Semantics and Pragmatics

Limitations of a modal analysis of before and after

Toshiyuki Ogihara — 2024-01-05

This article takes a critical view of Beaver & Condoravdi’s (2003) modal analysis of before and after. According to their proposal, the clause headed by before or after denotes the earliest possible time at which it is true. We first show that the original proposal presented by Beaver & Condoravdi (2003) faces difficulty with anti-veridical before-clause cases. We then incorporate eventualities (events and states) into a revamped proposal in which the existence of an eventuality that could lead to a before-clause eventuality and that parallels a very similar eventuality in the actual world is used as a criterion for selecting the set of alternative worlds. This allows the alternative worlds to differ from the actual one at a time earlier than the matrix clause predication time. However, this revision still suffers from counterexamples that involve before clauses that refer back to a time before the matrix clause eventuality. This discussion leaves room for the possibility that an extensional account might offer a better analysis.

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Strategies for Anderson conditionals

Teruyuki Mizuno — 2024-06-17

This paper contributes to the recent development of the research on O-/X-marking (von Fintel & Iatridou 2023) through providing novel data on so-called Anderson conditionals (Anderson 1951). While English has to use X-marking for Anderson conditionals, I show that Japanese Anderson conditionals cannot involve X-marking, thus suggesting a discrepancy across languages with respect to the way they express relevant constructions. I suggest that Japanese Anderson conditionals involve a perspectival shift analogous to the Historical Present, which I show to help bring the same semantic effects as X-marking would do. I discuss implications of my data for the uniformity hypothesis of X-marking submitted by von Fintel & Iatridou 2023. I also suggest that the availability of X-marking for Anderson conditionals and the availability of X-marking for Future Less Vivid conditionals (Iatridou 2000) seem to stand or fall together across languages.

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Social identity affects imprecision resolution across different tasks

Andrea Beltrama — 2024-07-25

In two experiments, we investigate how social information about the speaker affects pragmatic reasoning in numeral interpretation. Results from a picture selection task show that comprehenders interpret numerals more precisely when uttered by Nerdy speakers — described as studious, introverted and uptight — as opposed to Chill ones — described as extroverted, sociable, and laid-back (Exp.1). Data from a Truth-Value Judgment task (Exp.2) confirm this pattern: comprehenders exhibit more tolerance towards accepting imprecise statements uttered by Chill speakers than Nerdy ones. These findings highlight the importance of incorporating the interplay of social and descriptive meaning into our understanding of pragmatic reasoning and outline several directions of inquiry to take this enterprise further.

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The semantics and probabilistic pragmatics of deadjectival intensifiers

Rick Nouwen — 2024-02-18

Intensifiers (e.g. horribly in horribly warm) are usually deadjectival adverbs. I show that the lexical content of the adjectival base, and in particular its evaluative meaning, is directly relevant for the degree intensifying function of these adverbs. In particular, I highlight two generalisations that have remained unaccounted for so far. First, evaluative adjectives with a negative evaluative meaning tend to turn into deadjectival intensifiers expressing high degree, while adjectives with a positive meaning make intensifiers of medium degree. Second, negative modal adjectives can form deadjectival intensifiers, but positive ones cannot. I will argue that a relatively simple intersective semantics for evaluative and modal adverbs accounts for these observations, but that we can only show this if we supplement that semantic analysis with a probabilistic pragmatic component.

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Free choice and presuppositional exhaustification

Guillermo Del Pinal — 2024-02-22

Sentences such as Olivia can take Logic or Algebra (‘♢∨-sentences’) are typically interpreted as entailing that Olivia can take Logic and can take Algebra. Given a standard semantics for modals and disjunction, those ‘Free choice’ (FC) readings are not predicted from the surface form of ♢∨-sentences. Yet the standard semantics is appropriate for the ‘double prohibition’ reading typically assigned to ¬♢∨-sentences like Olivia can’t take Logic or Algebra. Several extant approaches to FC can account for those two cases, but face challenges when ♢∨, ¬♢∨ and related sentences appear embedded in certain environments. In this paper, we present a novel account of FC that builds on a ‘grammatical’ theory of scalar implicatures — proposed by Bassi et al. (2021) and Del Pinal (2021) — according to which covert exhaustification is a presupposition trigger such that the prejacent forms the assertive content while any excludable or includable alternatives are incorporated at the non-at issue, presuppositional level. Applied to ♢∨, ¬♢∨, and similar sentences, ‘presuppositional exhaustification’ predicts that their default interpretations have an assertive component (roughly, the classical interpretation of the prejacent) and a homogeneity presupposition which projects in standard ways. Those predictions, we then show, support a uniform account of the puzzling behavior of ♢∨, ¬♢∨, and related sentences when embedded under (negative) factives (Marty & Romoli 2020), disjunctions (Romoli & Santorio 2019), and in the scope of universal, existential (Bar-Lev & Fox 2020) and non-monotonic quantifiers (Gotzner et al. 2020).

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Formalizing spatial-causal polysemy of Agent prepositions

Camil Staps — 2024-03-04

Current formal approaches to by-phrases in passives analyze the Agent preposition by as semantically vacuous: the denotation of by is merely such that its argument fulfills the same function as the external argument in the corresponding active sentence. This leads to a view of agentive by as essentially homonymous with spatial and temporal by. We argue, on the basis of work in the cognitive linguistic tradition and a new analysis of the French Agent prepositions par and de, that Agent markers do have non-trivial semantic content, and are polysemous rather than homonymous with their spatial counterparts. To formalize this we propose to model these prepositions with general schematic denotations of a polymorphic type ⟨η,⟨θ,t⟩⟩, which can be instantiated with a concrete type in a specific syntactic and semantic context, such as ⟨e,⟨e,t⟩⟩ for the spatial meaning of by. The use as an Agent preposition is simply one of these instantiations, with type ⟨e,⟨s,t⟩⟩, where s stands for events). The concrete meaning in context depends on both the general, polymorphically typed denotation and the specific type in the given context. In this way our proposal integrates a useful insight from cognitive linguistics in a semantic formalization of the passive, and opens up possibilities for similar accounts of other highly grammaticalized prepositions.

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Covert mixed quotation

Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini — 2024-05-23

The term covert mixed quotation describes cases in which linguistic material is interpreted in the manner of mixed quotation — that is, used in addition to being mentioned despite the superficial absence of any commonly recognized conventional devices indicating quotation. After developing a novel theory of mixed quotation, I show that positing covert mixed quotation allows us to give simple and unified treatments of a number of puzzling semantic phenomena, including the projective behavior of conventional implicature items embedded in indirect speech reports and propositional attitude ascriptions, so-called ‘c-monsters,’ metalinguistic negation, metalinguistic negotiation, and ‘in a sense’ constructions.

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Indefinites in negated intensional contexts

Zahra Mirrazi — 2024-06-07

This paper introduces a novel scope paradox. Providing data from Farsi, I show that indefinites in the surface syntactic scope of negated intensional operators yield a reading in which the indefinite appears to take wider scope over the negation, and narrow scope with respect to the intensional operator. Genuine generalized quantifiers, in contrast, do not yield such readings. The uniqueness of indefinites in giving rise to such wide pseudo-scope de dicto readings, which are also found within a simple clause, provides evidence that indefinites differ from generalized quantifiers, not only in their ability to take exceptional scope across clause boundaries, but also in their local scopal properties. I argue that the existence of such wide pseudo-scope de dicto readings not only poses a problem for the generalized quantifier view of indefinites, but also for any approach that takes indefinites to scope via syntactic movement. In-situ accounts of indefinites, on the other hand, can straightforwardly account for the new data, without over-generating wide scope de dicto readings (a.k.a. the “fourth readings”) which are widely believed to be impossible (von Fintel & Heim 2011, Keshet & Schwarz 2019, Elliott 2023). I argue that an account in terms of world-Skolemized choice functions is more successful in accounting for the full pattern of the wide pseudo-scope de dicto reading in Farsi, as well as cross-linguistic variation in the availability of such readings.

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Metalinguistic gradability

Rachel Etta Rudolph — 2024-06-08

We present a novel semantic and conversational framework for a class of gradable-like constructions. These include metalinguistic comparatives, like ‘Ann is more a linguist than a philosopher’, as well as metalinguistic equatives, degree modifications, and conditionals. To the extent previous literature discusses such metalinguistic gradability, the focus has been on comparatives. We extend our account of metalinguistic comparatives (Rudolph & Kocurek 2020) to cover a broader range of metalinguistic gradable constructions. On our semantic expressivist view, these all serve in various ways to express speakers’ relative commitments to different linguistic interpretations.

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Intensional anaphora

Ezra Keshet — 2024-07-14

Intensional operators are often treated as quantifiers over possible worlds, parallel to the treatment of determiners as quantifiers over individuals. Individuals introduced in intensional contexts cannot serve as antecedents to later pronouns as easily as those introduced in (merely) quantificational contexts, though. For instance, a quantified sentence like Everyone is eating a cheeseburger may be felicitously followed by an anaphoric statement like They are large, where they refers to the totality of cheeseburgers being eaten. However, as Stone (1999) points out, the quite similar Andrea might be eating a cheeseburger does not support later anaphoric references such as It is large or They are large. Stone (1999), Stone & Hardt (1999), and Brasoveanu (2010) solve this problem by restricting the value of pronouns: in their systems, a pronoun presupposes that its referent(s) exist in the world of evaluation, ruling out anaphora from non-veridical intensional contexts. And yet, we show in this paper (i) cases where such anaphora is disallowed even when the pronoun’s referents clearly exist and (ii) cases where such anaphora is indeed allowed, even though the pronoun’s referents might not exist. We argue instead that intensional anaphora is best captured using a description-based, rather than a value-based account. We propose that a pronoun presupposes that its corresponding antecedent description is instantiated in each world of the context set. For instance, there must be a cheeseburger being eaten by Andrea in every candidate world of the context set in order for It is large to be felicitous after Andrea might be eating a cheeseburger. We implement our proposal via a new logic (building on work by Keshet 2018, Abney & Keshet 2022) that we name Plural Intensional Presuppositional predicate calculus (or PIP). Each PIP formula translates directly into standard first-order predicate calculus with set abstraction, providing a classical foundation for this work.

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Cataphoric resolution of projective content

Torgrim Solstad — 2024-07-26

We present evidence from three rating experiments showing that what we call occasion verbs (e.g., thank, criticize, congratulate) allow for the cataphoric resolution of projective content more broadly than trigger types discussed in previous research. Experiments 1 and 2 used methods established by Tonhauser et al. (2018) to show that occasion verbs do indeed pattern with other well-known triggers with respect to projectivity and at-issueness. Furthermore, these experiments provide evidence that occasion verbs — as opposed to a number of other triggers — allow for the cataphoric resolution of projective content in a separate clause in subsequent discourse. Experiment 3 compared the filtering behavior of occasion verbs with that of factive and aspectual triggers for conjunctions in the antecedent of conditionals (if p and q, then r; Mandelkern et al. 2020). The results show that while factive and aspectual verbs show left-to-right filtering asymmetry, occasion verbs display symmetric filtering, that is, right-to-left and left-to-right. Taken together, these results provide evidence that occasion verbs constitute a species not yet observed within the “zoo” of triggers of projective content.

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Modal indefinites and semantic variation

Justin Royer — 2024-07-26

Recent work proposes that modal auxiliaries project their domains from an event variable, their ‘anchor’ (Hacquard 2006, 2010, Kratzer 2013). Based on the Spanish modal indefinite uno cualquiera, Alonso-Ovalle & Menéndez-Benito (2018) conclude that modal indefinites do too. This paper argues that yalnhej DPs, a type of modal indefinite in Chuj, an understudied Mayan language, support this conclusion. These DPs are existential quantifiers that convey an at-issue modal component, like uno cualquiera. They pattern with uno cualquiera in conveying random choice modality with volitional verbs, but only when they are tied to internal argument positions. Yalnhej DPs depart from uno cualquiera in that they can also convey epistemic modality. They also depart from other epistemic modal indefinites insofar as they can, but do not have to, describe situations where the speaker knows that the whole domain satisfies the existential claim. Our analysis of yalnhej DPs builds upon the analysis of uno cualquiera in Alonso-Ovalle & Menéndez-Benito 2018, from which it departs in assuming that yalnhej DPs tolerate anchors with epistemic content. Furthermore, in line with other Chuj DPs, yalnhej DPs are not upper bounded. This results in an epistemic component that does not convey speaker ignorance when the whole domain satisfies the existential claim. Finally, unlike uno cualquiera, yalnhej DPs do not have an interpretation conveying that the witness of the existential claim is unremarkable. We link this fact to a lack of predicative uses, in support of the view that the random choice and ‘unremarkable’ interpretations stem from an ambiguity, as anticipated in Alonso-Ovalle & Menéndez-Benito 2018 and Alonso-Ovalle & Royer 2021.

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Default domain restriction possibilities

Katherine Ritchie — 2024-10-28

We start with an observation about implicit quantifier domain restriction: certain implicit restrictions (e.g., restricting objects by location and time) appear to be more natural and widely available than others (e.g., restricting objects by color, aesthetic, or historical properties). Our aim is to explain why this is. That is, we aim to explain why some implicit domain restriction possibilities are available by default. We argue that, regardless of their other explanatory virtues, extant pragmatic and metasemantic frameworks leave this question unanswered. We then motivate a partially nativist account of domain restriction that involves a minimal view of joint planning around broad shared goals about navigating and influencing our environments augmented with cognitive heuristics that facilitate these. Finally, we sketch how the view can be extended to account for the ways non-default restriction possibilities become available when conversationalists have shared idiosyncratic goals.

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Confidence reports

Paolo Santorio — 2024-11-12

We develop a states-based semantics for nominal and adjectival confidence reports like Ann is confident/has confidence that it’s raining, and their comparative forms. Our account leverages a Neodavidsonian analysis of adjectival comparatives in which adjectives denote properties of states and measure functions are introduced compositionally. We hereby provide the first systematic semantics for confidence reports, in addition to providing a needed modal extension to the states-based semantics of comparatives. As we show, the flexibility accorded by the Neodavidsonian implementation supports analysis of grammatical constructions with confident/confidence that might otherwise be puzzling, and it lends itself to certain natural ideas about the semantics of cross-categorial probabilistic language using, e.g., likely and probability. In the end, we sketch some immediate connections between confidence-reporting discourse (e.g., I am confident that…) and belief reports about probabilistic discourse (e.g., I think it’s likely that…).

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