Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Pluractionality in Karitiana
Get PDFThis paper focuses on the expression of number in Karitiana. It claims that both its noun and its verb have cumulative denotations, and argues that pluractional affixes perform a plural operation on verb denotations that subtracts its singular events. The paper provides evidence for a difference between lexical and phrasal cumulativity as proposed in Kratzer 2001, 2005
Russian Predicate Clefts: Tensions Between Semantics and Pragmatics
Get PDFRussian predicate cleft constructions have the surprising property of being associated with adversative clauses of the opposite polarity. I argue that clefts are associated with adversative clauses because they have the semantics of S-Topics in Büring’s (1997, 2000) sense of the term. It is shown that the polarity of the adversative clause is obligatorily opposed to that of the cleft because the use of a cleft gives rise to a relevance-based pragmatic scale. The ordering principle according to which these scales are organized is relevance to the question-under-discussion
Satisfying Questions
Get PDFIn this paper we first combine and refine the semantics of questions and answers (Groenendijk and Stokhof 1984) and the logic of interrogation (Groenendijk 1999) in order to deal with topical restriction, constituent answerhood and conditional questions in a compo- sitional way. The proposal builds on insights from the structured meanings approaches to questions (von Stechow 1991; Krifka 1991). We next present a global, pragmatic perspec- tive on the use of such questions and answers, which founds and furthers work of (Bu¨ ring 1999; Ginzburg 1996; Roberts 1996) on information structure
Manners and Causation
Get PDFThis paper is divided into two parts. In part one I apply a formal method for the establishment of cause-relations between events to cases involving manner modification. In the second part I argue that the status of a manner adverb with regard to its role in a cause-consequence sequent does not play a role for its formal representation at the sentential level. Instead, it influences a sentence’s information structure. In turn, this can influence the syntactic position of a manner adverb
Beck Effects in the Comparative
Get PDFThis paper defends a “classical” quantificational view on the semantics of comparatives. Building on a proposal in Heim (2000), I examine the role of syntax in scope interactions between the comparative operator and other scope bearing elements. I reevaluate Heim’s interface constraint, known as Kennedy’s generalization and propose to reduce it to a more general constraint about intervention effects of quantifiers, independently motivated in Beck (1996a). My proposal also sheds light on long known puzzles in the than-clause of comparatives
Using Focus to Improve Definition: What Counts in Quantification
No full textSzabolcsi (1997a) proposes that some left-peripheral syntactic positions encode not compositional semantic information, but different procedures for the assessment of truth conditions. These procedures are said to be reflected in the range of quantified noun phrases that may appear in certain positions in the pre-verbal field in Hungarian. While one of Szabolcsi’s proposed procedures correctly predicts a monotonicity-based constraint on the quantifiers appearing in certain positions, her other procedure is too vaguely defined to produce useful predictions. I argue that the appropriate procedure in this latter case is the same as the one that produces ‘narrow focus’ interpretations and that the related position that Szabolcsi proposes for quantificational processes is nothing other than the well-known ‘focus position’ of Hungarian. Apparent interpretive differences between the relevant quantificational phrases and other uses of syntactic focus follow naturally from an inferential pragmatic approach to this position. This has important theoretical implications: an inferential analysis of syntactic focus requires (1) a ‘dynamic’, parsing-based view of the relationship between syntax and semantics and (2) a re-alignment of the burden of explanation between linguistically encoded semantics and inferential pragmatics. An analysis of this nature proves to explain the quantifier distribution facts and a number of other syntactic phenomena in an extremely parsimonious fashion
\u27Only\u27: Meaning and Implicatures - The Very Incomplete Short Version
No full textThe meaning of ‘only’ has always been an exciting and challanging issue. Many surprising observations have been made and many sophisticated accounts proposed. In this paper we will not focus on new extraordinatry data and their treatment. Instead, we will show that there is a way to approach the meaning of ‘only’ that is faithful to classical insights and observations but still can deal with the well-known challenges. When ‘only’ is used in examples as (1),(1) John only introduced [Mary]F to Sue.the sentence is intuitively interpreted as stating both A that except for Mary, John introduced nobody to Sue, and B that, in fact, he introduced Mary to Sue. In this paper we will argue that contribution A is due to the semantic meaning of (1), while contribution B comes about as a pragmatic conversational implicature
On the Interpretation of Stressed Pronouns
Get PDFIn this paper I will argue that meaning effects of stress on pronouns are general interpretive effects of constituent focus. I propose two constraints, Contrastive Stress and Continuing Topic, to deal with the interpretation of stressed pronouns in English. These two constraints and their interaction also account for some well-known data that are usually analysed via the Complementary Preference Hypothesis
Conditionals and the Dual of Presupposition
Get PDFA proposal concerning the status of the semantic relation between the consequent clause of a conditional sentence and the conditional sentence itself is made: this relation corresponds to the dual of presupposition, in the technical sense. It holds not only for conditional declaratives but also for conditional questions, imperatives and exclamatives. Technically this is possible because conditional sentences are considered as categorially polyvalent modifications of the consequent clause by the conditional clause.This partially explains why many non-conditional constructions have conditional readings and gives a new answer to the question of what happens when the antecedent of a conditional is false
Focus on what\u27s not at issue: Gestures, presuppositions, appositives under contrastive focus
Get PDFThis paper is an attempt to systematically investigate how contrastive focus interacts with various types of not-at-issue content (co-speech and post-speech gestures, lexical presuppositions, and appositives). I look, in particular, at when focus forces at-issue interpretations of typically not-at-issue content, when it does not, and when such at-issue interpretations are impossible even to satisfy focus-related requirements. I conclude that the main factors affecting how a given type of content aligns along these dimensions are its prosodic (in)dependence and level of attachment in the syntax. The two factors also interact in a non-trivial way, in particular for gestures, which I use as a basis for an analysis of gestures that does not assume that their temporal alignment directly determines their semantics (contra Ebert and Ebert, 2014; Ebert, 2017; Schlenker, 2018), but instead relies on syntax/semantics and syntax/prosody interaction