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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

Many languages have particles that possess multiple logical functions. Take the Mandarin particle dou for example. Varying by the item it is associated with and the prosodic pattern of the environment it appears in, dou can trigger a distributivity effect, license a preverbal free choice item, or evoke an even-like inference. Considering universal grammar a simple system, we need to figure out, for

In this work, I propose a new semantic analysis of the Japanese progressive/resultative morpheme -te iru, which also leads to an improved account of the English progressive and contributes to cross-linguistic theory of aspect. The proposal is based on the modal analysis of the English progressive proposed by Portner (1998) and Ferreira (2016), but it is modified to accommodate the Japanese data. Crucially

A semantic universal, which we here dub the Veridical Uniformity Universal, has recently been argued to hold of responsive verbs (those that take both declarative and interrogative complements). This paper offers a preliminary explanation of this universal: verbs satisfying it are easier to learn than those that do not. This claim is supported by a computational experiment using artificial neural networks

The standard grammatical theory of scalar implicature, as envisioned by Chierchia (2004), Fox (2007), and Chierchia, Fox, and Spector (2012), posits that scalar implicatures are derived in grammar, as a matter semantics, rather than pragmatically, as an implicature rooted in Grice’s maxim of quantity. Ignorance inferences, by contrast, e.g. those associated with plain disjunctive sentences, are derived

A common assumption about our internal lexicon is that the meaning of words is underspecified and this underspecified representation is filled in based on the context in which the word occurs. In this paper I would like to explore a different hypothesis, that words are stored with overspecified representations which are ‘trimmed down’ by the context. This view seems to be in line with a well-known

This paper presents a puzzle involving embedded attitude reports. We resolve the puzzle by arguing that attitude verbs take restricted readings: in some environments the denotation of attitude verbs can be restricted by a given proposition. For example, when these verbs are embedded in the consequent of a conditional, they can be restricted by the proposition expressed by the conditional’s antecedent

The puzzle about copredication is that (1)-(3) ascribe two properties that, at least prima facie, can’t be jointly instantiated, e.g. being delicious (a property of food items) and lasting hours (a property of events); being heavy (a property of physical objects) and being informative (a property of informational entities); being vandalised (a property of physical buildings) and calling in debts (a

Content words (e.g. nouns and adjectives) are generally connected: there are no gaps in their denotations; no noun means ‘table or shoe’ or ‘animal or house’. We explore a formulation of connectedness which is applicable to content and logical words alike, and which compares well with the classic notion of monotonicity for quantifiers. On a first inspection, logical words satisfy this generalized version

We show that the interpretation of sentences like John is not very Adj depends on whether Adj is vague. We argue that this follows from a constraint on the interaction between vagueness and conversational implicature, a domain that has not been studied extensively. The constraint states that implicatures are not drawn if they lead to “borderline contradictions” (see Ripley 2011; Alxatib & Pelletier

This paper presents an account of notional belief attributions, that is, belief attributions where the belief content is fully specified. The proposal combines a Hintikka style possible-worlds sema ...

This paper offers a DRT-based analysis of epistemic specificity. Following Farkas (1996), we distinguish between scopal, partitive and epistemic specificity. After arguing in Section 1 that the three main variants of specificity are irreducible to each other, the paper then focuses on epistemic specificity. In the analysis of epistemically specific indefinites we distinguish between specific use and

On the basis of a model-theoretic analysis of the polysemy of the Dutch adverb terug (covering ‘back’ and ‘again’) and its partial synonyms, a semantic map is constructed that (i) explains how backward direction in space relates to repetition in time and what role counterdirectionality plays in that relation, (ii) integrates, in a semantically motivated way, various meanings that have been identified

While some modals readily appear in comparative constructions and are clearly gradable (e.g., likely as in p is more likely than q), the gradablity of possibility modals (e.g., possible) is controversial. We argue that one of the major reasons to think that possibility modals can be graded, namely the appearance of German possibility modals like möglich ‘possible’ and kann ‘can’ in a special comparative

The article puts forward a novel analysis of the German modal particle schon as a modal degree operator over propositional content. The proposed analysis offers a uniform perspective on the semantics of modal schon and its aspectual counterpart meaning ‘already’: Both particles are degree operators expressing a scale-based comparison over relevant alternatives. The alternatives are determined by focus

Comparative constructions like More people have been to Russia than I have are reported to be acceptable and meaningful by native speakers of English; yet, upon closer reflection, they are judged to be incoherent. This mismatch between initial perception and more considered judgment challenges the idea that we perceive sentences veridically, and interpret them fully; it is thus potentially revealing

This paper proposes a semantics for declarative and interrogative complements and for so-called responsive verbs, like know and forget, which embed both kinds of complements. Following Groenendijk & Stokhof (1984), we pursue a uniform account in the sense that we take both kinds of complements to be of the same semantic type and we assume a single lexical entry for each responsive verb. This approach

Projective content is utterance content that a speaker may be taken to be committed to even when the expression associated with the content occurs embedded under an entailment-canceling operator (e.g., Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 1990). It has long been observed that projective content varies in how projective it is (e.g., Karttunen 1971; Simons 2001; Abusch 2010), though preliminary experimental

We argue that echo wh-questions are autonomous grammatical structures, and that their distinctive formal properties determine their semantics and pragmatics. Echo wh-sentences contain a wh-phrase in which the wh-element is narrowly focused, and a phrasal Q operator. Wh-phrase and Q operator determine a question semantics. Focus on wh determines the discourse appropriateness conditions for echo wh-questions

A common approach to knowledge wh is to try to reduce it to knowledge that, and in particular to answer-knowledge. On this view, the truthconditions of a knowledge wh ascription can be given entirely in terms of which answers to the embedded question the subject knows. Against this background, this paper considers the phenomenon of false-belief sensitivity — a challenge to this common approach to knowledge

This paper presents an experimental study that provides evidence for the existence of two types of rising declaratives in English which differ systematically in their forms and their functions. The two are labelled assertive rising declaratives and inquisitive rising declaratives, respectively. Guided by the experimental results, the paper develops a semantic analysis of them. Having as backdrop an

Compare the following conditionals: Bad #If John is not in Paris, he is in France. Good If John is in France, he is not in Paris. Good sounds entirely natural, whereas Bad sounds quite strange. This contrast is puzzling, because Bad and Good have the same structure at a certain level of logical abstraction:

In American English, the intensifier totally presents a PRAGMATIC use, in which it strengthens the speaker’s commitment towards the utterance (e.g. ‘The Bulls will totally make the playoffs’). This use has received considerably less attention than the canonical LEXICAL contribution of the adverb (e.g. ‘the glass is totally full’). First, I rely on three acceptability studies to show that pragmatic

Miratives have often been thought of as expressing predications which can be schematized as ‘p is Y for the speaker at the time of the utterance’, where Y is some a member of the set {surprising, new information, a sudden revelation, . . . }. While much of the prior literature has discussed the value of Y, this discussion has typically been taken to be primarily a matter of analysis or its conceptual

The property of projection poses a challenge to formal semantic theories, due to its apparent non-compositional nature. Projected content is therefore typically analyzed as being different from and independent of asserted content. Recent evidence, however, suggests that these types of content in fact closely interact, thereby calling for a more integrated analysis that captures their similarities,

The goal of this paper is to account for the recurrent homophony between comparison, additivity and continuation cross-linguistically. Building on Roger Schwarzschild’s recent work on comparison in scale segment semantics, I propose that comparative, additive and continuative sentences all assert the existence of a rising scale segment, and differ in terms of (i) the nature of the scale and (ii) the

Chemla & Spector (2011) have found experimental evidence that a universal sen- tence embedding a weak scalar term like Every student read some of the books has the strong inference that no student read all of the books, in addition to the weak one that not every student did (see also Clifton Jr & Dube 2010, Potts et al. 2015, Gotzner & Benz 2015). While it is controversial how this strong inference

This paper investigates two types of data that appear to motivate complicating the semantics for weak necessity modals. I argue that these data can be captured using the same conceptual resources within a conservative extension of the standard quantificational semantics. The resulting analysis illuminates previously puzzling and underappreciated semantic and pragmatic properties of weak and strong

This paper investigates the semantics of Portuguese past tenses, focusing on their indexical behavior. I show that under certain circumstances, even when they are used anaphorically and refer to a contextually salient interval, these past tense heads can denote intervals that do not precede the speech time. I argue that the best way to capture this behavior is to construe its presupposition as a shiftable

Unlike belief and desire reports, intention reports (e.g., John intends to leave soon) are not well studied in formal semantics. This paper aims to begin to fill this gap, focusing on empirical similarities and differences that intention reports bear in relation to other attitude reports and to other expressions that involve intentional action. These empirical properties are shown to follow from the

In many languages, an indefinite determiner or numeral may be inflected to indicate that the value of the indefinite DP depends on another DP in the sentence or in context. Most semantic analyses of dependent indefinites formalize a similar insight: dependent indefinites contribute a variation condition: the value of the variable introduced by the indefinite must vary with respect to the value of another

It is commonly argued that weak negative polarity items (NPIs) (e.g., any) can occur in any (Strawson) downward-entailing environment. This generalization, however, is challenged by Wagner’s (2006) observations with the NPI-licenser only: although an only-clause is (Strawson) downward-entailing in its unfocused part, NPIs are not necessarily licensed there. In particular, DPonly does not license an

This paper presents an analysis of the English instrumental markers with and 15 verbal use. As with other thematic roles, the semantic generalizations encoded by the role Instrument have been difficult to precisely characterize. In this study, we analyze the distinct semantic contributions of with and use, illuminating several properties of instrumental meaning. In particular, use specifies that the

The received wisdom is that truth-conditional semantics presupposes and entails certain externalist ontological commitments. The idea is simple enough: if a semantic theory specifies (compositional) truth conditions, then, for any given sentence that is true, the theory will specify the very conditions that hold such that the sentence is true. Presumably, such conditions are exactly ways the world

In this paper, I present a modification of the scale-based framework of Sauerland & Stateva (2007, 2011) for modelling granularity—more precisely, of the so called granularity functions. Briefly, a granularity function maps a degree of a scale to an interval containing it such that the points within that interval are mutually indistinguishable. The proposed modification is a generalisation of the original

Lahiri (2002) classifies question embedding predicates into two major types, rogative and responsive predicates. Rogative predicates like wonder are only compatible with interrogative complements, while responsive predicates like know are also compatible with declarative complements. There are two main theories of responsive predicates: The question-to-proposition reduction approach holds that responsive

Hackl, Koster-Hale & Varvoutis (2012; hereafter HKV) provide data that suggest that in a null context, antecedent-contained deletion (ACD) relative clause structures modifying a quantified object noun phrase (NP) are easier to process than those modifying a definite object NP. HKV argue that this pattern of results supports a quantifier-raising (QR) analysis of both ACD structures and quantified NPs

This article presents an account of the semantic content and conventional discourse effects of a range of sentence types in English, namely falling declaratives, polar interrogatives and certain kinds of rising declaratives and tag interrogatives. The account aims to divide the labor between compositional semantics and conventions of use in a principled way. We argue that falling declaratives and polar

The puzzle I will address is illustrated in (1-3): (1) a. John finds this cake tasty. b. John finds the Dom Tower tall. (2) a. I find apples tastier than bananas. b. ??I find John taller than Mary. (3) a. Roller coasters are fun for John. b. *The Dom Tower is tall for John. (1) suggests that dimensional adjective (DA) tall is judge-dependent (according to one of the diagnostics), just like predicates

Copredication is the phenomenon whereby two or more predicates are applied to a single argument, but those predicates appear to require that their argument denote different things. This paper focuses on the problem of individuation and counting in copredication: many quantified copredication sentences have truth conditions that cannot be accounted for given standard assumptions, because the predicates

The scalar item some is widely assumed to receive a meaning enrichment to some but not all if it occurs in matrix position. The question under which circumstances this enrichment can occur in certain embedded positions plays an important role in deciding how to delineate semantics and pragmatics. We present new experimental data that bear on this theoretical issue. In distinction to previous experimental

When interpreting disjunctive sentences of the form ‘A or B,’ young children have been reported to differ from adults in two ways. First, children have been reported to interpret disjunction inclusively rather than exclusively, accepting ‘A or B’ in con- texts in which both A and B are true (Gualmini, Crain, Meroni, Chierchia & Guasti 2001; Chierchia, Crain, Guasti & Thornton 2001). Second, some children

This article is initially concerned with a famous constraint on the class of possible determiners in natural languages: the so-called Conservativity Constraint. We shall briefly illustrate the force of this constraint and informally sketch Keenan and Stavi (1986)’s view according to which the Conservativity Constraint derives from the boolean structure of natural language semantics. We shall proceed

Elementary sentences containing the quantificational determiner some seem to be ambiguous between a ‘weak’ existential meaning ∃ and a ‘strengthened’ some but not all meaning ∃+. The strengthened meaning is commonly assumed to be the output of a general enrichment mechanism, call it G (for ‘global’), that applies to the weak meaning of the sentence: G(∃) = ∃+. The application of G has been shown to

In this note, I make three corrections to my article Standard Contextualism Strikes Back, JoS, published online in January 2013, doi:10.1093/jos/ffs022. First, I acknowledge a very similar contextualist account proposed before mine by Janice Dowell (2011). Dowell’s and my accounts, developed independently, coincide on most issues, and seem to be complementary on the few remaining ones. Second, I scale

A central aspect of language comprehension is that hearers integrate incoming linguistic content both with the rest of the current sentence and the larger discourse context. Presuppositions crucially interact with both intraand inter-sentential context in intricate ways, which makes their study especially useful in this regard. We present a series of experiments investigating the time-course of interpreting

The article presents a proof-theoretic semantics for intensional transitive verbs (ITVs), with the following three characteristics: (i) non-specific interpretation of indefinite objects; (ii) resistance to substitution of coextensive objects; and (iii) no existential commitment. The article also shows how to handle monotonicity reasoning for ITVs. A central advantage of the approach is the absence

The grammatical category of evidentiality is traditionally conceived as marking the “information source” for the claim described by the sentence (see e.g. Anderson 1986; Willett 1988; Aikhenvald 2004). This paper defends the view that evidentiality need not be a semantic primitive but can rather be pragmatically derived from the spatiotemporal distance between the event described by the sentence and