Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Complement coercion in Polish and the role of selectional restrictions revealed in a self-paced reading study
Get PDFSo-called ‘complement coercion’ (‘begin a book’), understood as a combinatorial conflict, is mainly analysed as a repair operation in composition. Experimental data has shown that there is an extra cognitive effort in the processing of event-selecting verbs with entitydenoting arguments. These results support the formal analysis of ‘complement coercion’ as an enriched form of semantic composition (Pustejovsky, 1995; Egg, 2003; de Swart, 2011; Asher, 2015). Recently, an alternative view has been proposed by Piñango and Deo (2015) arguing that there is no mismatch between the verb and its complement, but an ambiguity resulting from the different dimensions along which an aspectual verb in composition with its argument can be interpreted (e.g. temporal, spatial, etc.). This approach has been supported by experiments showing that aspectual verbs like begin incur greater processing cost in coercing contexts than psychological verbs like enjoy (Lai et al., 2014). We designed a self-paced reading experiment to compare the different predictions that the two approaches make for the processing of matching and mismatching verb-noun combinations. Our results are compatible with enriched composition, but not with dimensional ambiguity. We find facilitation in conditions where the selectional restrictions of the verbs are satisfied (‘begin a fight’, ‘see a book’), and longer processing times in the conditions ‘begin a book’, ‘see a fight’, which does not support the dimensional ambiguity approach. Our experiment thus provides evidence that selectional restrictions are a fundamental property of a predicate and that they need to be understood as a graded continuum of combinatorial preferences, as also argued in Spalek (2014)
Conjoining imperatives and declaratives
Get PDFThis paper investigates conjoined imperatives and declaratives (IaDs). It argues that some IaDs are best explained in terms of true conjunction and anaphora between conjuncts, despite challenges posed by von Fintel and Iatridou (2017). The key to addressing these challenges is a dynamic, non-modal analysis of imperatives building on Starr (to appear). The other IaDs are explained by appeal to a semantically related use of and, e.g. ‘left-subordinating and (LSand)’ (Culicover and Jackendoff 1997). These other IaDs neutralize the directive meaning of the imperative, and this paper offers a new account of this building on ‘parameter-change conjunction’ (Klinedinst and Rothschild 2012). New data is presented that helps distinguish between the varieties of IaD, and it is shown that the proposed analysis captures it
Numerical Approximation Using Some
Get PDFIn this paper I investigate a use of the English determiner some with numerals, as in twenty-some. This kind of construction has an approximative interpretation, where it is interpreted as denoting a number within a range. Some cannot modify all numerals, with constraints that depend on the syntactic structure of the numeral. I draw parallels between this construction and epistemic indefinites, and provide an analysis based on existing analyses of Spanish algún.
Economy of structure and information: Oddness, questions, and answers
Get PDFWe examine two conflicting perspectives on oddness: Magri (2009, 2011)’s theory, which derives oddness from blind inferences that clash with common knowledge, and Spector (2014)’s theory that derives oddness from trivial alternatives. Building on these works, we offer a third alternative, one that relies on a discourse condition that says that a good assertion is one that provides a good answer to a good question. A remaining difficulty is the persistence of oddness when the relevant sentences are embedded in environments that are predicted to satisfy the proposed appropriateness conditions
Evidentials in attitudes: do’s and don’ts
Get PDFThis paper is devoted to evidentials in attitudinal complements. I start with two empirical observations. A. Some logically possible interpretations are systematically not attested for evidentials-in-attitudes. This new observation has no straightforward account in the current literature. B. Languages vary with respect to whether or not evidentials-in-attitudes shift, i.e. whether they are speaker-oriented (as in root declaratives) or not. The variation has been previously attributed to the semantic non-uniformity of evidentials. I argue against this view. To account for A, I propose that evidentials are self-ascriptions, which is additionally motivated by their behavior in matrix clauses. To account for B, I propose that evidential shift is an instance of indexical shift driven by a monster operator à la Anand and Nevins (2004), which explains previously unnoticed similarities in restrictions on both kinds of shift. Understanding what happens in attitude reports has often been key to the semantics of many phenomena, e.g. pronouns and modals. Offering the first systematic examination of evidentials-in-attitudes across languages, the paper makes a case for evidentials and broadens our understanding of perspective-sensitivity in general
Presupposed Ignorance and Exhaustification
Get PDFThis paper investigates the interactions between presuppositions and scalar implicatures. We start our discussion with a previously undiscussed puzzle which we call presupposed ignorance and offer a preliminary account of it. We then claim that certain types of interactions between presuppositions and scalar implicatures, namely those involving Strawson-decreasing presupposition triggers and weak scalar items, can be understood as special cases of presupposed ignorance. But we also point out that this cannot be the whole story, as it runs into problem with examples involving Strawson-increasing presupposition triggers with weak scalar items. To counter this problem, we propose that the mechanism of scalar strengthening, namely the exhaustivity operator (EXH), interacts with the mechanism responsible for presupposed ignorance in an intricate manner, thereby giving rise to the complex empirical patterns we observe
Formalizing Current Relevance
Get PDFThis article presents a way of formalizing the notion of Current Relevance based on the seminal work by Merin (1999). Its aim is to provide formalist linguistics with a valuable tool for accounting for the meaning of present perfects
Focus Influences the Presence of Conditional Perfection: Experimental Evidence
Get PDFThis contribution tests whether focus has a determining influence on the occurrence of Conditional Perfection. Two off-line experiments support this hypothesis. Conditional Perfection occurs significantly more often if the antecedent of the conditional is focused compared to the non-focused case. Additionally, in contrast to the scalar implicature associated with or (Zondervan 2009), Conditional Perfection occurs only infrequent if the antecedent is not focused. The second experiment suggests that this distinct behavior is due to different properties of the scalar implicature and the implicature associated with Conditional Perfection
Facts and Ideals: On the Role of \u27doch\u27 in conditionals and Optatives
No full textThis paper addresses optative constructions, constructions that express a wish or desire without a modal that means ‘wish’ or ‘want’. Focusing on German, I argue that “expressing a wish” is a possible use of a conditional antecedent that is freely available. The question is how certain elements, such as the contrastive particle doch (or the focus particle nur ‘only’), which are typical for optative constructions, interact with this wish. I argue that they interact with the wish indirectly; they have a meaning that is independent from optativity, but which can be used to bring out an already available wish reading. This is achieved by eliminating alternative readings. Discussing German doch as a case study, I show how this interaction can be made precise
Optional and Obligatory Modal Subordination
Get PDFThis paper raises the empirical point that modal subordination is not always obligatory, and that moreover, this is a point of lexical variation. Some modals, like will, which I call definite modals, undergo modal subordination obligatorily, and some, like gonna, which I call nondefinite modals, do so optionally. I propose a dynamic framework in which, following from Frank (1997), information states are possible discourse referents. I also propose that these referents are potentially subject to familiarity presuppositions, whose presence makes a modal definite, and whose absence makes a modal nondefinite