Semantics and Pragmatics

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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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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