Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung
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Corrective markers \u27bing\u27 and \u27you\u27 in Mandarin Chinese
No full textThis paper argues that there are two types of corrective words across languages, and both types are attested in Mandarin Chinese. One type (e.g. Mandarin you) manages the Common Ground, as Frana and Rawlins (2019) and Bhatt and Homer (2022) have claimed for Italian mica and Hindi thoṛi:, but there is another type that had not been noticed before (e.g. Mandarin bing)–they mark contrast to a salient expectation. While bing and you have similar syntactic distribution, they have subtle differences in meaning: the use of you implies the speaker’s impatience with the hearer, but bing does not have this inference. I argue that bing and you are located between C and T, and have presuppositions (or conventional implicatures): bing not p presupposes that there is a salient proposition that ¬p contrasts with, while you not p presupposes that the speaker believes that ¬p was already in the Common Ground
On \u27very\u27-intensified superlatives
No full textMost theories of very treat it as a degree modifier whose distribution is restricted to positive-form APs. Against this view, Goncharov (2024) has argued that very has a much wider distribution, highlighting cases like the very beginning, the very same, and the very man and arguing for a unified analysis. While Goncharov (2024) represents a major step towards understanding very, there is another use of very that, though it has been noted in passing, has not been closely scrutinized: very’s use in superlatives (very best). In this paper, I examine very-intensified superlatives more closely to gain a fuller understanding of very. I start by arguing that very’s use in superlatives should be unified with its other uses; then, I turn to the question of what a unified, degree-based theory of very would have to look like. Ultimately, I pursue a new theory of very built on (a) a new approach to comparison classes; and (b) Fitzgibbons et al.’s (2008) claim that -est, like the positive morpheme pos, invokes a standard-degree
The landscape of inferential evidentiality: Towards a unified framework
Full text linkInferential evidential markers (IEMs) in assertions indicate that the speaker inferred φ from a set of privileged knowledge (e.g. from facts that the speaker witnessed directly). As the intuition that ‘inferencing took place’ is typical for IEMs, a uniform analysis in terms of inferencing seems warranted. The attested logical properties of IEMs, however, can differ substantially from language to language, which led to a multitude of incommensurable accounts. I propose a unified underlying framework which (a) captures the implicitly assumed inferencing in IEMs and (b) can be modulated so as to capture IEMs of different logical strength in a common framework. The model builds on von Fintel + Gillies’ (2010, 2021) kernel model and can be adapted to account for German wohl, Gitksan =ima and Cuzco Quechua =chá
Mixed-polarity pluralities: A solution to van Benthem’s problem
Full text linkIn this paper, I suggest a new way of resolving a number of problems with an orthodox treatment of modified numerals as existential quantifiers over pluralities. It’s well known that existential quantification renders upper bounds inert—an issue known as ‘van Benthem’s problem’. This can be addressed by building a notion of maximality into the semantics of modified numerals, but this fails to capture attested cumulative readings due to how maximality takes scope with respect to other operators. Existing work addressing this compositional stalemate exploits powerful mechanisms for side-stepping scopal interactions, such as post-suppositions (e.g., Brasoveanu 2013). Here, I maintain a simple treatment of modified numerals as existential quantifiers over pluralities, while significantly enriching the ontology of pluralities themselves. Concretely, I explore the idea that pluralities can encode both positive and negative information, building on recent work by Bledin (2024)
The Italian Conditional: X-Marking and Beyond
Full text linkLanguages often use the same morphology (‘X-marking’ morphology, von Fintel and Iatridou 2023) to express counterfactual conditionals, wishes and weak necessity. We bring into the arena a use of X-marking, the reportative interpretation of the Italian conditional, which has received little attention in the formal semantics literature (but see Howell 2012 on the French conditionnel). We show that, on its reportative use, the Italian conditional patterns with reportative evidentials cross-linguistically. We propose that the reportative reading arises when conditional morphology interacts with a default assertoric modal operator, and performs two operations argued to be at work in other uses of X-marking: modal domain widening (as in counterfactual conditionals, von Fintel and Iatridou 2023) and modal domain restriction (as in weak necessity modals, von Fintel and Iatridou 2008)
Plural definites and domain restriction in Romance and Germanic
Full text linkAcross Romance and Germanic languages, plural definites either have the three following uses, or none of them. (a) They can refer to the maximal plural individual satisfying the description, without being anaphoric or contextually restricted; (b) They can serve as arguments of kind predicates; (c) they can be generic and enter the restrictor of a modal adverb of quantification like ‘usually’ (and its counterpart in other languages). We use compatibility with ‘usually’ as a test for genericity, because even non-generic referential plural definites (say [The NPs] in English) can restrict some adverbs of quantification, including ‘generally’, an often overlooked fact. The relationship between (b) and (c) has been observed, but their connection with (a) has gone unnoticed, and our generalization, to our knowledge, has never been formulated as such. Our goal is to substantiate it and to show that it sheds a new light on the cross-linguistic comparison of Romance and Germanic languages regarding genericity, bare plurals, and plural definites. We conclude the paper by fitting existential readings of Italian and English Bare Plurals into the picture
Constraining alternatives
Full text linkThe focus operator only asserts that alternatives to its prejacent are false. But, what alternatives does only exclude? There must be constraints on alternatives. Fox and Katzir (2011) propose that alternatives are formed in the syntax, and are constrained by grammar such that they cannot be structurally more complex than the prejacent. We argue that this constraint is too restrictive. We take a new look at complex alternatives, and conclude that they can be attested, with their distribution regulated pragmatically by the Question Under Discussion (after Roberts 1996/2012, Beaver & Clark 2008, Katzir 2023)
Degrees are accessed indirectly? A new look at Chinese \u27bi\u27-comparatives
No full textTwo aspects of Chinese adjectival bi-comparatives (bi-comparatives) remain underexplored. First, a critical morphosyntactic difference between bare (i.e., those without differential phrases) and differential (i.e., those with differential phrases) bi-comparatives is that the morpheme chu, literally meaning ‘beyond/exceed’, is exclusively licensed in the latter, but not in the former. Second, bi-comparatives do not freely allow measure phrases (MPs) as the standard of comparison unless there are sufficiently specific contexts. These observations are taken as indications that degrees may only be accessible in some constructions. I propose that (i) bare bi-comparatives do not characterize an ordering of degrees, but a directed scale segment (Schwarzschild, 2020); and (ii) while characterizing a directed segment, differential bi-comparatives allow the mapping of the segment onto a degree specified by the differential phrase, a role fulfilled by chu (à la Wellwood, 2015). Taken together, Chinese bi-comparatives may constitute a case where degrees are not encoded in the lexical semantics of gradable adjectives, but introduced via a functional morpheme (Wellwood, 2015; Bochnak et al., 2020)
Spanish Neg-raising: Mood effects on NPI licensing
Full text linkAlthough Neg-raising (NR) has been subject to a considerable amount of attention over the last decades, the interaction of NR with other linguistic phenomena such as mood is currently not well understood. This paper addresses this gap from both an empirical and theoretical perspective by investigating how mood interacts with NR in terms of licensing the NR reading and strict NPIs. In particular, two simultaneous online experiments were conducted that showed that, whereas the NR reading availability is not influenced by mood, the grammaticality of the strict NPIs is significantly lower when in the indicative. To account for these results, the paper follows Gajewski’s (2011) theory of NPI licensing, whereby not only the asserted content but also the implicatures and presuppositions of the sentence are factored in when testing for anti-additivity. The paper explores two implications potentially induced by indicative mood: (a) the speaker is committed to the embedded proposition p (Quer, 1998; Homer, 2008), and (b) the embedded proposition p has previously been discussed by the conversationalists (Ridruejo Alonso, 1999). It is then shown that when either implication is factored in, the environment is no longer anti-additive and thus blocks strict NPIs without affecting NR
DP-internal relative readings of Japanese \u27ichiban\u27 superlatives
No full textThis paper provides a new perspective on the question of whether Japanese superlatives involve movement of ichiban, considered to be a superlative morpheme, out of superlative DPs. Aihara (2007, 2009) proposes that the different readings of Japanese superlatives are due to the structural ambiguity caused by the movement of ichiban to different landing sites, following Heim (1985, 1999) and Szabolcsi (1986). However, I argue that no movement of a superlative morpheme to a DP-external position is involved in Japanese superlatives based on the absence of “DP-internal relative readings” that are observed in Slavic languages (Pancheva and Tomaszewicz, 2012; Tomaszewicz, 2015). To derive this reading, the superlative -est in Slavic moves out of the superlative DP; the absence of this reading in Japanese supports the view that no such movement obtains in Japanese