Natural Language Semantics最新文献

Copular asymmetries in belief reports 信念报告中的共性不对称

IF 1.1 1区文学

Natural Language Semantics Pub Date : 2024-08-16 DOI: 10.1007/s11050-024-09222-7

Orin Percus, Yael Sharvit

引用次数: 0

Mental states via possessive predication: the grammar of possessive experiencer complex predicates in Persian 通过占有式谓词了解心理状态：波斯语中占有式经验者复合谓词的语法

IF 1.1 1区文学

Natural Language Semantics Pub Date : 2024-04-05 DOI: 10.1007/s11050-024-09221-8

Ryan Walter Smith

{"title":"Mental states via possessive predication: the grammar of possessive experiencer complex predicates in Persian","authors":"Ryan Walter Smith","doi":"10.1007/s11050-024-09221-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-024-09221-8","url":null,"abstract":"Persian possesses a number of stative complex predicates with dâshtan ‘to have’ that express certain kinds of mental state. I propose that these possessive experiencer complex predicates be given a formal semantic treatment involving possession of a portion of an abstract quality by an individual, as in the analysis of property concept lexemes due to Francez and Koontz-Garboden (Language 91(3):533–563, 2015; Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 34:93–106, 2016; Semantics and morphosyntactic variation: Qualities and the grammar of property concepts, Oxford University Press, 2017). Augmented with an analysis of prepositional phrases introducing the target of the mental state and an approach to gradability in terms of measure functions (Wellwood in Measuring predicates, PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2014), the analysis explains various properties of possessive experiencer complex predicates, including the behavior of target phrases, the ability of the non-verbal element to be modified by a range of adjectives, the direct participation of the non-verbal element in comparative constructions, and the ability of degree expressions to modify both the non-verbal element and the VP containing the complex predicate. Theoretically, the analysis ties transitive mental state expressions to the grammar and semantics of property concept sentences, which are expressed via possessive morphosyntax cross-linguistically, and connects with syntactic proposals that independently argue for a universal underlyingly possessive morphosyntax for mental state predicates (Noonan in Case and syntactic geometry, PhD dissertation, McGill University, 1992; Hale and Keyser in Prolegomenon to a theory of argument structure, MIT Press, 2002). The work here also motivates modifications to Francez and Koontz-Garboden’s original proposal, and opens new questions in the original empirical domain of the analysis of possessive predicating strategies for the expression of property concept sentences.","PeriodicalId":47108,"journal":{"name":"Natural Language Semantics","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140589291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Eventive modal projection: the case of Spanish subjunctive relative clauses 事件模态投射：西班牙语从句相对从句的情况

IF 1.1 1区文学

Natural Language Semantics Pub Date : 2024-02-19 DOI: 10.1007/s11050-023-09218-9

Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Paula Menéndez-Benito, Aynat Rubinstein

{"title":"Eventive modal projection: the case of Spanish subjunctive relative clauses","authors":"Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Paula Menéndez-Benito, Aynat Rubinstein","doi":"10.1007/s11050-023-09218-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-023-09218-9","url":null,"abstract":"How do modal expressions determine which possibilities they range over? According to the Modal Anchor Hypothesis (Kratzer in The language-cognition interface: Actes du 19e congrès international des linguistes, Libraire Droz, Genève, 179–199, 2013), modal expressions determine their domain of quantification from particulars (events, situations, or individuals). This paper presents novel evidence for this hypothesis, focusing on a class of Spanish relative clauses that host verbs inflected in the subjunctive. Subjunctive in Romance is standardly taken to be licensed only in a subset of intensional contexts. However, in our relative clauses, subjunctive is exceptionally licensed in extensional contexts. At the same time, the interpretation of these relative clauses still involves modality, a type of modality that targets the goals of the agent of the main event. We argue that the pattern displayed by these relative clauses follows straightforwardly if subjunctive is associated with a modal operator that, like modal indefinites (Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito in Journal of Semantics 35(1):1–41, 2017), can project its domain from a volitional event. Overall, our proposal supports the event-based analysis of mood (Kratzer in Evidential mood in attitude and speech reports. Talk delivered at the 1st Syncart Workshop, Siena, July 13, 2016; Portner and Rubinstein in Natural Language Semantics 28:343–393, 2020) and extends its application beyond attitudinal and modal complements.","PeriodicalId":47108,"journal":{"name":"Natural Language Semantics","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139910426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Force shift: a case study of Cantonese ho2 particle clusters 力的转移：粤语ho2粒子群案例研究

IF 1.1 1区文学

Natural Language Semantics Pub Date : 2024-02-05 DOI: 10.1007/s11050-023-09219-8

Jess H.-K. Law, Haoze Li, Diti Bhadra

引用次数: 0

Direct evidentiality and discourse in Southern Aymara 南艾马拉语中的直接证据性和话语

IF 1.1 1区文学

Natural Language Semantics Pub Date : 2024-01-22 DOI: 10.1007/s11050-023-09220-1

Gabriel Martínez Vera

{"title":"Direct evidentiality and discourse in Southern Aymara","authors":"Gabriel Martínez Vera","doi":"10.1007/s11050-023-09220-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-023-09220-1","url":null,"abstract":"This paper discusses the discourse contrasts that arise in connection to direct evidentiality in Southern Aymara (henceforth, Aymara), an understudied Andean language. Aymara has two direct evidentials, the enclitic =wa and the covert morpheme -∅, which are used whenever the speaker has the best possible grounds for some proposition. I make the novel observation that a sentence with =wa can be felicitously uttered if the speaker attempts to update the common ground by addressing an issue on the table. In fact, the sentence with =wa that is uttered must be congruent with prior discourse; I tie this to the claim that =wa is a (presentational) focus marker (Proulx in Language Sciences 9(1):91–102, 1987). This paper thus claims that =wa is a marker that combines evidentiality and focus. In contrast, uttering a sentence with -∅ entails that the speaker’s contribution is already in the common ground, which likens this evidential to common ground management operators—there is no congruence requirement in this case. I identify which construction can be used in different discourse settings (conversation openers and telling anecdotes). I implement a formal analysis based on Farkas and Bruce (Journal of Semantics 27:81–118, 2010) and Faller (Semantics and Pragmatics 12(8):1–53, 2019) that links evidentiality and discourse.","PeriodicalId":47108,"journal":{"name":"Natural Language Semantics","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139518487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Is degree abstraction a parameter or a universal? Evidence from Mandarin Chinese 程度抽象是参数还是普遍现象？来自普通话的证据

IF 1.1 1区文学

Natural Language Semantics Pub Date : 2024-01-17 DOI: 10.1007/s11050-023-09217-w

Ying Gong, Elizabeth Coppock

引用次数: 0

Quantification, matching and events 量化、匹配和事件

IF 1.1 1区文学

Natural Language Semantics Pub Date : 2024-01-11 DOI: 10.1007/s11050-023-09216-x

Richard K. Larson

引用次数: 0

Word learning tasks as a window into the triggering problem for presuppositions. 单词学习任务是了解预设触发问题的窗口。

IF 0.9 1区文学

Natural Language Semantics Pub Date : 2024-01-01 Epub Date: 2024-10-14 DOI: 10.1007/s11050-024-09224-5

Nadine Bade, Philippe Schlenker, Emmanuel Chemla

引用次数: 0

When tense shifts presuppositions: hani and monstrous semantics 当时态改变预设时：哈尼语和畸形语义学

IF 1.1 1区文学

Natural Language Semantics Pub Date : 2023-12-22 DOI: 10.1007/s11050-023-09215-y

Furkan Dikmen, Elena Guerzoni, Ömer Demirok

引用次数: 0

On the roles of anaphoricity and questions in free focus 论回指和疑问句在自由焦点中的作用

IF 1.1 1区文学

Natural Language Semantics Pub Date : 2023-11-21 DOI: 10.1007/s11050-023-09214-z

Roni Katzir

{"title":"On the roles of anaphoricity and questions in free focus","authors":"Roni Katzir","doi":"10.1007/s11050-023-09214-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-023-09214-z","url":null,"abstract":"The sensitivity of focus to context has often been analyzed in terms of focus-based anaphoric relations between sentences and surrounding discourse. The literature, however, has also noted empirical difficulties for the anaphoric approach, and my goal in the present paper is to investigate what happens if we abandon the anaphoric view altogether. Instead of anaphoric felicity conditions, I propose that focus leads to infelicity only indirectly, when the semantic processes that it feeds—in particular, exhaustification and question formation—make an inappropriate contribution to discourse. I outline such an account, in line with Roberts (In Papers in semantics, Vol. 49 of Working papers in linguistics, 91–136, The Ohio State University, 1996) and incorporating recent insights from Büring (In Questions in discourse, Vol. 36 of Current research in the semantics/pragmatics interface, 6–44, Leiden: Brill, 2019) and Fox (In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, 403–434, 2019). This account, which I motivate on conceptual grounds, has no anaphoric conditions on focus placement and has only an economy condition as a potential felicity condition on focus. However, there are cases where the fine control offered by anaphoricity seems needed, either to block deaccenting that would be licensed by a question or to allow local deaccenting that is not warranted by a question. Such cases challenge non-anaphoric accounts such as the present one and appear to support recent anaphoric proposals such as Schwarzschild (In Making worlds accessible. Essays in honor of Angelika Kratzer, 167–192, 2020), Wagner (In The Wiley Blackwell companion to semantics, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), and Goodhue (Journal of Semantics 39: 117–158, 2022). I argue that this potential motivation for anaphoricity is only apparent and that to the extent that anaphoric conditions on focus from the literature are not inert, they are in fact harmful.","PeriodicalId":47108,"journal":{"name":"Natural Language Semantics","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138520791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0