Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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The semantics of common nouns in Ga (Kwa, Niger-Congo) and their interaction with exclusive particles
Get PDFThis paper discusses the semantics of exclusive particles in Ga and their interaction with different types of common nouns. I argue that there are three, not two, types of common nouns in Ga: count nouns, mass nouns, and intermediate nouns with mixed properties. Crucially, the main evidence for the existence of the third, intermediate type of noun is its interaction with exclusive particles: kome pe and kome too
A birelational analysis of the Russian imperfective
Get PDFThis paper provides two puzzles for a theory of aspect. The first concerns the quirky behavior of the Russian imperfective with regard to its culmination properties: it seems to function like the perfect aspect in certain cases, but like the progressive in others. The other puzzle concerns how the Russian imperfective constrains the temporal location of a described event: it relates distinct event parts to a given temporal parameter. Which part is at play depends on how this parameter is specified. If it is specified by an adverbial, then an event is located in time. If it is specified by the discourse context, then a consequent state is located in time. I solve the former puzzle by appealing to the structure of atomic vs. non-atomic events and solve the latter by appealing to two temporal inputs required by an aspectual marker. These inputs reveal that aspectual meaning involves both temporal information and information about discourse connectivity
A unified account of distributivity, for-adverbias, and pseudopartitives
Get PDFThis paper presents a diagnostic for identifying distributive constructions and shows that it applies to pseudopartitives and for-adverbials. On this basis, a unified account is proposed for the parallels between the constructions involved. This account explains why for-adverbials reject telic predicates (*run to the store for five hours), why pseudopartitives reject count nouns (*five pounds of book), and why both reject certain measure functions like temperature and speed (*30°C of water, *drive for 5 mph). These restrictions all follow from a general constraint on distributive constructions. Related concepts such as the D operator (Link, 1987), the subinterval property (Bennett and Partee, 1972), and divisive reference (Cheng, 1973) can be understood as formalizing special cases of this constraint
Restructuring and Implicative Properties of \u27volere\u27
No full textThis paper deals with a puzzling interaction between Italian volere (want) and viewpoint aspect. With perfective aspect (but not with imperfective), volere acts like an implicative predicate (such as manage): the proposition expressed by its complement clause has to hold in the actual world, and not merely, as expected from a standard semantics for desire predicates (cf. Hintikka 1962, Heim 1992), in the subject’s desire worlds. I show that this peculiar effect can be explained by invoking the restructuring properties of volere. In particular, I take Italian restructuring constructions to be monoclausal (Wurmbrand 2001) and involve a single Tense and Aspect projection, resulting in a single event quantification. This single event quantification yields a single event, which has to occur both in the actual world and in all of the subject’s desire worlds. I further show that volere’s lack of implicative behavior with imperfective aspect arises from an additional layer of modality associated with the imperfective
Not only ‘only’, but ‘too’, too: Alternative-sensitive Particles in Bura
Get PDFThis article discusses the syntactic and semantic behaviour of alternative-sensitive particles in Bura (Central-Chadic, Afro-Asiatic), a tone language spoken by about 250.000 speakers in Northeastern Nigeria. The observed findings help to evaluate a number of claims on the syntactic and semantic nature of alternative-sensitive particles, which have been made largely on the basis of European languages
On an Analogy between English Nominal and Polish Aspectual Manifestations of Genericity
Get PDFThe main goal of this study is to prove that two modal mechanisms Greenberg (2003) postulated for English indefinite singular (IS) and bare plural (BP) generics in the nominal domain are mirrored in Polish perfective and imperfective generics in the event domain. On the basis of Oosterhof’s (2006) argumentation, I justify the distinction between the GEN and the HAB intensional operators. With this distinction in mind, I associate the combination of HAB+perfective aspect as exemplifying the same kind of an ‘in virtue of’ modality as Greenberg postulates for the combination of GEN+IS. In the same manner, I claim that both the combination of GEN+BP and the combination of HAB+imperfective aspect exemplify either ‘descriptive’ or ‘in virtue of\u27 modality
Multiple accent in alternative questions
Get PDFAlternative Questions (AltQs) are typically characterized by two prosodic cues: a final falling boundary tone and a pitch accent on each disjunct. Recent accounts in the literature have taken the final fall as the central surface cue for AltQ interpretation or have assigned a vacuous semantic contribution to the multiple accent on the disjuncts. Based on data from English and Turkish, we argue that both cues are equally important and require modelling in a unified account of AltQs. Combining ingredients from the literature (Roberts, 1996; Biezma, 2009; Westera, 2017), we propose that, essentially, the multiple accent shapes the Question under Discussion (QUD) and that the final fall, or the lack thereof, indicates restrictions on the content of the QUD via (un)satisfaction of Attention Maxims
A semantic underspecification-based analysis of scope ambiguities in gapping
Get PDFGapping is known to interact with scopal operators to create an ambiguity between so-called wide- and distributive-scope readings (Siegel, 1984). In this paper, we offer an analysis of these readings which combines an underspecified treatment of scope and a general theory of coordination. Utilizing the technique of semantic underspecification (Richter and Sailer, 2004), we develop a new coordination rule that captures an asymmetry in the semantic contributions between initial and non-initial conjuncts observed independently of Gapping. This semantic asymmetry in coordination as well as well-justified assumptions about tense and scopal operators (Condoravdi, 2002; Champollion, 2015) correctly predict the various readings of conjoined sentences with or without Gapping