{"title":"Pluralities across categories and plural projection","authors":"V. Schmitt","doi":"10.3765/sp.12.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.17","url":null,"abstract":"This paper proposes an extension of the class of plural expressions, a generalized analysis of the denotations of such expressions and a novel account of how they semantically combine with other elements in the sentence. The point of departure is the observation that definite plural DPs and and -coordinations with coordinates of several semantic categories share certain features — in particular cumulativity—in the context of other plural expressions. Existing analyses of conjunction fail to derive these parallels and I propose that and -coordinations should be analyzed as denoting pluralities (of whatever kind of semantic object their conjuncts denote). This, in turn, raises the question of how pluralities combine with other material in the sentence. I show that a simple expansion of the standard analysis thereof, which puts the workload onto the predicate, is insufficient. I propose an alternative which is based on the idea that all semantic domains contain pluralities and involves plural projection. In this system, the truth-conditions of sentences containing plurality-denoting expressions are not due to the semantic expansion of the predicate (as in existing analyses), but the result of a step-by-step process: Once a plurality enters the derivation, the node immediately dominating it will also denote a plurality, namely of the values obtained by a particular combination of the plurality and the denotation of its sister. \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46017533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The discourse commitments of illocutionary reportatives","authors":"Martina Faller","doi":"10.3765/SP.12.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/SP.12.8","url":null,"abstract":"This article develops an account of the discourse updates contributed by utterances of declarative sentences with the Cuzco Quechua reportative. The challenge posed by such utterances is that the speaker does not need to be committed to the at-issue proposition φ and may even deny its truth. They are therefore not assertions. Yet φ can behave in many ways like an asserted proposition in discourse: it can be used to answer questions, link to the discourse with veridical rhetorical relations, and, if accepted by the interlocutors, be subsequently presupposed. The proposed semantics for the reportative assigns the commitment to φ to a third-party principal instead of to the discourse participant producing the utterance, leaving them free to disagree with φ. However, if they do not disagree, they will be understood as intending to propose it to the common ground. This, it is argued, is due to the Collaborative Principle, a pragmatic principle that requires discourse participants to provide evidence of any discrepancy in commitments. The analysis is implemented in a modified version of the discourse framework of Farkas & Bruce 2010. \u0000 \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45371683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anankastic conditionals are still a mystery","authors":"Milo Phillips-Brown","doi":"10.3765/SP.12.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/SP.12.13","url":null,"abstract":"‘If you want to go to Harlem, you have to take the A train’ doesn’t look special. Yet a compositional account of its meaning, and the meaning of anankastic conditionals more generally, has proven an enigma. Semanticists have responded by assigning anankastics a unique status, distinguishing them from ordinary indicative conditionals. Condoravdi & Lauer (2016) maintain instead that “anankastic conditionals are just conditionals.” I argue that Condoravdi and Lauer don’t give a general solution to a well-known problem: the problem of conflicting goals. They rely on a special, “effective preference” interpretation for want on which an agent cannot want two things that conflict with her beliefs. A general solution, though, requires that the goals cannot conflict with the facts. Condoravdi and Lauer’s view fails. Yet they show, I believe, that previous accounts fail too. Anankastic conditionals are still a mystery. \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46272859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Experimental studies on it-clefts and predicate interpretation","authors":"Agata Renans, J. Veaugh-Geiss","doi":"10.3765/sp.12.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.11","url":null,"abstract":"There is an ongoing discussion in the literature whether the series of sentences ‘It’s not α that did P. α and β did P.’ is acceptable or not. Whereas the homogeneity approach in Buring & Križ 2013, Križ 2016, and Križ 2017 predicts these sentences to be unacceptable, the alternative-based approach predicts acceptability depending on the predicate being interpreted distributively or non- distributively (among others, Horn 1981, Velleman et al. 2012, Renans 2016a,b). We report on three experiments testing the predictions of both types of approaches. These studies provide empirical data that not only bears on these approaches, but also allows us to distinguish between different accounts of cleft exhaustivity that might otherwise make the same predictions. The results of the three studies reported here suggest that the acceptability of clefts depends on the interpretation of the predicate, thereby posing a serious challenge to the homogeneity approach, and contributing to the ongoing discussion on the semantics of it -clefts. \u0000 \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47757801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vagueness, contextualism, and ellipsis","authors":"Paul D. Elbourne","doi":"10.3765/sp.12.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.22","url":null,"abstract":"Stanley (2003) has argued that contextualist theories of vagueness are inconsistent with a certain fact about the interpretation of indexicals in Verb Phrase ellipsis, namely that the semantic content of an indexical in an elided verb phrase must be the same as the semantic content of the corresponding indexical in the antecedent verb phrase. In this paper, some counterexamples are adduced to undermine confidence in this generalization and hence Stanley’s argument as a whole.","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42209956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Know whether and -ever free relative clauses","authors":"Maayan Abenina-Adar","doi":"10.3765/sp.12.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.19","url":null,"abstract":"Know whether sentences and -ever free relative clauses have not been studied together, but they have similar contextual constraints. This work offers an explanation of their similarities based on well-established pragmatic principles. These constructions are proposed to evoke equally informative alternatives with stronger presuppositions, and as a consequence of Heim’s (1991) pragmatic principle of Maximize Presupposition, the use of a know whether sentence or a sentence containing an -ever free relative clause requires the presuppositions of all of its alternatives not to be satisfied. This gives rise to a variety of requirements, depending on what grammatical environment either construction appears in and how its presuppositions project. Although the modal implications of -ever free relative clauses are typically analyzed as a semantically-encoded component of their meaning, this work argues that a pragmatic explanation provides better coverage of a broad range of empirical observations. \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44851105","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Polarity particles revisited","authors":"D. Farkas, F. Roelofsen","doi":"10.3765/sp.12.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.15","url":null,"abstract":"Claus et al. (2017) present novel experimental evidence concerning polarity particle responses in German, and discuss the challenges these findings raise for three approaches to such responses, namely the saliency approach of Krifka (20130, the feature model of Roelofsen and Farkas (2015), and \u0000the ellipsis approaches of Kramer and Rawlins (2012), and Holmberg (2016). The authors then sketch a way to account for the data within the feature model, as well as a revised version of the saliency account. \u0000 \u0000The first goal of this paper is to work out in full detail an account of the new German data in the feature model. In the process, we will clarify and better articulate those aspects of the feature model that are responsible for how preference patterns are to be explained. Our second goal is to deepen the comparison between this model and the saliency approach by taking a wider cross-linguistic perspective. \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45568692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Polarity reversals under sluicing","authors":"M. Kroll","doi":"10.3765/sp.12.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.18","url":null,"abstract":"This 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 antecedent content in a sluicing construction contain opposite polarity. The data challenge 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 — i.e. non-truth-conditional — content 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. \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48054305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Learnability and semantic universals","authors":"Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Jakub Szymanik","doi":"10.3765/sp.12.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.4","url":null,"abstract":"One of the great successes of the application of generalized quantifiers to natural language has been the ability to formulate robust semantic universals. When such a universal is attested, the question arises as to the source of the universal. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that many semantic universals arise because expressions satisfying the universal are easier to learn than those that do not. While the idea that learnability explains universals is not new, explicit accounts of learning that can make good on this hypothesis are few and far between. We propose a model of learning — back-propagation through a recurrent neural network — which can make good on this promise. In particular, we discuss the universals of monotonicity, quantity, and conservativity and perform computational experiments of training such a network to learn to verify quantifiers. Our results are able to explain monotonicity and quantity quite well. We suggest that conservativity may have a different source than the other universals. \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44569305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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