{"title":"Where is the destructive update problem?","authors":"Simon Charlow","doi":"10.3765/sp.12.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.10","url":null,"abstract":"I critically examine several objections to ‘destructive update’ of assignment functions in dynamic theories of anaphora, using a modular compositional treatment of the static/dynamic divide to highlight what static and dynamic approaches to assignment functions have in common, and how they differ. \u0000 \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42642274","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":"Filtering free choice","authors":"Jacopo Romoli, P. Santorio","doi":"10.3765/SP.12.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/SP.12.12","url":null,"abstract":"Sentences involving disjunctions under a possibility modal give rise to so-called ‘free choice’ inferences, i.e. inferences to the effect that each disjunct is possible. This note investigates the interaction between free choice and presuppositions. We focus on sentences embedding both a disjunction in the scope of a possibility modal and a presupposition trigger, and we investigate how the free choice inference triggered by the former can contribute to filtering the presupposition of the latter. We consider three cases: conditionals, disjunctions and unless sentences. We observe that in all of these cases the presuppositions triggered from the consequent, second disjunct, or the scope of unless appear to be filtered by a free choice inference associated with the rest of the sentence. The case of the conditional can be accommodated by scalar accounts of free choice, but the disjunction and unless cases cause a substantial problem for all these accounts. After discarding a natural but unsuccessful attempt at a solution, we consider two more promising strategies. The first holds on to an implicature account of free choice and exploits an algorithm of free insertion of redundant material. The second is based on a semantic account of free choice based on a notion of homogeneity. Each of these solutions comes with related problems. We conclude that the correct form of a theory of free choice remains open, though the data concerning the interaction between free choice and presupposition can significantly help sharpen our theoretical choices. EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42906322","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":"Donkeys under discussion","authors":"Lucas Champollion, Dylan Bumford, R. Henderson","doi":"10.3765/sp.12.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.1","url":null,"abstract":"Donkey sentences have existential and universal readings, but they are not often perceived as ambiguous. We extend the pragmatic theory of non-maximality in plural definites by Križ (2016) to explain how hearers use Questions under Discussion to fix the interpretation of donkey sentences in context. We propose that the denotations of such sentences involve truth-value gaps — in certain scenarios the sentences are neither true nor false — and demonstrate that Križ’s pragmatic theory fills these gaps to generate the standard judgments of the literature. Building on Muskens’s (1996) Compositional Discourse Representation Theory and on ideas from supervaluation semantics, we define a general schema for dynamic quantification that delivers the required truth-value gaps. Given the independently motivated pragmatic theory of Križ 2016, we argue that mixed readings of donkey sentences require neither plural information states, contra Brasoveanu 2008, 2010, nor error states, contra Champollion 2016, nor singular donkey pronouns with plural referents, contra Krifka 1996, Yoon 1996. We also show that the pragmatic account improves over alternatives like Kanazawa 1994 that attribute the readings of donkey sentences to the monotonicity properties of the embedding quantifier. \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43609926","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":"Modal interpretation of tense in subjunctive conditionals","authors":"J. Mackay","doi":"10.3765/sp.12.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.2","url":null,"abstract":"The paper gives an account of the meaning of subjunctive conditionals according to which the past tense receives a modal interpretation. The view allows the worlds of the antecedent to include the world of the context of utterance, and thus it avoids a problem pointed out by Mackay (2015) for previous modal views of the past tense in subjunctive conditionals. I argue that it also explains a variety of facts about the relationship among subjunctive morphology, counterfactuality, and presupposition. \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44549776","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":"What ifs","authors":"Justin Bledin, Kyle Rawlins","doi":"10.3765/sp.12.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.14","url":null,"abstract":"We develop a dynamic account of what if questions on which they re-pose questions inside local contexts introduced by their if -clauses subject to the felicity constraint that the resulting context is inquisitive. While this analysis is directly motivated by cases where a what if questioner challenges another speaker’s attempt to answer a current question under discussion (QUD) by seeming to re-ask this question over a more restricted contextual domain, it can also explain the flexibility of what if since other uses trigger accommodation with new QUDs to ensure that the post-suppositional inquisitivity condition is met. While QUD accommodation is a complex phenomenon that isn’t specific to just what if constructions, the pragmatic flexibility of what if furnishes a nice range of examples for investigating such repair. In the latter part of the paper, we focus on practical what if questions which trigger accommodation with QUDs that subserve the real-world domain goals of the speakers. We offer a systematic working theory of this accommodation within a formal model of discourse that involves goal stacks populated with both questions and decision problems tethered together by relevance. The larger contribution of this paper is to add to the understanding of how discourse felicity and update conditions at the level of speech acts can be encoded in natural languages. \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48375682","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":"Free choice and homogeneity","authors":"Simon Goldstein","doi":"10.3765/sp.12.23","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.23","url":null,"abstract":"This paper develops a semantic solution to the puzzle of Free Choice permission. The paper begins with a battery of impossibility results showing that Free Choice is in tension with a variety of classical principles, including Disjunction Introduction and the Law of Excluded Middle. Most interestingly, Free Choice appears incompatible with a principle concerning the behavior of Free Choice under negation, Double Prohibition, which says that Mary can’t have soup or salad implies Mary can’t have soup and Mary can’t have salad. Alonso-Ovalle 2006 and others have appealed to Double Prohibition to motivate pragmatic accounts of Free Choice. Aher 2012, Aloni 2018, and others have developed semantic accounts of Free Choice that also explain Double Prohibition. \u0000 \u0000This paper offers a new semantic analysis of Free Choice designed to handle the full range of impossibility results involved in Free Choice. The paper develops the hypothesis that Free Choice is a homogeneity effect. The claim possibly A or B is defined only when A and B are homogenous with respect to their modal status, either both possible or both impossible. Paired with a notion of entailment that is sensitive to definedness conditions, this theory validates Free Choice while retaining a wide variety of classical principles except for the transitivity of entailment. The homogeneity hypothesis is implemented in two different ways, homogeneous alternative semantics and homogeneous dynamic semantics, with interestingly different consequences. \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49498320","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":"Sluicing on free choice","authors":"Melissa Fusco","doi":"10.3765/sp.12.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.20","url":null,"abstract":"I explore the implications of the Tense Phrase deletion operation known as sluicing (Ross 1969) for the semantic and pragmatic literature on the Free Choice effect (Kamp 1973, von Wright 1969). I argue that the time-honored ‘I don’t know which’-riders on Free Choice sentences, traditionally taken to show that the effect is pragmatic, are sensitive to scope. Careful attention to such riders suggests that these sluices do not show cancellation on Free Choice antecedents in which disjunction scopes narrower than the modal. \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43381567","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":"Attitudes in discourse: Italian polar questions and the particle mica","authors":"Ilaria Frana, Kyle Rawlins","doi":"10.3765/sp.12.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.16","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores ways in which discourse participants convey an attitude about another discourse participant’s conversational move. We examine the semantics/pragmatics of Italian positive and negative polar questions (building on the literature on biased questions) and propose the first fully compositional analysis of the Italian particle ‘mica’, appearing in negative polar questions and negative assertions. The core is that ‘mica’ is member of a family of presuppositional, epistemic ‘common ground management’ operators, leading to a new account of epistemic inferences in biased polar questions that relies on the presuppositional nature of these operators. We argue that ‘mica’ is a high-left-periphery particle that indicates a presupposed bias against a proposition being added to the common ground, anchored uniformly to the speaker and therefore not showing ‘interrogative flip’. The paper develops connections between common-ground management operators and evidentials, arguing that interrogative flip (and lack thereof) is a phenomenon that should be studied for a wide variety of discourse particles. \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44684017","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 proprial article and the semantics of names","authors":"Patrick Muñoz","doi":"10.3765/sp.12.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.6","url":null,"abstract":"The proprial article is a functional item that occurs in a number of languages alongside names to the general exclusion of other nouns. In the following I present an account of the semantic function of this article, and how it interacts with names as nouns to form referential expressions in argument position. In particular, I suggest that in line with what a number of researchers have claimed, names generally are count nouns in the lexicon, denoting the property of bearing the name in question. The proprial article then composes with name NPs of a certain sort to yield proprial DPs that rigidly denote individuals, which are presupposed to bear the name in question at their world of use. It follows that ordinary referential names in argument position are not definite descriptions, as related approaches to the semantics of names often suppose, and that the proprial article is a functional element distinct from the definite article. This schema is applied to DP languages with article systems generally: all such languages are taken to have the proprial article, whether it appears overtly or covertly, and to make use of proprial DPs for reference using names. The machinery used further allows for a model-theoretically precise and intuitively compelling characterization of name-bearing. \u0000 \u0000EARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2019-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47140042","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}