u27no\u27: Multimodal multilexical polar responses in German
No full textResponse particles like yes and no fulfil two functions: they may affirm or reject a previous utterance, or they may indicate the response polarity. Languages differ with regard to the function that is given priority, which is reflected in the use of particles in responses to negative antecedents. Quantitative evidence shows that priorities are gradient and that there also is interindividual variation. Response strategies other than particle responses are less well studied but it is well known that languages use for instance echoing strategies, truth-related verbal and adjectival predicates, non-vocal gestural strategies, as well as sequential and simultaneous combinations of these. We present results from an open production experiment looking at the entire range of multilexical and multimodal response strategies in German. German uses a wide range of response elements (RE) including the ambiguous particles ja ‘yes’ and nein ‘no’, unambiguous RE like the adverb genau ‘exactly’ and the particle doch ‘rejecting a negative antecedent’, as well as stand-alone head nods and headshakes. We show inter alia that particles are preferred over non-particles, that stand-alone head movements are ambiguous like ja and nein, that co-speech headshakes may be used to help disambiguation whereas this is not the case for co-speech head nods, and that sequential combinations in principle are such that a second RE may disambiguate the first, although they typically are collocations that are used independently of actual ambiguity avoidance. We discuss the results in the context of models of response elements making use of presuppositional polarity features
Expressive contexts and descriptive subjects of Spanish imperatives
Full text linkImperative clauses in various languages can be used to express the speaker’s wish exclusively, either without addressing the addressee or even in the absence of one. The speaker-bouletic use of imperatives has generally been assumed to exist universally. The current work provides novel empirical data from Spanish that show a complex felicity condition related to the imperatives in expressive contexts. Spanish imperatives can be truly speaker-bouletic only if the imperative subject fails to refer to a particular individual in the context, but rather is associated with a set of objects that share a homogeneous property. Building on Kaufmann (2012), we argue for the necessity of including a subject-dependent element in the denotationof imperatives and an additional presuppositional restriction related to the subject
Contracted attitudes
Full text linkCertain emotive factive reports and knowledge reports appear to violate their entailment relations in both embedded and unembedded environments. To account for these cases, I propose that these problematic attitude reports should be understood as instances of non-literal speech and, therefore, as cases that trigger a pragmatic mechanism of content subtraction. By adopting an analysis that employs this mechanism, this paper argues that the problematic cases ultimately convey unproblematic propositions that do not violate any entailments
Pragmatic reasoning in context: Anticipating negation for adjectives
Full text linkNegation processing seems to be facilitated in pragmatically felicitous contexts compared to infelicitous ones. Using a novel methodological approach, we investigated whether adults can identify felicitous contexts for negative statements by anticipating affirmative or negative sentence continuations (e.g., The socks were not dry. / The socks were wet.) for naturalistic contexts. Results from our forced choice study indicate that participants selected negative statements more frequently after contexts intended to elicit a negative statement than after contexts intended to elicit an affirmative statement. This effect was observed for absolute gradable adjectives but not reliably for relative gradable adjectives. Our study shows that naturalistic contexts contain cues for the polarity of subsequent sentences and that these cues are used by speakers to anticipate affirmative vs. negative sentences
Degrees and depiction – gradability in sign languages
No full textBased on variation in spoken languages, the Degree Semantics Parameter (DSP) pro-poses a split between languages that use a degree based system and those that use a delineation system (Beck et al., 2009; Bochnak, 2015). When it comes to sign languages, it has recently been proposed that the phonological form of gradable predicates can iconically represent the boundaries and points on a degree scale, as in Italian Sign Language [LIS] (Aristodemo and Geraci, 2018). From this perspective, sign languages seem to offer visible evidence of abstract linguistic objects like degree scales which have been theoretically motivated in spoken languages but whose existence has been inferred through certain syntactic and semantic cues. However, evidence for a degreeless semantics for American Sign Language [ASL] (Kouli-dobrova et al., 2023) suggests that sign languages could vary as much as spoken languages within this domain.We argue for an alternative semantics for comparative constructions in sign languages with a iconic component in them. Rather than assuming that that sign languages vary with respect to whether this iconicity encodes degrees, we suggest a unified view of all these constructions where the iconicity is analysed as gestures or demonstrations in the sense of Davidson (2015). Under this view, iconicity is insufficient to motivate a degree ontology in a sign language because the linguistic parts of sign languages, being languages, are built around abstraction, and what may appear to be iconic/visible pieces of the grammar are more accurately viewed as gestural depiction, just like spoken language gestures
Decoupling degrees from their instantiations
Full text linkDegree DPs, like the amount of paint you use, feature both a degree noun, like amount, and an entity noun, like paint. Scontras (2017) observes that these DPs can saturate not just degree predicates, like be three liters, but also entity predicates, like use, and argues that this flexibility shows that degrees, hence the denotations of degree DPs, are complex objects built from instantiating ordinary entities. Based on the distribution of degree DPs with two entity nouns, like the amount of paint that you use of wax, we challenge this argument and argue that the flexibility is instead due to syntactic ambiguity (Alonso-Ovalle and Schwarz 2023, 2024). We moreover present a direct argument against Scontras’ view of degrees as built from instantiating entities. This argument is based on the observation that two degree DPs with different entity nouns, like paint and wax, can be truthfully equated in copular sentences. To set the stage, we show that the internal composition of degree DPs does not require a complex construal of degrees, once we assume a relative clause syntax with pied piping and reconstruction that parallels the structure for how many-questions suggested in Heim (1987)
Higher-order plurality: To what degree?
Full text linkRecent work by Grimau (2020) and Buccola et al. (2021) has rekindled the debate on the extent to which natural language allows for the construction of higher-order (or structured) pluralities (HOPs) — that is, pluralities of pluralities (Link, 1983; Landman, 1989; Schwarzschild,1996). Over the decades, research on HOP has focused on ordinary entity-denoting plurals, yet the typology of semantic entities is generally assumed to be diverse (Rett, 2022), arguably including events, worlds, times, degrees, and more. At least some of these domains arguably have the same or similar mereology as the ordinary entity domain, most famously events (Bach, 1986), and more recently degrees (Dotlačil and Nouwen, 2015). A natural question that arises is: do any of these other semantic entities allow for HOP? I argue that the answer is yes, using reciprocal degree constructions as a case study (cf. Schwarz, 2007; Hsieh, 2021)
“One tool to rule them all”? An integrated model of the QuD for Hurford Sentences
Full text linkKatzir and Singh (2015) proposed that felicitous sentences should constitute good answers to a “good” Question under Discussion (QuD, Roberts, 1996, i.a.). Following this insight, we account for a range of challenging Hurford Sentences (Hurford, 1974; Singh, 2008b; Marty and Romoli, 2022; Mandelkern and Romoli, 2018), via a compositional machinery pairing assertions with implicit QuDs, complemented with two pragmatic principles (RELEVANCE, REDUNDANCY) made sensitive to implicit QuDs. This approach motivates the use of implicit QuDs as a general and explanatory tool in pragmatics
Temporal interpretation in directive speech acts: A competition between imperative and 2nd person subjunctive in Greek
Full text linkIn this study, we examine the distribution of imperative and subjunctive forms in Greek directive speech acts, focusing on their temporal interpretation. We present evidence from a Sentence Evaluation Task that the imperative is subject to an immediacy restriction, while the subjunctive mood favors a laterness inference and resists immediacy. We argue that this difference is semantic, stemming from the absence of tense in imperatives and its presence in subjunctives. Imperatives, by lacking tense, are interpreted at speech time, resulting in a more specific temporal reading than subjunctives, which convey a non-past meaning. The least specified subjunctive form is therefore blocked in immediate contexts