Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
Not a member yet
1139 research outputs found
Sort by
A new kind of epistemic indefinite
Get PDFTiwa (Tibeto-Burman; India) has two series of epistemic indefinites: one whose epistemic effects arise via an anti-singleton constraint similar to Spanish alg´un (Alonso-Ovalle and Men´endez-Benito, 2010), and another, wide-scope indefinite whose epistemic effects must be derived differently. I propose that for these latter indefinites, ignorance arises not through domain constraints, but as a result of their choice functional nature through competition with other indefinites. Tiwa’s wide scope indefinites then constitute a new kind of epistemic indefinite, showing that ignorance implicatures for indefinites can arise through different sorts of competition
Presuppositional implicatures: quantity or maximize presupposition?
Get PDFSchlenker (2012) proposes that when framed within a modern Stalnakerian view of presupposition and common ground (Stalnaker, 1998, 2002), Maximize Presupposition! (Heim, 1991; Sauerland, 2008) can be viewed as a special case of the maxim of Quantity (Grice, 1975). We provide data suggesting that in some cases, Maximize Presupposition! applies even when speakers are not expected to use a presupposition as vectors of new information. We argue that these data support the view that Maximize Presupposition! is an independent pragmatic principle, distinct from Quantity
HAVE as a relation between individuals and properties
Get PDFThis paper argues that the role of HAVE-predicates is to introduce relations into the discourse, one of whose arguments is the individual denoted by the sentence subject. This is the only token-level argument in the relation: the other is modeled as a nominalized property (Chierchia, 1984; Chierchia and Turner, 1988). A number of peculiarities of HAVE are argued to follow from this account, including its connection with existential predicates (McNally, 1992, 2009)
Polarity reversals under sluicing
Get PDFThis paper presents novel English sluicing data that challenge even the most successful existing theories of the relationship between antecedent and elided content in sluicing constructions. The data supply robust evidence for a previously unobserved phenomenon in which the elided content and the antecedent content in a sluiced construction contain opposite polarity. The phenomenon challenges current accounts of identity conditions on ellipsis by demonstrating that a greater mismatch between antecedent and elided content is possible than previously thought; specifically, the paper shows that the identity condition for sluicing must be sensitive to pragmatic as well as to semantic content. This observation motivates a proposal in which sluicing is treated as a pragmatics-sensitive phenomenon licensed by local contextual entailment
Severing maximality from fewer than: evidence from genericity
Get PDFThis paper presents new evidence suggesting that the downward entailingness of a quantifier like fewer than four people is due not simply to the lexical meaning of the quantifier, but also to a separate, and in principle optional, maximization operation that occurs in the scope of the quantifier, a decomposition already posited for independent reasons by Spector (2014)
The English Perfect is Past
Get PDFThis paper argues that the English Perfect is uniformly an embedded Past. This paper shows that differences in meaning between Present Perfect and Past, which are apparently problematic for this theory, are due to the requirement that frame adverbials merge high and directly interact only with the highest tense. Despite attaching high, frame adverbials constrain event time, in the same way modals may constrain temporal interpretation at a distance (Klecha 2016)
On the semantics of wh-questions
Get PDFThis paper develops a new framework for the syntax and semantics of interrogative constructions which unifies the mechanisms of scope-taking employed in wh-movement, wh-insitu, and partial wh-movement constructions. This framework represents the first major account for a wide range of syntactic and semantic facts relating to the structure and meaning of interrogatives at the same time, including pied-piping, superiority, presuppositions of questions, readings of multiple questions (single-pair vs pair-list), and intervention effects in multiple questions. It thus achieves a wider empirical coverage than other theories of interrogative syntax-semantics (e.g. Hamblin, 1973; Karttunen, 1977; Hagstrom, 1998; Cable, 2007, 2010; Cheng and Demirdache, 2010; Fox, 2012; Nicolae, 2013), and is at the same time simpler than these other proposals
Acquisition as a window on the nature of NPIs
Get PDFDutch modal verb hoeven ‘need’ is a negative polarity item (NPI) (Zwarts 1981, Hoeksema 2000), which survives in all anti-additive, and some but not all downward entailing (DE) contexts. The aim of the paper is to explore the reason why Dutch hoeven is not allowed in all DE-contexts – as observed for NPIs such as any-terms. We answer this question by looking at acquisition. The reasoning is straightforward: the analysis underlying a linguistic phenomenon is a product of children’s acquisition of it. Data collected from a total of 132 monolingual Dutch children (2;09–5;10; M = 4;04; SD = 9.3 months) in an elicited imitation task demonstrate a learning path of hoeven in which children start with two lexical frames [HOEF NIET] ‘NEED NOT’ and [HOEF GEEN] ‘NEED NO’ and switch to an abstract analysis of it later on: [HOEF NEG] ‘NEED NEG’. Given this abstract analysis, emerging as a result of language acquisition, we argue that hoeven is an NPI because of its lexical dependency with the abstract negation NEG (cf. Postal 2000). This in turn explains the distribution of the Dutch NPI restricted to some but not all DE-contexts: hoeven is only allowed in those DE-contexts that incorporate the abstract negation NEG
The likelihood of upper-bound construals among numeral modifiers
Get PDFIn this paper we show that modified numerals differ with respect to the nature of the bounds they express. We examine the numeral modifiers less/fewer than, at most and up to in a series of experiments in English and Greek, and investigate to what extent these modifiers impose an upper bound. Our results indicate that the upper-bound construal that up to gives rise to is cancellable in contrast with the uncancellability of the upper-bound construal that at most and less/fewer than give rise to. This finding is compatible with an analysis that treats the upper bound of at most and less/fewer than as part of their semantic content and the upper bound of up to as a pragmatic inference. In addition, we discuss the effect of the scalar distance between possible alternatives and the modified numeral on the likelihood and strength of the upper-bound construal
On pragmatic demonstratives: The case of pragmatic discourse anaphora in Czech
Get PDFThis paper offers a novel syntactico-semantic treatment of canonical and pragmatic demonstratives (the latter type being exemplified by so called affective demonstratives) and within that frame provides an analysis of pragmatic anaphora in Czech. Pragmatic anaphora is understood as an anaphoric relation between the denotation of a demonstrative description and a previous utterance about that denotation. The theoretical proposal is that the syntactic and semantic structure of demonstratives consists of two parts: the D head, interpreted as the iota type shifter (i.e., as a Fregean definite article), and the Dem head, which conveys that the denotation of its nominal complement is related to some entity in extra-linguistic reality or discourse. Due to nanosyntactic principles (superset and elsewhere), demonstratives can either spell out the whole Dem+D structure (canonical demonstratives) or Dem alone (pragmatic demonstratives)