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Russian Disjunction To li To li and Obligatory Ignorance Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-09-07 Natalia Ivlieva
In this paper, we explore the behavior of one complex disjunction in Russian that has some special properties that set it apart from other simple and complex disjunctions: it never gives rise to free choice inferences in environments in which other disjunctions do and under universal quantifiers it behaves different from other disjunctions. We show that the data resist an analysis in terms of wide
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The Interpretation of Relative and Absolute Adjectives Under Negation Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-09-05 Stavroula Alexandropoulou, Nicole Gotzner
Negation typically has a contradictory effect on interpretation. At the same time, negated statements are often underinformative, which leaves room for pragmatic effects such as negative strengthening, where negated adjectives are pragmatically strengthened to convey their antonym (e.g., not large $\leadsto $ ‘small’). Here, we investigate a theoretical controversy relating to the mechanism deriving
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X- vs. O-marked want Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-08-14 Alexander Wimmer
X-marked want is identified by von Fintel & Iatridou (2023) (vF&I) as one of the crosslinguistic challenges for what they call X-marking, the kind of morphology traditionally referred to as ‘subjunctive’ or ‘counterfactual’. This paper’s main goal is to spell out vF&I’s idea that X-marking on want reflects a widening of want’s quantificational domain, thereby doing the same job as it does in conditionals
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Keeping Fake Simple Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-08-08 Janek Guerrini
In this paper, I argue against two common claims about so-called privative adjectives like ‘fake’: first, I argue against the idea that their semantic complexity requires a richer notion of lexical meaning than the standard one (see, e.g., Del Pinal, 2018); second, I argue against the idea that ‘fake’ is a subsective adjective ‘in disguise’ and does not semantically negate its input (see, e.g., Partee
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Negative strengthening: The interplay of evaluative polarity and scale structure Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-05-06 Nicole Gotzner, Diana Mazzarella
This work investigates absolute adjectives in the not very construction and how their pragmatic interpretation depends on the evaluative polarity and the scale structure of their antonymic pairs. Our experimental study reveals that evaluatively positive adjectives (clean) are more likely to be strengthened than evaluatively negative ones (dirty), and that maximum standard adjectives (clean or closed)
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The Domains of Monotonicity Processing Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-04-30 I-An Tan, Nir Segal, Yosef Grodzinsky
This paper reports an investigation into the nature of Negative Polarity Item (NPI) licensing conditions from a processing perspective. We found that the processing cost of Downward Entailingness (a k a the Monotonicity Effect) is determined by the number of monotonicity reversals of NPI domains, rather than by the number of Downward-Entailing (DE) operators. This conclusion is not based on the standard
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What Makes Linguistic Inferences Robust? Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-04-19 Paul Marty, Jacopo Romoli, Yasutada Sudo, Richard Breheny
Sentences involving embedded disjunctions give rise to distributive and free choice inferences. These inferences exhibit certain characteristics of Scalar Implicatures (SIs) and some researchers have proposed to treat them as such. This proposal, however, faces an important challenge: experimental results have shown that the two inferences are more robust, faster to process, and easier to acquire than
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Emphasizing Writing Acts: The Exclamation Point in German as a Lexical Operator for Verum Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Sebastian Bücking
This paper is concerned with the interpretation of the exclamation point in German; for example, Es hat geschneit! ‘It has been snowing!’. I argue that the exclamation point contributes a lexical operator for verum at the layer of writing acts. Specifically, it introduces the writer’s wish to ensure the recognition of the writing act in its scope. This lexicon-based proposal builds on a lexicon-based
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Quelques in French: a Clustered Plural Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Philippe Gréa
We present the result of a corpus study on the difference between quelques ‘a few’ and plusieurs ‘several’. On this basis, we propose a categorization of the nouns significantly attracted by quelques and argue for an understanding of the distinction in topological terms ( Grimm, 2012a, 2012b; Wągiel, 2018, 2019). A series of observations, focusing successively on the aggregate nouns (pomme de terre
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Rationale and Precautioning Clauses: Insights from A’ingae Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Maksymilian Dąbkowski, Scott AnderBois
We describe and analyze the semantics of rationale and precautioning clauses (i.e. in order to- and lest-clauses) through a detailed case study of two operators in A’ingae (or Cofán, iso 639-3: con, an Amazonian isolate): the infinitive -ye ‘inf’ and the apprehensional -sa’ne ‘appr.’ We provide a new account of rationale semantics and the first formal account of precautioning semantics. We propose
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Lexicon and Logic: A Corpus-Based Investigation Into a Connection Between Prepositional Senses and Quantifier Scope Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Justyna Grudzińska, Aleksandra Siemieniuk, Aleksander Leczkowski
Previous research has indicated that abstract grammatical rules and forms fall short of predicting quantifier scope and that lexical/pragmatic knowledge plays a significant part in quantifier scope disambiguation (QSD). More recent works have argued that world knowledge in the form of relations among objects may be salient to QSD. This paper contributes to this line of research by providing support
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How to Marry a Star: Probabilistic Constraints for Meaning in Context Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Katrin Erk, Aurélie Herbelot
In this paper, we derive a notion of word meaning in context that characterizes meaning as both intensional and conceptual. We introduce a framework for specifying local as well as global constraints on word meaning in context, together with their interactions, thus modelling a wide range of lexical shifts and ambiguities observed in utterance interpretation. We represent sentence meaning as a situation
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Can you See? Actuality Entailments in the Present Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Anouk Dieuleveut
This paper argues that English present ability modal statements like “I can see Saturn” are ambiguous in the same way as past ability statements like “I was able to lift a fridge”: they can express either a general ability (‘I have the ability to see Saturn, in general’), or have an actualized (episodic) interpretation (‘I'm seeing Saturn, right now’). The challenge is to explain why in the present
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Metaphorical Uses of Proper Names and the Continuity Hypothesis Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-10-11 Jacob Hesse, Chris Genovesi, Eros Corazza
According to proponents of the continuity hypothesis, metaphors represent one end of a spectrum of linguistic phenomena, which includes various forms of loosening/broadening, such as category extensions and approximations, as well as hyperbolic interpretations. The continuity hypothesis is used to establish that the inferences derived from the set of linguistic expressions mentioned above result from
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Causal Semantics for Implicative Verbs Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Prerna Nadathur
Implicative verbs (e.g., manage, dare) are characterized by complement inferences (Karttunen, 1971). English manage entails its complement; the entailment reverses polarity with matrix negation, and is accompanied by a projective inference to the complement’s non-triviality (Coleman, 1975; Karttunen & Peters, 1979). I use data from Finnish and English to argue that the implicative inferential profile
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Knowing and Believing Things: What DP-Complementation Can Tell us about the Meaning and Composition of (Factive) Attitudes Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Kajsa Djärv
In the Hintikkan tradition, attitude verbs are viewed as relations between individuals and propositions. Previous work on know and believe with Content DPs like the rumour has tended to treat know CP vs. know DP as polysemy. In this paper, I show that polysemy runs into conceptual and empirical problems, and propose instead a new decompositional approach to know-verbs, which avoids polysemy; linking
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Attitudes, Presuppositions, and the Binding Theory Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Kyle Blumberg
In order to handle presuppositions in the scope of attitude verbs, the binding theory allows presuppositions triggered in a subject's beliefs to be bound at the matrix level; and it allows presuppositions triggered in non-doxastic attitudes to be bound in the subject's beliefs (Geurts, 1999; Maier, 2015). However, we argue that this leads to serious overgeneration, for example it predicts that the
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Semantic Incorporation in English Singular Indefinites Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-04-16 Sadhwi Srinivas, Kyle Rawlins
In this paper, we introduce a class of exceptionally narrow-scoping singular indefinites in English (e.g., “Sam drove a car for several years before switching to a truck”), which pattern more closely with what have been termed “weak definites” in the literature (e.g., Poesio, 1994; Carlson et al., 2006) than with regular indefinites. While the existence of such exceptional “weak” indefinites has been
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The Role of Incremental and Superficial Processing in the Depth Charge Illusion: Experimental and Modeling Evidence Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Dario Paape
The depth charge illusion occurs when compositionally incongruous sentences such as No detail is too unimportant to be left out are assigned plausible non-compositional meanings (Don’t leave out details). Results of two online reading and judgment experiments show that moving the incongruous degree phrase to the beginning of the sentence in German (lit. “Too unimportant to be left out is surely no
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Plural and Quantified Protagonists in Free Indirect Discourse and Protagonist Projection Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Márta Abrusán
In this paper I observe a number of new plural and (apparently) quantified examples of free indirect discourse (FID) and protagonist projection (PP). I analyse them within major current theoretical approaches, proposing extensions to these approaches where needed. In order to derive the wide range of readings observed with plural protagonists, I show how we can exploit existing mechanisms for the interpretation
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Are There Pluralities of Worlds? Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Viola Schmitt
Indicative conditionals and configurations with neg-raising predicates have been brought up as potential candidates for constructions involving world pluralities. I argue against this hypothesis, showing that cumulativity and quantifiers targeting a plurality’s part structure cannot access the presumed world pluralities. I furthermore argue that this makes worlds special in the sense that the same
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Copredication and Meaning Transfer Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-04-01 David Liebesman, Ofra Magidor
Copredication occurs when a sentence receives a true reading despite prima facie ascribing categorically incompatible properties to a single entity. For example, ‘The red book is by Tolstoy’ can have a true reading even though it seems that being red is only a property of physical copies, while being by Tolstoy is only a property of informational texts. A tempting strategy for resolving this tension
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Focused NPIs in Statements and Questions Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 Sunwoo Jeong, Floris Roelofsen
Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) with emphatic prosody such as ANY or EVER, and minimizers such as lift a finger or sleep a wink are known to generate particular contextual inferences that are absent in the case of non-emphatic NPIs such as unstressed any or ever. It remains an open question, however, what the exact status of these inferences is and how they come about. In this paper, we analyze these
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Steps towards a Semantics of Dance Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-11-12 Pritty Patel-Grosz, Patrick Georg Grosz, Tejaswinee Kelkar, Alexander Refsum Jensenius
As formal theoretical linguistic methodology has matured, recent years have seen the advent of applying it to objects of study that transcend language, e.g., to the syntax and semantics of music (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983, Schlenker 2017a; see also Rebuschat et al. 2011). One of the aims of such extensions is to shed new light on how meaning is construed in a range of communicative systems. In this
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Figuring Out Root and Epistemic Uses of Modals: The Role of the Input Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-08-27 Annemarie van Dooren, Anouk Dieuleveut, Ailís Cournane, Valentine Hacquard
This paper investigates how children figure out that modals like must can be used to express both epistemic and “root” (i.e. non epistemic) flavors. The existing acquisition literature shows that children produce modals with epistemic meanings up to a year later than with root meanings. We conducted a corpus study to examine how modality is expressed in speech to and by young children, to investigate
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Structural Effects on Implicature Calculation Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-04-07 Jon Ander Mendia
Abstract This paper provides an investigation of Ignorance Inferences by looking at the superlative modifier at least. The formal properties of these inferences are characterized in terms of the epistemic conditions that they impose on the speaker, thereby establishing how much can and must be inferred about what the speaker is ignorant about. The paper makes two main contributions. First, it argues
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Alternatives in Counterfactuals: What Is Right and What Is Not Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Jacopo Romoli,Paolo Santorio,Eva Wittenberg
Abstract Classical semantics for counterfactuals is based on a notion of minimal change: If ${\textsf {A}}$, would ${\textsf {C}}$ says that the worlds that make ${\textsf {A}}$ true and that are otherwise minimally different from the actual world are ${\textsf {C}}$-worlds. This semantics suffers from a well-known difficulty with disjunctive antecedents (see e.g. Alonso-Ovalle, 2009; Willer, 2018;
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Non-Intrusive Questions as a Special Type of Non-Canonical Questions Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-25 Donka F Farkas
This paper introduces on the scene a new type of non-canonical question, dubbed non-intrusive, exemplified by interrogatives marked by the particle oare in Romanian. It does so by providing an account of the distribution and interpretation of this particle using an updated version of the context components in Fălăuş & Laca (2014), and an elaboration of the general assumptions in Faller (2002). The
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Are Most and More Than Half Truth-Conditionally Equivalent? Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-03 Milica Denić, Jakub Szymanik
Quantifying determiners most and more than half are standardly assumed to have the same truth-conditional meaning. Much work builds on this assumption in studying how the two quantifiers are mentally encoded and processed (Hackl, 2009; Lidz et al., 2011; Pietroski et al., 2009; Steinert-Threlkeld et al., 2015; Szymanik & Zajenkowski, 2010; Talmina et al., 2017). There is however empirical evidence
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The Mereological Structure of Distributivity: A Case Study of Binominal Each Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-13 Jess H-K Law
Binominal each is known to exhibit selectional requirements on the noun phrase that immediately precedes it. The goal of this paper is to reduce these selectional requirements to a single requirement of monotonic growth of measurement in relation to the ‘size’ of distributivity. More concretely, it is argued that binominal each imposes a constraint on the functional dependencies arising from distributive
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Iffy Endorsements Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-11-28 Magdalena Kaufmann, Stefan Kaufmann
Theories of imperatives differ in how they aim to derive the distributional and functional properties of this clause type. One point of divergence is how to capture the fact that imperative utterances convey the speaker’s endorsement for the course of events described. Condoravdi & Lauer (2017) observe that conditionals with imperative consequents (conditionalized imperatives, CIs) are infelicitous
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Comparison via eher Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-11-12 Carla Umbach, Stephanie Solt
This paper is about the semantics of the German adverb eher, which has three, or perhaps four, readings: temporal, epistemic, metalinguistic and—depending on whether it is accepted as a genuine reading—preference. In its epistemic reading, eher gained prominence in semantics because it was used by Kratzer (1981) to argue that the notion of possibility is gradable. Eher has also received attention from
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Property Inheritance, Deferred Reference and Copredication Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-10-20 Matthew Gotham
There are sentences that are coherent and possibly true, but in which there is at the very least the appearance of a conflict between the requirements of two (or more) predicates that are applied to the same argument. This phenomenon, known as copredication, raises various issues for linguistic theory. In this paper I defend and develop an approach to the issues of counting and individuation in copredication
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Articulated Homogeneity in Cumulative Sentences Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-10-13 Keny Chatain
In this work, I use cumulative readings of every (Champollion, 2010, 2016a; Haslinger & Schmitt, 2018; Kratzer, 2003; Schein, 1993) as a tool to investigate homogeneity in cumulative readings in general. Based on a new observation about the homogeneity properties of cumulative readings of every, I argue that the homogeneity properties of cumulative readings arise from the interaction of multiple operators
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Children’s Interpretation of Sentences Containing Multiple Scalar Terms Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-30 Cory Bill, Elena Pagliarini, Jacopo Romoli, Lyn Tieu, Stephen Crain
Sentences containing the scalar term “some”, such as “The pig carried some of his rocks”, are usually interpreted as conveying the scalar inference that the pig did not carry all of his rocks. Previous research has reported that when interpreting such sentences, children tend to derive fewer of these scalar inferences than adults ( Noveck (2001); Papafragou & Musolino (2003); Guasti et al. (2005),
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All Focus is Contrastive: On Polarity (Verum) Focus, Answer Focus, Contrastive Focus and Givenness Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-30 Daniel Goodhue
I develop a general theory of focus and givenness that can account for truly contrastive focus, and for polarity focus, including data that are sometimes set apart under the label “verum focus”. I show that polarity focus creates challenges for classic theories of focus (e.g. Rooth 1992, a.o.) that can be dealt with by requiring that all focus marking is truly contrastive, and that givenness deaccenting
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The Origin of Cross-Cultural Differences in Referential Intuitions: Perspective Taking in the Gödel Case Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-08-07 Jincai Li
How do proper names refer? This question about reference is critical for philosophers studying language, linguists investigating meaning and reference, and psycholinguists interested in how children acquire names. Over the past century, philosophers have put forward two classical theories to explain the link between a name and the entity it refers to, i.e., the descriptivist theory proposed by Frege
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Notes on Iterated Rationality Models of Scalar Implicatures Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-08 Danny Fox, Roni Katzir
In the linguistics literature, the derivation of scalar implicatures has often been handled in a relatively modular way, using computations that are sensitive to logical relations among alternatives such as entailment but are blind to other notions such as the probabilities that participants in a conversation might associate with these alternatives (or with related propositions). In recent years, a
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Evidentiality in Abductive Reasoning: Experimental Support for a Modal Analysis of Evidentials Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-08 Anastasia Smirnova
This paper presents results from two experimental studies that address a theoretical debate in semantics about the meaning of evidentiality and its relation to epistemic modality (Faller 2002; 2011; Izvorski 1997; Koev 2017; Lee 2013; Matthewson et al. 2007; McCready & Ogata 2007; Murray 2010; Smirnova 2013). According to modal analyses, evidentiality, in addition to the information source, encodes
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Distinguishing Homogeneity From Vagueness Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-08-19 Diego Feinmann
The question of whether the gappiness associated with vague sentences is of the same kind as the gappiness associated with homogenous sentences has been raised but not settled. In this article, I set out to fill this gap. To begin with, I examine the arguments that have been given for and against assimilating homogeneity to the phenomenon of vagueness (and contend that none of these arguments, neither
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Monotonicity Revisited: Mass Nouns and Comparisons of Purity Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-08-17 Alan Bale, Bernhard Schwarz, David Shanks
Comparatives with more plus mass noun, like John has more milk than Bill, are naturally analyzed as referencing measure functions, functions like volume or weight that map individuals to degrees. Although such measure functions vary with context as well as the choice of mass noun, there are well known grammatical limitations on this variation. In particular, Schwarzschild (2006) proposes that only
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A Note on the Cardinalities of Sets of Scalar Alternatives Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-24 Salvador Mascarenhas
Formal theories of scalar implicature appeal crucially to a set of alternatives. These are the alternative statements that a speaker could have made but chose not to in pragmatic accounts, and the alternative statements that figure in the computation of exhaustivity operators in grammatical approaches. I show that the three sufficiently explicit theories of alternatives in the literature generate sets
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Random Choice from Likelihood: The Case of Chuj (Mayan) Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-02 Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Justin Royer
Research on modality has recently broadened beyond the verbal domain, unearthing questions about the cross-categorial nature of modality ( Arregui et al. 2017), for instance: To what extent do DP and VP modals mirror each other? Chuj, an understudied Mayan language, provides an ideal vantage point to answer this question with respect to random choice modality. Random choice indefinites convey, roughly
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Causes and Expectations: On the Interpretation of the Tagalog Ability/Involuntary Action Form Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-05-31 Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Henrison Hsieh
The Tagalog Ability/Involuntary Action (aia) verbal form conveys apparently unrelated modal meanings: that an action was within what an agent could do or that it was beyond what an agent could control, for instance. Recent analyses for the Malagasy and St’át’imcets counterparts of this form propose that this morphology contributes circumstantial modality and conveys, roughly, that the event described
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Disjunction in Negative Contexts: A Cross-Linguistic Experimental Study Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-05-14 Oana Lungu, Anamaria Fălăuș, Francesca Panzeri
This squib reports experimental findings from a study investigating the interpretation of simple disjunction in negative contexts in four languages: Italian, French, English, Romanian. We provide evidence that casts doubt on the robustness of the distinction between PPI disjunction languages and non-PPI disjunction languages. The difference turns out to be less clear-cut than assumed in the theoretical
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Subclausal Local Contexts Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-05-12 Amir Anvari, Kyle Blumberg
One of the central topics in semantic theory over the last few decades concerns the nature of local contexts. Recently, theorists have tried to develop general, non-stipulative accounts of local contexts (Ingason, 2016; Mandelkern & Romoli, 2017a; Schlenker, 2009). In this paper, we contribute to this literature by drawing attention to the local contexts of subclausal expressions. More specifically
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The Contribution of Gestures to the Semantics of Non-Canonical Questions Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-05-11 Michela Ippolito
The symbolic gesture MAT (mano a tulipano) used by native speakers of Italian characterizes non-canonical wh questions when used both as a co-speech and pro-speech gesture. MAT can be executed with either a fast tempo contour or a slow tempo contour. Tempo is semantically significant: descriptively, a fast tempo characterizes a biased but information-seeking non-canonical question; a slow tempo characterizes
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The Semantics of Emotive Markers and Other Illocutionary Content Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-04-28 Jessica Rett
I identify a class of expressions called ‘emotive markers,’ exemplified by fortunately and alas, which encode not-at-issue information about the speaker’s emotive attitude towards the content of the utterances they occur in. I argue that there are important differences emotive markers and other encoders of not-at-issue content, in particular utterance modifiers like frankly or evidential adverbs like
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Coordinating Ifs Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-04-28 Justin Khoo
Accounting for the behavior of conjoined and disjoined if-clauses is not easy for standard theories of conditionals that treat if as either an operator or restrictor. In this paper, I discuss four observations about coordinated if-clauses, and motivate a semantics for conditionals that reorients the compositional structure of the restrictor theory. On my proposal, if-clauses provide restrictions on
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The Semantics of Comparatives: A Difference-Based Approach Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-04-02 Linmin Zhang, Jia Ling
Degree semantics has been developed to study how the meanings of measurement and comparison are encoded in natural language. Within degree semantics, this paper proposes a difference-based (or subtraction-based) approach to analyze the semantics of comparatives. The motivation is the measurability and comparability of differences involved in comparatives. The main claim is that comparatives encode
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Deferred Reference of Proper Names Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-01-20 Katarzyna Kijania-Placek, Paweł Banaś
In this paper, we argue that proper names have deferred uses. Following Geoffrey Nunberg, we describe the deferred reference mechanism by which a linguistic expression refers to something in the world by exploiting a contextually salient relation between an index and the referent in question. Nunberg offered a thorough analysis of deferred uses of indexicals but claimed that proper names do not permit
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Structured Plurality Reconsidered Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-08 Grimau B.
AbstractIn this article, I address the question of the semantic analysis of structured plurals, that is, expressions like these children and those children, which seem to refer to pluralities of individuals divided into groups. In the first half of the article, I describe a variety of structured plural expressions and predicates they can combine with and I point out the difficulties faced by two extant
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Comparisons of Equality With German so…wie, and the Relationship Between Degrees and Properties Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2020-11-25 Hohaus V, Zimmermann M.
AbstractWe present a compositionally transparent, unified semantic analysis of two kinds of so…wie-equative constructions in German, namely degree equatives and property equatives in the domain of individuals or events. Unlike in English and many other European languages (Haspelmath & Buchholz 1998, Rett 2013), both equative types in German feature the parameter marker so, suggesting a unified analysis
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Deriving Dual Dimensions of Bias: Preposed Negation Questions with EVEN Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2020-10-22 Jeong S.
AbstractPolar interrogatives with preposed negation (e.g., Didn’t Cam help?) convey positive epistemic bias. Polar interrogatives with even-type expressions, including prosodically stressed NPIs and minimizer NPIs (e.g., Did Cam lift a finger to help?), convey negative epistemic bias and often have a rhetorical flavor. This paper examines hybrid PQ constructions with both preposed negations and even-type
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Domains of Polarity Items Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Homer V.
AbstractThis article offers a unified theory of the licensing of Negative and Positive Polarity Items (PIs), focusing on the acceptability conditions of PPIs of the some-type, and NPIs of the any-type. It argues that licensing has both a syntactic and a semantic component. On the syntactic side, the acceptability of PIs is checked in constituents; in fact, for any given PI, only some constituents,
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Quadruplex Negatio Invertit? The On-Line Processing of Depth Charge Sentences Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2020-10-15 Paape D, Vasishth S, von der Malsburg T.
AbstractSo-called “depth charge” sentences (No head injury is too trivial to be ignored) are interpreted by the vast majority of speakers to mean the opposite of what their compositional semantics would dictate. The semantic inversion that is observed for sentences of this type is the strongest and most persistent linguistic illusion known to the field ( Wason & Reich, 1979). However, it has recently
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Cumulation Across Attitudes and Plural Projection Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2020-08-18 Schmitt V.
AbstractThis paper investigates cumulative readings of sentences in which some, but not all of the plural expressions have a de dicto reading, i.e. sentences where the lower plural is interpreted in the scope of an attitude verb like believe. I argue that such cases represent a problem for existing accounts of cumulativity, because the required cumulative relation cannot be formed. I then motivate
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A Realis Subjunctive in German Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2020-08-12 Csipak E.
AbstractThe German Konjunktiv II is known for its reportative and irrealis uses. This paper argues for a third, realis, use which is independent of the other two uses. Thus by uttering ‘Da wäre Saft im Kühlschrank there is.[realis subjunctive] juice in the fridge’ a speaker can signal that not only is she certain that there is juice in the fridge, but also that she is offering the juice to an interlocutor
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The Semantics of Evidentials in Questions Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-08 Diti Bhadra
Abstract This paper presents a novel cross-linguistic exploration of the phenomenon of Interrogative Flip at the semantics-pragmatics interfaces. Most previous studies describe an obligatory shift in the anchor of an evidential from the speaker to the addressee in interrogatives, across a diverse set of languages. In this work, we discuss a lesser-studied set of facts, which show that in many languages
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Definiteness, Uniqueness, and Maximality in Languages With and Without Articles Journal of Semantics (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2020-05-30 Radek Šimík, Christoph Demian
We present a number of experiments testing influential hypotheses about the meaning of definite descriptions (in languages with articles, represented here by German) and bare nominals (in articleless languages, represented here by Russian). Our results are in line with the commonly entertained hypothesis that definite descriptions convey uniqueness (if singular) or maximality (if plural), but fail