Journal of Semantics最新文献

{"title":"Russian Disjunction To li To li and Obligatory Ignorance","authors":"Natalia Ivlieva","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffae013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffae013","url":null,"abstract":"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 scope disjunction and propose that those special properties are due to obligatory ignorance inferences associated with this disjunction. The paper provides one more argument for a grammatical theory of ignorance along the lines of ( 7).","PeriodicalId":46947,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Semantics","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142193576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Interpretation of Relative and Absolute Adjectives Under Negation","authors":"Stavroula Alexandropoulou, Nicole Gotzner","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffae012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffae012","url":null,"abstract":"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 negative strengthening effects. According to Horn's (1989) account negative strengthening arises on the basis of social considerations, whereas on Krifka's (2007) account it arises via complexity-based considerations, yielding distinct interpretation patterns. We applied Horn's (1989) and Krifka's (2007) accounts to three distinct cases of negated antonymic adjectives: informationally weak relative adjectives, informationally weak absolute adjectives, and informationally strong gradable adjectives. Our experimental results demonstrate different interpretation patterns for weak relative (large/small) and weak absolute gradable adjectives (clean/dirty) under negation. These results confirm the predictions stemming from Horn's (1989) account of negative strengthening effects and highlight the importance of a semantic extension gap between antonymic predicates for the occurrence of negative strengthening. In contrast, our experimental findings concerning strong antonymic adjectives (e.g., not gigantic/not tiny) prima facie present challenges for Horn's (1989) analysis, while they do not endorse any alternative account.","PeriodicalId":46947,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Semantics","volume":"60 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142193558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"X- vs. O-marked want","authors":"Alexander Wimmer","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffae005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffae005","url":null,"abstract":"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 under an influential view originating with Stalnaker (1975). With Sode (2021), but also Grano & Phillips-Brown (2022), the proposition $phi $ denoted by want’s complement is treated as the antecedent of a “hidden conditional” that Heim (1992) sees in want and desire-ascriptions more generally, a treatment in whose favor vF&I’s Conditional/Desire Pattern provides morphosyntactic evidence. In line with the Stalnakerian view, but also more recent ones under which X-marking is semantically vacuous (Crowley 2022; Leahy 2011, 2018), X-marking on want is treated as reflecting the absence of a presuppositional constraint that the O-marked counterpart comes with: a limitation of closest antecedent-worlds to the attitude holder’s belief set.","PeriodicalId":46947,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Semantics","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142193559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Negative strengthening: The interplay of evaluative polarity and scale structure","authors":"Nicole Gotzner, Diana Mazzarella","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffae004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffae004","url":null,"abstract":"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) are more likely to be strengthened than minimum standard ones (dirty or open). Our findings suggest that both evaluative polarity and scale structure drive the asymmetric interpretation of gradable adjectives under negation. Overall, our work adds to the growing literature on the interplay between pragmatic inference, valence and semantic meaning.","PeriodicalId":46947,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Semantics","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140883510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Domains of Monotonicity Processing","authors":"I-An Tan, Nir Segal, Yosef Grodzinsky","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffae003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffae003","url":null,"abstract":"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 judgment paradigm, but rather, on the measurement of continuous variables (error rates, Reaction Times (RTs)) in a verification task, in which the truth value of a sentence is determined against a scenario. We conducted two experiments with sentences that contained one or two DE operators, which featured in different syntactic configurations. We explored how RT is affected by the manipulation of both the number of DE operators, and the syntactic environments in which they reside. We ran these experiments in Hebrew and in English, with different participant populations and different testing methods. Despite the linguistic subtlety of the theoretical issues, our results were remarkably sharp, leading to two firm conclusions: (i) that processing time is determined not by the number of DE operators, but rather, by the monotonicity of the minimal constituent in which they reside; (ii) that DE-ness is not a property of operators, but of environments. We show how our results bear directly on the current debate about the nature of monotonicity, which we describe below. Finally, we provide quantitative tests of alternative, non-semantic explanations, and show how our results do not support them.","PeriodicalId":46947,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Semantics","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140831996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What Makes Linguistic Inferences Robust?","authors":"Paul Marty, Jacopo Romoli, Yasutada Sudo, Richard Breheny","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffad010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffad010","url":null,"abstract":"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 regular SIs. A common response to this challenge has been to hypothesise that such discrepancies among different types of SIs stem from the type of alternative used to derive them. That is, in contrast to regular SIs, distributive and free choice inferences are computed on the basis of sub-constituent alternatives, which are alternatives that are formed without lexical substitutions. This paper reports on a series of experiments that tested this hypothesis by comparing positive, disjunctive sentences giving rise to the two inference types to variants of these sentences involving either negation and conjunction, or negation and disjunction, for which the implicature approach predicts similar inferences on the basis of the same type of alternatives. The investigation also included deontic and epistemic modality, different positions of negation, and was extended to similar comparisons with simple disjunctions and the related ignorance inferences they give rise to. Our results show that, while the inferences are indeed quite robust in the disjunctive cases, regardless of whether negation is present or not, the inferences that their negative, conjunctive variants give rise to are not. These findings are challenging for the hypothesis that the type of alternatives involved in SI computation is a major factor responsible for differences in robustness. We outline two possible alternative explanations of our data.","PeriodicalId":46947,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Semantics","volume":"200 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140623246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Emphasizing Writing Acts: The Exclamation Point in German as a Lexical Operator for Verum","authors":"Sebastian Bücking","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffad020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffad020","url":null,"abstract":"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 analysis of verum focus. However, while verum focus is related to the propositional layer, the exclamation point is argued to relate to the act layer. The following advantages are defended: (i) The proposal accounts for both the functional kinship between exclamation points and verum focus and their distributional differences. On the one hand, both means introduce affirmative emphasis by a bouletic attitude; on the other hand, the exclamation point has a much wider distribution than verum focus, as it is not bound to contexts that provide a controversy between a proposition and its negation. (ii) The difference in semantic scope can be traced back to a structural difference. While verum focus is integrated into its host clause, exclamation points occupy a peripheral structural position, which is typical of act modifiers. (iii) The lexicon-based approach to the interpretation of exclamation points has noteworthy broader implications. It provides an independent cross-modal piece of evidence in favor of a lexicon-based analysis of verum focus instead of a focus-based one. Furthermore, it is amenable to a formal compositional implementation. This implementation comprises first steps toward a formal model of writing acts in terms of Commitment Space Semantics and advances the general hypothesis that the graphematic form licenses a systematic mapping from form to meaning in its own right.","PeriodicalId":46947,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Semantics","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139770581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rationale and Precautioning Clauses: Insights from A’ingae","authors":"Maksymilian Dąbkowski, Scott AnderBois","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffac012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffac012","url":null,"abstract":"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 that in structures such as [$p$ [(in order) to$q$]] or [$p$ [$q$-ye]], the rationale operator (underlined) encodes modal semantics where the goal worlds of the actor responsible for $p$ achieve $q$. In structures such as [$p$ [lest$q$]] or [$p$ [$q$-sa’ne]], the precautioning operator encodes modal semantics where the actor’s goal worlds avoid a recoverable situation $r$ which entails $q$ ($rRightarrow q$). We observe and account for three apparent asymmetries within the domain of rationale and precautioning semantics, which we dub precautioning semantics asymmetry, rationale polarity asymmetry, and precautioning encoding asymmetry. We thus elucidate the relation between rationale and precautioning clauses and make substantial predictions with respect to the cross-linguistic inventories of rationale and precautioning operators.","PeriodicalId":46947,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Semantics","volume":"167 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139679936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Quelques in French: a Clustered Plural","authors":"Philippe Gréa","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffad013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffad013","url":null,"abstract":"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 ‘potato’), a sub-class of ‘fence’ nouns (gribouillis ‘scrawl’) and the mass plurals (victuailles ‘victuals’) leads us to argue that quelques Npl ‘a few Npl’ is a ‘clustered’ plural, which is true of a (more or less) cohesive set of connected entities, while plusieurs ‘several’ quantifies over sets of maximally strongly self-connected (mssc) entities. We will show that this principle can also be generalized to the temporal domain. We shall see that this distinction between the two determiners has numerous consequences on atomicity, the mass-count distinction, the possibility of counting individuals, and especially, on the existence of an individuation scale in the nominal domain.","PeriodicalId":46947,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Semantics","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139679964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lexicon and Logic: A Corpus-Based Investigation Into a Connection Between Prepositional Senses and Quantifier Scope","authors":"Justyna Grudzińska, Aleksandra Siemieniuk, Aleksander Leczkowski","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffad019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffad019","url":null,"abstract":"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 to the claim that there is a connection between our lexical knowledge about preposition meanings and quantifier scope. More specifically, we propose that certain prepositional senses encode dependency relations that have an effect on scope-taking preferences. For example, the preposition of expressing ‘part-whole sense’ contributes to our choice of the inverse scope reading for the construction a day of every month by introducing a dependency between wholes (months) and their respective parts (days). Quantifying over this dependency yields the inverse scope reading: for every month, there is a different day that belongs to it (every month > a day). Furthermore, universal quantification in locative and temporal prepositional phrases tends to support inverse scope. For example, the locative preposition on — as in a store on each side of the street — implies ‘disjointness’ (objects do not occupy more than one place at a time), and hence can be interpreted as a dependency between each side of the street and the respective stores located on them. Quantifying over this dependency yields the inverse scope reading: for each side of the street, there is a different store located on it (each side of the street > a store). For studying the connection between prepositional senses and quantifier scope in the wild, we use a scope-disambiguated corpus created by AnderBois et al. ( 2012), additionally annotated with prepositional senses using the Semantic Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses (SNACS) scheme proposed in Schneider et al. ( 2018, 2020). The results of the corpus study combined with psycholinguistic experiments support the claim made here that certain prepositional senses are strong predictors of quantifier scope.","PeriodicalId":46947,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Semantics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139658989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}