Semantics and Pragmatics

A probabilistic, question-based approach to additivity

William C. Thomas — 2026-01-26

Many analyses of additive particles (e.g., too, also, either) have claimed that any such particle requires a contextually salient antecedent sentence that is a focus alternative of its prejacent or is a partial answer to the Question Under Discussion addressed by the prejacent. There is, however, a previously unstudied use — the argument-building use — which occurs without such an antecedent. This paper proposes an analysis of too that accounts for the argument-building use and unifies it with the canonical additive use. The central claim is that too is felicitous if and only if its antecedent can be taken to answer some contextually relevant question such that the conjunction of too’s antecedent and prejacent evidences some resolution to that question more strongly than the antecedent does alone. This analysis relies on the notion of a “resolution” from Inquisitive Semantics and the treatment of context update as Bayesian inference, as is done in the Rational Speech Act framework. The treatment of too developed here provides the basis for a new approach to additivity that can be extended to other additive expressions.

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Monotonicity via mereology in the semantics of attitude reports

Tanya Bondarenko — 2026-02-17

In this paper, we develop a new proposal about how the monotonicity of attitude verbs like believe should be modeled within the content-based approach to clausal embedding (Kratzer 2006, 2013). We pursue the idea that monotonicity is a consequence of how the part-whole structure of attitudinal eventualities relates to the part-whole structure of their contents and thematic participants. In order to cash out this idea, we rely on a non-monotonic, equality-based implementation of the content-based approach (Moulton 2009, Elliott 2020, 2017, Bassi & Bondarenko 2022), supplemented with tools and concepts from mereology. We apply the mereological account of monotonicity to a pattern noticed by Sharvit (2024) concerning Negative Polarity Item (NPI) licensing in nominal arguments to monotonic attitude verbs, which existing implementations of the content-based framework fail to capture.

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Simplification of disjunctive antecedents

Eleonora Zani — 2026-03-04

Disjunctive antecedent conditionals (DACs), i.e., sentences of the form “if A or B, C”, are the source of a long-standing puzzle. They are generally felt to be equivalent to the conjunction of their simplifications, “if A, C” and “if B, C”, in accordance with the principle of Simplification of disjunctive antecedents (SDA). However, Lewis’s influential theory of counterfactual conditionals invalidates SDA, as do several prominent theories of indicative conditionals. To explain the strong appeal of this principle, various accounts have recently been proposed: for some, SDA stems from the potential of disjunction to generate semantic alternatives; for others, it arises from a non-Gricean exhaustification operator. To shed light on the status and source of SDA, we administered a picture-based binary forced choice task to 169 children (aged 4;1–9;11) and 28 adults, who were asked to evaluate indicative and counterfactual DACs. Our results reveal that SDA emerges early, being the preferred interpretation already at age four to five. This is in line with the idea that SDA is tightly related to free-choice inferences, which also emerge early (Tieu et al. 2015). We found that subjects who derived SDA in indicatives also derived it in counterfactuals and vice versa, supporting the idea that SDA has the same status in both kinds of conditionals. We did not find any evidence of a shift from a pure Lewisian reading to an SDA reading, which may have supported the exhaustification account. Instead, our data reveal an interesting developmental trend from disjunctive to conjunctive interpretation of DACs, strictly parallel to a trend from existential to universal interpretation of plural definites (Tieu et al. 2019), supporting the idea that SDA involves homogeneity over the antecedent alternatives, as proposed by Santorio (2018) and Cariani & Goldstein (2020).

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Rational Speech Acts meet exhaustification

Lucas Champollion — 2026-05-15

We derive inferences of free choice disjunctions by combining grammatical models based on covert exhaustification (Fox 2007) with Gricean reasoning as implemented in the game-theoretic Rational Speech Acts framework (Frank & Goodman 2012). Our approach synthesizes insights from both frameworks and overcomes their respective limitations. The account leverages semantic uncertainty and ambiguity introduced by covert exhaustivity operators, enabling speakers to prevent unwanted inferences about denied permissions. Pragmatic reasoning then helps listeners navigate these ambiguities to infer that each disjunct is permissible without the other. This unified model explains the stability of free choice inferences, accounts for the defeasibility of associated inferences about whether both disjuncts together are permitted or forbidden, avoids overgeneration problems that arise in grammatical accounts, and explains why even fully informed Gricean speakers can prefer uttering disjunctions over more informative disjuncts.

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Against wide-scope free choice

Ivano Ciardelli — 2026-03-19

Sentences of the form "x may A or x may B" have a reading that implies "x may A" and "x may B". This has led many to conclude that there is a specific problem of wide-scope free choice, namely, the problem of explaining how a disjunction of possibilities ◇A ∨ ◇B can receive a reading that implies its disjuncts. We argue that this conclusion is mistaken: once we consider a broader range of data, it becomes plausible that the relevant reading in fact results from an LF of the form ◇(A ∨ B). This raises the question of how this LF arises compositionally. We propose a solution based on the theory of modal concord of Zeijlstra (2007), which avoids the problems of previous movement-based approaches and explains an interesting contrast observed by Meyer & Sauerland (2017).

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Direction of fit and the grammar of attitude reports

Thomas A Grano — 2026-05-14

Crosslinguistically, ‘believe’ and related verbs often have complement clause syntax different from that of ‘want’ and related verbs, although the reasons behind this pattern remain poorly understood. Moltmann 2024 suggests an avenue to explore: the possibility that finite complements apply to attitudes that have a word/mind-to-world direction of fit whereas nonfinite complements apply to attitudes that have a world-to-word/mind direction of fit. In this reply, I show that Moltmann’s suggestion faces apparent challenges from hope and from fiction predicates like pretend and dream, although it may be possible to overcome these challenges via appropriate refinements to Moltmann’s direction of fit diagnostics and/or to the hypothesis linking direction of fit to finiteness. I close by asking why the grammar of attitude reports might correlate with direction of fit and whether a reduction to truth-conditional properties of attitude reports is possible.

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Extended metaphor, discourse relations, and metaphorical content

Esteban Sanchez — 2026-05-14

This paper argues that extended metaphor is a linguistic phenomenon governed by discourse structure, rather than a purely cognitive or imaginative one. I consider two theoretical traditions: non-cognitivism, which holds that metaphors invite a “way of seeing” without conveying additional propositional content (Davidson 1978, Lepore & Stone 2010), and cognitivism, which explains metaphor extension through cognitively-represented mappings between conceptual domains (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, Romero & Soria 1998, 2014, Stern 2000, Wearing 2014). Both accounts predict that metaphorical extension should not demonstrate typical linguistic patterning— a prediction this paper challenges through novel empirical data. I argue that these patterns follow from two independently motivated constraints within Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher & Lascarides 2003): the requirement to establish discourse relations and topicality requirements imposed by certain discourse relations (Kehler 2002, Asher 2004, Altshuler & Truswell 2022). This analysis challenges non-cognitivist accounts by showing that metaphorical content plays a role in establishing discourse coherence, and challenges cognitivist accounts by demonstrating that conceptual maps are not a sufficient explanation of extended metaphor.

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