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  1. Presuppositional exhaustification.Itai Bassi, Guillermo Del Pinal & Uli Sauerland - 2021 - Semantics and Pragmatics 14:1-42.
    Grammatical theories of Scalar Implicatures make use of an exhaustivity operator exh, which asserts the conjunction of the prejacent with the negation of excludable alternatives. We present a new Grammatical theory of Scalar Implicatures according to which exh is replaced with pex, an operator that contributes its prejacent as asserted content, but the negation of scalar alternatives at a non-at-issue level of meaning. We show that by treating this non-at-issue level as a presupposition, this theory resolves a number of empirical (...)
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  • Perspectival Plurality, Relativism, and Multiple Indexing.Dan Zeman - 2018 - In Rob Truswell, Chris Cummins, Caroline Heycock, Brian Rabern & Hannah Rohde (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21. Semantics Archives. pp. 1353-1370.
    In this paper I focus on a recently discussed phenomenon illustrated by sentences containing predicates of taste: the phenomenon of " perspectival plurality " , whereby sentences containing two or more predicates of taste have readings according to which each predicate pertains to a different perspective. This phenomenon has been shown to be problematic for (at least certain versions of) relativism. My main aim is to further the discussion by showing that the phenomenon extends to other perspectival expressions than predicates (...)
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  • Embedding irony and the semantics/pragmatics distinction.Mihaela Popa-Wyatt - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (6):674-699.
    This paper argues that we need to re-think the semantics/pragmatics distinction in the light of new evidence from embedding of irony. This raises a new version of the old problem of ‘embedded implicatures’. I argue that embedded irony isn’t fully explained by solutions proposed for other embedded implicatures. I first consider two strategies: weak pragmatics and strong pragmatics. These explain embedded irony as truth-conditional content. However, by trying to shoehorn irony into said-content, they raise problems of their own. I conclude (...)
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  • A revised, gradability-based semantics for even.Yael Greenberg - 2018 - Natural Language Semantics 26 (1):51-83.
    This paper concentrates on giving precise content to the general wisdom on the scalar presupposition of even, according to which the prejacent of even, p, is stronger than its relevant focus alternatives, q. To that end I first examine both familiar challenges for the popular ‘comparative likelihood’ view of the ‘stronger than’ relation, as well as novel challenges, having to do with the context dependency of even and with its sensitivity to standards of comparison. To overcome these challenges and to (...)
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  • Parsing and Presupposition in the Calculation of Local Contexts.Matthew Mandelkern & Jacopo Romoli - forthcoming - Semantics and Pragmatics.
    In this paper, we use antecedent-final conditionals to formulate two problems for parsing-based theories of presupposition projection and triviality of the kind given in Schlenker 2009. We show that, when it comes to antecedent-final conditionals, parsing-based theories predict filtering of presuppositions where there is in fact projection, and triviality judgments for sentences which are in fact felicitous. More concretely, these theories predict that presuppositions triggered in the antecedent of antecedent-final conditionals will be filtered (i.e. will not project) if the negation (...)
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  • Color Adjectives, Standards, and Thresholds: An Experimental Investigation.Nat Hansen & Emmanuel Chemla - 2017 - Linguistics and Philosophy 40 (3):1--40.
    Are color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.) relative adjectives or absolute adjectives? Existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives attempt to answer that question using informal ("armchair") judgments. The informal judgments of theorists conflict: it has been proposed that color adjectives are absolute with standards anchored at the minimum degree on the scale, that they are absolute but have near-midpoint standards, and that they are relative. In this paper we report two experiments, one based on entailment patterns and one based (...)
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  • Blindness, Short-sightedness, and Hirschberg’s contextually ordered alternatives: a reply to Schlenker (2012).Giorgio Magri - 2017 - In Salvatore Pistoia-Reda & Filippo Domaneschi (eds.), Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Approaches on Implicatures and Presuppositions. Cham: Palgrave-Macmillan.
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  • Le implicature scalari.Salvatore Pistoia-Reda & Jacopo Romoli - 2015 - Aphex 11:1-35.
    Negli ultimi quindici anni la letteratura filosofico-linguistica ha registrato un rinnovato interesse per i meccanismi di implicatura, specialmente del tipo scalare. In buona parte, l’interesse stato suscitato dall’emergere di una prospettiva grammaticale, secondo la quale i fenomeni di implicatura scalare sarebbero conseguenza di un meccanismo interpretativo incassato nella logica delle lingue naturali, e quindi riferibile al componente semantico dell’architettura cognitiva umana. L’obiettivo di questo testo fornire una presentazione di alcuni tra gli argomenti che hanno motivato l’emergere della prospettiva grammaticale. Inizieremo, (...)
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  • Pragmatic Interpretations of Vague Expressions: Strongest Meaning and Nonmonotonic Consequence.Pablo Cobreros, Paul Egré, Dave Ripley & Robert van Rooij - 2015 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 44 (4):375-393.
    Recent experiments have shown that naive speakers find borderline contradictions involving vague predicates acceptable. In Cobreros et al. we proposed a pragmatic explanation of the acceptability of borderline contradictions, building on a three-valued semantics. In a reply, Alxatib et al. show, however, that the pragmatic account predicts the wrong interpretations for some examples involving disjunction, and propose as a remedy a semantic analysis instead, based on fuzzy logic. In this paper we provide an explicit global pragmatic interpretation rule, based on (...)
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  • Presuppositional TOO, Postsuppositional TOO.Adrian Brasoveanu & Anna Szabolcsi - 2013 - The Dynamic, Inquisitive, and Visionary Life of Φ, ?Φ, and ◊Φ Subtitle: A Festschrift for Jeroen Groenendijk, Martin Stokhof, and Frank Veltman.
    One of the insights of dynamic semantics in its various guises (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982, Groenendijk & Stokhof 1991, Kamp & Reyle 1993 among many others) is that interpretation is sensitive to left-to-right order. Is order sensitivity, particularly the default left-to-right order of evaluation, a property of particular meanings of certain lexical items (e.g., dynamically interpreted conjunction) or is it a more general feature of meaning composition? If it is a more general feature of meaning composition, is it a processing (...)
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  • Free choice of alternatives.Anamaria Fălăuş - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (2):121-173.
    This paper contributes to the semantic typology of dependent indefinites, by accounting for the distribution and interpretation of the Romanian indefinite vreun. It is shown that its occurrences are restricted to negative polarity and a subset of modal contexts. More specifically, the study of its behavior in intensional environments reveals that vreun is systematically incompatible with non-epistemic operators, a restriction we capture by proposing a novel empirical generalization (‘the epistemic constraint’). To account for the observed pattern, we adopt the unitary (...)
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  • Game theory and scalar implicatures.Daniel Rothschild - 2013 - Philosophical Perspectives 27 (1):438-478.
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  • In defense of the grammatical approach to local implicatures.Yael Sharvit & Jon Gajewski - 2012 - Natural Language Semantics 20 (1):31-57.
    The existence of “local implicatures” has been the topic of much recent debate. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this debate by asking what we can learn from three puzzles, namely, the cancellation of such implicatures by or both, their behavior in the complement clauses of negative factive verbs such as sorry, and their behavior in root and embedded questions. Two basic approaches to local implicatures have been advanced: a fully pragmatic account in which local implicatures result (...)
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  • Implicature.Wayne Davis - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Perspective-taking in deriving implicatures: The listener's perspective is important too.Napoleon Katsos, Blanche Gonzales de Linares, Ekaterina Ostashchenko & Elspeth Wilson - 2023 - Cognition 241 (C):105582.
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  • Priming scalar and ad hoc enrichment in children.Alice Rees, Ellie Carter & Lewis Bott - 2023 - Cognition 239 (C):105572.
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  • Indirect illusory inferences from disjunction: a new bridge between deductive inference and representativeness.Mathias Sablé-Meyer & Salvador Mascarenhas - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (3):567-592.
    We provide a new link between deductive and probabilistic reasoning fallacies. Illusory inferences from disjunction are a broad class of deductive fallacies traditionally explained by recourse to a matching procedure that looks for content overlap between premises. In two behavioral experiments, we show that this phenomenon is instead sensitive to real-world causal dependencies and not to exact content overlap. A group of participants rated the strength of the causal dependence between pairs of sentences. This measure is a near perfect predictor (...)
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  • Hurford Conditionals.Matthew Mandelkern & Jacopo Romoli - 2018 - Journal of Semantics 35 (2):357-367.
    Compare the following conditionals: 'If John is not in Paris, he is in France' versus 'If John is in France, he is not in Paris.' The second sounds entirely natural, whereas the first sounds quite strange. This contrast is puzzling, because these two conditionals have the same structure at a certain level of logical abstraction, namely 'If ¬p+, then p.' -/- We argue that existing theories of informational oddness do not distinguish between these conditionals. We do not have an account (...)
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  • Monkey semantics: two ‘dialects’ of Campbell’s monkey alarm calls.Philippe Schlenker, Emmanuel Chemla, Kate Arnold, Alban Lemasson, Karim Ouattara, Sumir Keenan, Claudia Stephan, Robin Ryder & Klaus Zuberbühler - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (6):439-501.
    We develop a formal semantic analysis of the alarm calls used by Campbell’s monkeys in the Tai forest and on Tiwai island —two sites that differ in the main predators that the monkeys are exposed to. Building on data discussed in Ouattara et al. :e7808, 2009a; PNAS 106: 22026–22031, 2009b and Arnold et al., we argue that on both sites alarm calls include the roots krak and hok, which can optionally be affixed with -oo, a kind of attenuating suffix; in (...)
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  • Taking the epistemic step: Toward a model of on-line access to conversational implicatures.Richard Breheny, Heather J. Ferguson & Napoleon Katsos - 2013 - Cognition 126 (3):423-440.
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  • Modularity and intuitions in formal semantics: the case of polarity items.Emmanuel Chemla, Vincent Homer & Daniel Rothschild - 2011 - Linguistics and Philosophy 34 (6):537-570.
    Linguists often sharply distinguish the different modules that support linguistics competence, e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics. However, recent work has identified phenomena in syntax (polarity sensitivity) and pragmatics (implicatures), which seem to rely on semantic properties (monotonicity). We propose to investigate these phenomena and their connections as a window into the modularity of our linguistic knowledge. We conducted a series of experiments to gather the relevant syntactic, semantic and pragmatic judgments within a single paradigm. The comparison between these quantitative data leads (...)
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  • Number in NPI licensing.Luka Crnič - 2022 - Natural Language Semantics 30 (1):1-46.
    The acceptability of _any_-DPs in existential modal sentences presents a challenge for theories of NPI licensing: existential modal sentences appear to differ substantially from other environments in which _any_-DPs are acceptable (in particular, they lack a downward-entailing operator). One approach to this challenge has been to, first, take _any_-DPs to be subject to an environment-based downward-entailingness condition—they have to occur in an environment that is Strawson downward-entailing with respect to their domain (cf. Kadmon and Landman 1993 )—and, second, to derive (...)
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  • On glasses half full or half empty: understanding framing effects in terms of default implicatures.María Caamaño-Alegre - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):11133-11159.
    The variations in how subjects respond to positively or negatively framed descriptions of the same issue have received attention from social science research, where, nevertheless, a naïve understanding of speech interpretation has undermined the different explanations offered. The present paper explores the semantic-pragmatic side of framing effects and provides a unifying explanation of this phenomenon in terms of a combined effect of pragmatic presuppositions and default implicatures. The paper contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of representations and cognitive processes involved (...)
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  • Presupposed free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures.Paul Marty & Jacopo Romoli - 2021 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (1):91-152.
    A disjunctive sentence like Olivia took Logic or Algebra conveys that Olivia didn’t take both classes and that the speaker doesn’t know which of the two classes she took. The corresponding sentence with a possibility modal, Olivia can take Logic or Algebra, conveys instead that she can take Logic and that she can take Algebra. These exclusivity, ignorance and free choice inferences are argued by many to be scalar implicatures. Recent work has looked at cases in which exclusivity and ignorance (...)
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  • Framing Effects and Fuzzy Traces: ‘Some’ Observations.Sarah A. Fisher - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (3):719-733.
    Framing effects occur when people respond differently to the same information, just because it is conveyed in different words. For example, in the classic ‘Disease Problem’ introduced by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, people’s choices between alternative interventions depend on whether these are described positively, in terms of the number of people who will be saved, or negatively in terms of the corresponding number who will die. In this paper, I discuss an account of framing effects based on ‘fuzzy-trace theory’. (...)
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  • Complex Inferential Processes Are Needed for Implicature Comprehension, but Not for Implicature Production.Irene Mognon, Simone A. Sprenger, Sanne J. M. Kuijper & Petra Hendriks - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 11.
    Upon hearing “Some of Michelangelo’s sculptures are in Rome,” adults can easily generate a scalar implicature and infer that the intended meaning of the utterance corresponds to “Some but not all Michelangelo’s sculptures are in Rome.” Comprehension experiments show that preschoolers struggle with this kind of inference until at least 5 years of age. Surprisingly, the few studies having investigated children’s production of scalar expressions like some and all suggest that production is adult-like already in their third year of life. (...)
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  • Framing Effects and Context in Language Comprehension.Sarah Fisher - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Reading
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  • Some Pieces Are Missing: Implicature Production in Children.Sarah F. V. Eiteljoerge, Nausicaa Pouscoulous & Elena V. M. Lieven - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9:398569.
    Until at least 4 years of age, children, unlike adults, interpret some as compatible with all. The inability to draw the pragmatic inference leading to interpret some as not all, could be taken to indicate a delay in pragmatic abilities, despite evidence of other early pragmatic skills. However, little is known about how the production of these implicature develops. We conducted a corpus study on early production and perception of the scalar term some in British English. Children's utterances containing some (...)
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  • Varieties of alternatives: Mandarin focus particles.Mingming Liu - 2017 - Linguistics and Philosophy 40 (1):61-95.
    Mandarin focus particles systematically have heterogeneous uses. By examining details of two focus particles jiu ‘only’ and dou ‘even’, this paper explores the hypothesis that varieties of alternatives give rise to systematic ‘ambiguities’. Specifically, by positing sum-based alternative sets and atom-based ones, it maintains unambiguous semantics of jiu as onlyweak and dou as even, while deriving their variability through interaction with alternatives. Independently motivated analyses of distributive/collective readings and contrastive topics, combined with varieties of alternatives, deliver the full range of (...)
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  • (1 other version)VI-B ayesian E xpressivism.Seth Yalcin - 2012 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112 (2pt2):123-160.
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  • Constraining the derivation of alternatives.Tue Trinh & Andreas Haida - 2015 - Natural Language Semantics 23 (4):249-270.
    Inferences that result from exhaustification of a sentence S depend on the set of alternatives to S. In this paper, we present some inference patterns that are problematic for previous theories of alternatives and propose some structural constraints on the derivation of formal alternatives which derive the observations.
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  • Vagueness in Degree Constructions.Galit Weidman Sassoon - 2009 - In Arndt Riester & Torgrim Solstad (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 13.
    This paper presents a novel semantic analysis of unit names and gradable adjectives, inspired by measurement theory (Krantz et al 1971). Based on measurement theory's typology of measures, I claim that different predicates are associated with different types of measures whose special characteristics, together with features of the relations denoted by unit names, explain the puzzling limited distribution of measure phrases.
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  • Are children with Specific Language Impairment competent with the pragmatics and logic of quantification?Napoleon Katsos, Clara Andrés Roqueta, Rosa Ana Clemente Estevan & Chris Cummins - 2011 - Cognition 119 (1):43-57.
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  • Responding to alternative and polar questions.María Biezma & Kyle Rawlins - 2012 - Linguistics and Philosophy 35 (5):361-406.
    This paper gives an account of the differences between polar and alternative questions, as well as an account of the division of labor between compositional semantics and pragmatics in interpreting these types of questions. Alternative questions involve a strong exhaustivity presupposition for the mentioned alternatives. We derive this compositionally from the meaning of the final falling tone and its interaction with the pragmatics of questioning in discourse. Alternative questions are exhaustive in two ways: they exhaust the space of epistemic possibilities, (...)
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  • Granularity and scalar implicature in numerical expressions.Chris Cummins, Uli Sauerland & Stephanie Solt - 2012 - Linguistics and Philosophy 35 (2):135-169.
    It has been generally assumed that certain categories of numerical expressions, such as ‘more than n’, ‘at least n’, and ‘fewer than n’, systematically fail to give rise to scalar implicatures in unembedded declarative contexts. Various proposals have been developed to explain this perceived absence. In this paper, we consider the relevance of scale granularity to scalar implicature, and make two novel predictions: first, that scalar implicatures are in fact available from these numerical expressions at the appropriate granularity level, and (...)
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  • (1 other version)On the characterization of alternatives.Danny Fox Roni Katzir - 2011 - Natural Language Semantics 19 (1):87-107.
    The computation of both Scalar Implicatures (SI) and Association with Focus (AF) is characterized with reference to sets of alternatives. However, it has generally been assumed that the relevant alternatives are determined in different ways for the two processes. Specifically, it has been assumed that the alternatives for SI – scalar alternatives – are computed by a special procedure specifically designed for implicatures, whereas the alternatives for AF – focus alternatives – are determined by the general theory of association with (...)
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  • Relativized Exhaustivity: mention-some and uniqueness.Yimei Xiang - 2022 - Natural Language Semantics 30 (3):311-362.
    _Wh_-questions with the modal verb _can_ admit both mention-some (MS) and mention-all (MA) answers. This paper argues that we should treat MS as a grammatical phenomenon, primarily determined by the grammar of the _wh_-interrogative. I assume that MS and MA answers can be modeled using the same definition of answerhood (Fox in Mention-some interpretations, MIT seminar, 2013 ) and attribute the MS/MA ambiguity to structural variations within the question nucleus. The variations are: (i) the scope ambiguity of the higher-order _wh_-trace (...)
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  • Modelling Perjury: Between Trust and Blame.Izabela Skoczeń - 2021 - International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique 35 (2):771-805.
    I investigate: to what extent do folk ascriptions of lying differ between casual and courtroom contexts? to what extent does motive to lie influence ascriptions of trust, mental states, and lying judgments? to what extent are lying judgments consistent with previous ascriptions of communicated content? Following the Supreme Court’s Bronston judgment, I expect: averaged lying judgments to be similar in casual and courtroom contexts; motive to lie to influence levels of trust, mental states ascriptions, and patterns of lying judgments; retrospective (...)
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  • Discourse, Diversity, and Free Choice.Wolfgang Schwarz - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (1):48-67.
    ABSTRACT ‘You may have beer or wine’ suggests that you may have beer and you may have wine. Following Klinedinst, I argue that this ‘free choice’ effect is a special kind of scalar implicature, arising from the application of an unspecific predicate to a plurality (of worlds). I show that the implicature can be derived from general norms of cooperative communication, without postulating new grammatical rules or hidden lexical items. The derivation calls for an extension to the classical neo-Gricean model. (...)
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  • Saving Uniqueness.Massimiliano Vignolo - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (4):1177-1198.
    The purpose of this paper is to present a theory of referential uses of definite descriptions that is alternative to Neale’s theory of Gödelian completions but nonetheless assumes two tenets of Neale’s view: the Russellian analysis of definite descriptions is basically correct, i.e. definite descriptions are quantified NPs and referential uses are not to be explained in terms of the Gricean distinction between what is said and what is meant. The proposition said is the intuitive content of an assertion as (...)
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  • The Metaphysics of Meaning: Hopkins on Wittgenstein.Steven Gross - 2015 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 23 (4):518-538.
    Jim Hopkins defends a ‘straight’ response to Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations, a response he ascribes to Wittgenstein himself. According to this response, what makes it the case that A means that P is that it is possible for another to interpret A as meaning that P. Hopkins thus advances a form of interpretivist judgment-dependence about meaning. I argue that this response, as well as a variant, does not succeed.
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  • Generically free choice.Bernhard Nickel - 2010 - Linguistics and Philosophy 33 (6):479-512.
    This paper discusses free-choice like effects in generics. Just as Jane may drink coffee or tea can be used to convey Jane may drink coffee and Jane may drink tea (she is free to choose ), some generics with disjunctive predicates can be used to convey conjunctions of simpler generics: elephants live in Africa or Asia can be used to convey elephants live in Africa and elephants live in Asia. Investigating these logically slightly more complex generics and especially the free-choice (...)
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  • (1 other version)Exhaustivity in Questions with Non-Factives.Nathan Klinedinst - manuscript
    This paper is concerned with the conditions under which a person can be said to have told someone or predicted (the answer to a question like) ‘who came’.
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  • Higher-order readings of wh -questions.Yimei Xiang - 2021 - Natural Language Semantics 29 (1):1-45.
    In most cases, a wh-question calls for an answer that names an entity in the set denoted by the extension of the wh-complement. However, evidence from questions with necessity modals and questions with collective predicates argues that sometimes a wh-question must be interpreted with a higher-order reading, in which this question calls for an answer that names a generalized quantifier. This paper investigates the distribution and compositional derivation of higher-order readings of wh-questions. First, I argue that the generalized quantifiers that (...)
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  • Evoking Context with Contrastive Stress: Effects on Pragmatic Enrichment.Chris Cummins & Hannah Rohde - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6.
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  • (1 other version)On the characterization of alternatives.Danny Fox & Roni Katzir - 2011 - Natural Language Semantics 19 (1):87-107.
    We present an argument for revising the theory of alternatives for Scalar Implicatures and for Association with Focus. We argue that in both cases the alternatives are determined in the same way, as a contextual restriction of the focus value of the sentence, which, in turn, is defined in structure-sensitive terms. We provide evidence that contextual restriction is subject to a constraint that prevents it from discriminating between alternatives when they stand in a particular logical relationship with the assertion or (...)
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  • Knowledge and Implicature: Modeling Language Understanding as Social Cognition.Noah D. Goodman & Andreas Stuhlmüller - 2013 - Topics in Cognitive Science 5 (1):173-184.
    Is language understanding a special case of social cognition? To help evaluate this view, we can formalize it as the rational speech-act theory: Listeners assume that speakers choose their utterances approximately optimally, and listeners interpret an utterance by using Bayesian inference to “invert” this model of the speaker. We apply this framework to model scalar implicature (“some” implies “not all,” and “N” implies “not more than N”). This model predicts an interaction between the speaker's knowledge state and the listener's interpretation. (...)
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  • On the interpretation of disjunction: Asymmetric, incremental, and eager for inconsistency. [REVIEW]Raj Singh - 2008 - Linguistics and Philosophy 31 (2):245-260.
    Hurford’s Constraint (Hurford, Foundations of Language, 11, 409–411, 1974) states that a disjunction is infelicitous if its disjuncts stand in an entailment relation: #John was born in Paris or in France. Gazdar (Pragmatics, Academic Press, NY, 1979) observed that scalar implicatures can obviate the constraint. For instance, sentences of the form (A or B) or (Both Aand B) are felicitous due to the exclusivity implicature of the first disjunct: A or B implicates ‘not (A and B)’. Chierchia, Fox, and Spector (...)
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  • Free choice is a form of dependence.Magdalena Kaufmann - 2016 - Natural Language Semantics 24 (3):247-290.
    This paper refutes the widespread view that disjunctions of imperatives invariably grant free choice between the actions named by their disjuncts. Like other disjunctions they can also express a correlation with some factual distinction, but as with modalized declaratives used for non-assertive speech acts this needs to be indicated explicitly. A compositional analysis of one such indicator, depending on, constitutes the point of departure for a uniform analysis of disjunctions across clause types. Disjunctions are analyzed as sets of propositional alternatives (...)
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  • Number-neutral bare plurals and the multiplicity implicature.Eytan Zweig - 2009 - Linguistics and Philosophy 32 (4):353-407.
    Bare plurals (dogs) behave in ways that quantified plurals (some dogs) do not. For instance, while the sentence John owns dogs implies that John owns more than one dog, its negation John does not own dogs does not mean “John does not own more than one dog”, but rather “John does not own a dog”. A second puzzling behavior is known as the dependent plural reading; when in the scope of another plural, the ‘more than one’ meaning of the plural (...)
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