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Semantic interpretation in generative grammar

Cambridge, Mass.,: MIT Press (1972)

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  1. “Ought” and Intensionality.Junhyo Lee - 2021 - Synthese 199:4621-4643.
    The syntactic structure of the deontic “ought” has been much debated in philosophy and linguistics. Schroeder argues that the deontic “ought” is syntactically ambiguous in the sense that it can be associated with either a control or raising construction. He distinguishes between deliberative and evaluative “ought”s and argues that the deliberative “ought” is control while the evaluative “ought” is raising. However, if there is a control sense of “ought,” it implies that there is a sense of “ought” in which the (...)
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  • Understanding Focus: Pitch, Placement and Coherence.Julian J. Schlöder & Alex Lascarides - 2020 - Semantics and Pragmatics.
    This paper presents a novel account of focal stress and pitch contour in English dialogue. We argue that one should analyse and treat focus and pitch contour jointly, since (i) some pragmatic interpretations vary with contour (e.g., whether an utterance accepts or rejects; or whether it implicates a positive or negative answer); and (ii) there are utterances with identical prosodic focus that in the same context are infelicitous with one contour, but felicitous with another. We offer an account of two (...)
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  • Explaining the Actuality Operator Away.John Mackay - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (269):709-21.
    I argue that ‘actually’ does not have a reading according to which it is synonymous with the actuality operator of modal logic, and propose an alternative account of ‘actually’. The cases that have been thought to show that ‘actually’ is synonymous with the actuality operator are modal and counterfactual sentences in which an embedded clause's evaluation is held fixed at the world of the context. In these cases, though, this embedded clause's evaluation is not due to the presence of ‘actually’. (...)
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  • Focus games.Jon Scott Stevens - 2016 - Linguistics and Philosophy 39 (5):395-441.
    This paper provides a game-theoretic analysis of contrastive focus, extending insights from recent work on the role of noisy communication in prosodic accent placement to account for focus within sentences, sub-sentential phrases and words. The shared insight behind these models is that languages with prosodic focus marking assign prosodic prominence only within elements which constitute material critical for successful interpretation. We first take care to distinguish the information-structural notion of focus from an ontologically distinct notion of givenness marking, and then (...)
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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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  • A Defense of Causal Invariantism.Martin Montminy & Andrew Russo - 2016 - Analytic Philosophy 57 (1):49-75.
    Causal contextualism holds that sentences of the form ‘c causes e’ have context-sensitive truth-conditions. We consider four arguments invoked by Jonathan Schaffer in favor of this view. First, he argues that his brand of contextualism helps solve puzzles about transitivity. Second, he contends that how one describes the relata of the causal relation sometimes affects the truth of one’s claim. Third, Schaffer invokes the phenomenon of contrastive focus to conclude that causal statements implicitly designate salient alternatives to the cause and (...)
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  • (1 other version)Ought, Agents, and Actions.Mark Schroeder - 2011 - Philosophical Review 120 (1):1-41.
    According to a naïve view sometimes apparent in the writings of moral philosophers, ‘ought’ often expresses a relation between agents and actions – the relation that obtains between an agent and an action when that action is what that agent ought to do. It is not part of this naïve view that ‘ought’ always expresses this relation – on the contrary, adherents of the naïve view are happy to allow that ‘ought’ also has an epistemic sense, on which it means, (...)
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  • The interaction of compositional semantics and event semantics.Lucas Champollion - 2015 - Linguistics and Philosophy 38 (1):31-66.
    Davidsonian event semantics is often taken to form an unhappy marriage with compositional semantics. For example, it has been claimed to be problematic for semantic accounts of quantification Proceedings of the 16th Amsterdam Colloquium, 2007), for classical accounts of negation Semantics and contextual expression, 1989), and for intersective accounts of verbal coordination. This paper shows that none of this is the case, once we abandon the idea that the event variable is bound at sentence level, and assume instead that verbs (...)
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  • Shifting senses in lexical semantic development.Hugh Rabagliati, Gary F. Marcus & Liina Pylkkänen - 2010 - Cognition 117 (1):17-37.
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  • The cognitive map as a hippocampus.John O'Keefe & Lynn Nadel - 1979 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2 (4):520-533.
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  • Mental maps, mental images, and intuitions about space.Steven Pinker - 1979 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2 (4):512-512.
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  • On panspatial theories of brain and behavior.Ernest Greene - 1979 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2 (4):503-503.
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  • Literalness and other pragmatic principles.François Recanati - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (4):729-730.
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  • Presumptions of relevance.Dan Sperber & Deirdre Wilson - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (4):736.
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  • Focus Below the Word Level.Ron Artstein - 2004 - Natural Language Semantics 12 (1):1-22.
    Intonational focus can be observed on parts of words that appear to lack intrinsic meaning, and triggers alternatives that are similar in form. In order to provide a unified treatment of focus above and below the word level (they do, after all, behave the same in most respects), I develop a theory of denotations for arbitrary word parts in which focused word parts denote their own sound and the unfocused parts are functions from sounds to word meanings. This allows focus (...)
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  • (1 other version)Quantifiers vs. Quantification Theory.Jaakko Hintikka - 1973 - Dialectica 27 (3‐4):329-358.
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  • Single words, multiple words, and the functions of language.A. Charles Catania - 1995 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1):184-185.
    Wilkins & Wakefield assign importance to motor systems but skip from anatomy to cognitive structure with little attention to behavior. Organisms, no matter how sophisticated, that do not behave in accord with what they know will fall by the evolutionary wayside. Facts about behavior can supplement the authors' theory, whose hierarchical structures can accommodate an evolutionary scenario in which a million years or more of functionally varied utterances mainly limited to single words is followed by an explosion of linguistic diversity (...)
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  • Brains evolution and neurolinguistic preconditions.Wendy K. Wilkins & Jennie Wakefield - 1995 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1):161-182.
    This target article presents a plausible evolutionary scenario for the emergence of the neural preconditions for language in the hominid lineage. In pleistocene primate lineages there was a paired evolutionary expansion of frontal and parietal neocortex (through certain well-documented adaptive changes associated with manipulative behaviors) resulting, in ancestral hominids, in an incipient Broca's region and in a configurationally unique junction of the parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes of the brain (the POT). On our view, the development of the POT in (...)
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  • Issues in neo- and paleoneurology of language.Harry J. Jerison - 1995 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1):195-196.
    Wilkins and Wakefield's hypothesis that language is fundamentally a cognitive rather than cominunicational adaptation is reasonable, but there are flaws in their anatomical and fossil evidence. Their analysis of reorganization also needs clarification. Finally, the origin of language ability must have occurred with australopithecine rather than habiline adaptations on entry into the novel hominid adaptive zone.
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  • Scalar additive particles in negative contexts.Bernhard Schwarz - 2005 - Natural Language Semantics 13 (2):125-168.
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  • Coordination and Comparatives.Friederike Moltmann - 1992 - Dissertation, MIT
    This thesis explores the syntax and semantics of coordinate structures on the basis of three-dimensional syntactic structures. In particular it gives an analysis of sentences of the sort 'a man came and a woman left who knew each other well' on the basis of implicit coordination of NPs, made available within three-dimensionional syntactic structures..
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  • Focusing bound pronouns.Clemens Mayr - 2012 - Natural Language Semantics 20 (3):299-348.
    The presence of contrastive focus on pronouns interpreted as bound variables is puzzling. Bound variables do not refer, and it is therefore unclear how two of them can be made to contrast with each other. It is argued that this is a problem for both alternative-based accounts such as Rooth’s (Nat Lang Semantics 1:75–116, 1992) and givenness-based ones such as Schwarzschild’s (Nat Lang Semantics 7:141–177, 1999). The present paper shows that previous approaches to this puzzle face an empirical problem, namely (...)
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  • ‘Ought’ and Control.Matthew Chrisman - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (3):433-451.
    Ethical theorists often assume that the verb ‘ought’ means roughly ‘has an obligation’; however, this assumption is belied by the diversity of ‘flavours’ of ought-sentences in English. A natural response is that ‘ought’ is ambiguous. However, this response is incompatible with the standard treatment of ‘ought’ by theoretical semanticists, who classify ‘ought’ as a member of the family of modal verbs, which are treated uniformly as operators. To many ethical theorists, however, this popular treatment in linguistics seems to elide an (...)
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  • The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics.Peter Ludlow - 2011 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Peter Ludlow presents the first book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, including both Chomsky's government and binding theory and his minimalist ...
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  • What projects and why.Mandy Simons, David Beaver, Judith Tonhauser & Craige Roberts - 2010 - Semantics and Linguistic Theory 20:309-327.
    The empirical phenomenon at the center of this paper is projection, which we define (uncontroversially) as follows: (1) Definition of projection An implication projects if and only if it survives as an utterance implication when the expression that triggers the implication occurs under the syntactic scope of an entailment-cancelling operator. Projection is observed, for example, with utterances containing aspectual verbs like stop, as shown in (2) and (3) with examples from English and Paraguayan Guaraní (Paraguay, Tupí-Guaraní).1 The Guaraní example in (...)
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  • ([How/why]) does linguistics matter to philosophy?Francis Jeffry Pelletier - 1977 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 15 (3):393-426.
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  • Echo Questions Are Interrogatives? Another Version of a Metarepresentational Analysis.Seizi Iwata - 2003 - Linguistics and Philosophy 26 (2):185 - 254.
    Noh (1998a, b) analyzes echo questions in terms of metarepresentation and pragmatic enrichment within the framework of Relevance Theory. This paper argues that while the basic idea of metarepresentational analysis seems correct, it is better implemented differently. The alternative analysis proposed in this paper consists of three claims: first, echo questions are metarepresentational with rising intonation, with the rise alone conferring the question status; second, echo questions question the pragmatically enriched attribution; third, the focus of metarepresentation is to be distinguished (...)
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  • Abilities.John Maier - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    In the accounts we give of one another, claims about our abilities appear to be indispensable. Some abilities are so widespread that many who have them take them for granted, such as the ability to walk, or to write one's name, or to tell a hawk from a handsaw. Others are comparatively rare and notable, such as the ability to hit a Major League fastball, or to compose a symphony, or to tell an elm from a beech. In either case, (...)
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  • On the interaction of aspect and modal auxiliaries.Valentine Hacquard - 2009 - Linguistics and Philosophy 32 (3):279-315.
    This paper discusses the interaction of aspect and modality, and focuses on the puzzling implicative effect that arises when perfective aspect appears on certain modals: perfective somehow seems to force the proposition expressed by the complement of the modal to hold in the actual world, and not merely in some possible world. I show that this puzzling behavior, originally discussed in Bhatt (1999, Covert modality in non-finite contexts) for the ability modal, extends to all modal auxiliaries with a circumstantial modal (...)
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  • Imperatives and Modals.Paul Portner - 2007 - Natural Language Semantics 15 (4):351-383.
    Imperatives may be interpreted with many subvarieties of directive force, for example as orders, invitations, or pieces of advice. I argue that the range of meanings that imperatives can convey should be identified with the variety of interpretations that are possible for non-dynamic root modals (what I call ‘priority modals’), including deontic, bouletic, and teleological readings. This paper presents an analysis of the relationship between imperatives and priority modals in discourse which asserts that, just as declaratives contribute to the Common (...)
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  • The Semantics of Questions and the Focusation of Answers.Manfred Krifka - 2004 - In Topic and Focus: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 139-151.
    In Krifka (2001) I argued that three distinct phenomena of question semantics – alternative questions like Did it rain or not?, multiple constituent questions with pair-list readings like Who bought what? and the focus patterns of answers to constituent questions – cannot be dealt with adequately within the framework of Alternative Semantics. In Krifka (to appear) I argue that Alternative Semantics also is problematic as a framework for focus semantics in general; in particular, it makes wrong predictions in case focus (...)
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  • Information structure. Notional distinctions, ways of expression.Manfred Krifka & Caroline Féry - manuscript
    to be published in the Proceedings of the 18. International Conference of Linguistics, Seoul, Korea.
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  • Restrictions on Quantifier Domains.Kai von Fintel - 1994 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
    This dissertation investigates the ways in which natural language restricts the domains of quantifiers. Adverbs of quantification are analyzed as quantifying over situations. The domain of quantifiers is pragmatically constrained: apparent processes of "semantic partition" are treated as pragmatic epiphenomena. The introductory Chapter 1 sketches some of the background of work on natural language quantification and begins the analysis of adverbial quantification over situations. Chapter 2 develops the central picture of "semantic partition" as a side-effect of pragmatic processes of anaphora (...)
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  • An investigation of the lumps of thought.Angelika Kratzer - 1989 - Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (5):607 - 653.
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  • Ellipsis and higher-order unification.Mary Dalrymple, Stuart M. Shieber & Fernando C. N. Pereira - 1991 - Linguistics and Philosophy 14 (4):399 - 452.
    We present a new method for characterizing the interpretive possibilities generated by elliptical constructions in natural language. Unlike previous analyses, which postulate ambiguity of interpretation or derivation in the full clause source of the ellipsis, our analysis requires no such hidden ambiguity. Further, the analysis follows relatively directly from an abstract statement of the ellipsis interpretation problem. It predicts correctly a wide range of interactions between ellipsis and other semantic phenomena such as quantifier scope and bound anaphora. Finally, although the (...)
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  • A simple comment regarding the Turing test.Benny Shanon - 1989 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 19 (June):249-56.
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  • In Defense of Definitions.David Pitt - 1999 - Philosophical Psychology 12 (2):139-156.
    The arguments of Fodor, Garret, Walker and Parkes [(1980) Against definitions, Cognition, 8, 263-367] are the source of widespread skepticism in cognitive science about lexical semantic structure. Whereas the thesis that lexical items, and the concepts they express, have decompositional structure (i.e. have significant constituents) was at one time "one of those ideas that hardly anybody [in the cognitive sciences] ever considers giving up" (p. 264), most researchers now believe that "[a]ll the evidence suggests that the classical [(decompositional)] view is (...)
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  • Ought and agency.Daniel Skibra - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-40.
    A thorny question surrounding the meaning of ought concerns a felt distinction between deontic uses of ought that seem to evaluate a state of affairs versus those that seem to describe a requirement or obligation to perform an action, as in and, respectively. There ought not be childhood death and disease. You ought to keep that promise. Various accounts have been offered to explain the contrast between “agentive” and “non-agentive” ought sentences. One such account is the Agency-in-the-Prejacent theory, which traces (...)
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  • How to have a metalinguistic dispute.Poppy Mankowitz - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):5603-5622.
    There has been recent interest in the idea that speakers who appear to be having a verbal dispute may in fact be engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation: they are communicating information about how they believe an expression should be used. For example, individuals involved in a dispute about whether a racehorse is an athlete might be communicating their diverging views about how ‘athlete’ should be used. While many have argued that metalinguistic negotiation is a pervasive feature of philosophical and everyday (...)
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  • On Adversative Coordinative Conjunctions.Fernando García Murga - 2017 - Theoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science 32 (3).
    Adversative coordinative conjunctions necessarily involve a contrast between two elements related to the utterances they coordinate. Contrast is a heterogeneous concept. In this article, three types of contrast are identified: restrictive, corrective and additive. These types give rise to three different readings of the adversative coordinative conjunctions. In this work, a semantic function for each type of contrast is proposed, and the presuppositional character of restrictive contrast is defended. These hypotheses lead us towards the discourses in which the coordinative adversative (...)
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  • Assessing the Role of Experimental Evidence for Interface Judgment: Licensing of Negative Polarity Items, Scalar Readings, and Focus.Anastasia Giannakidou & Urtzi Etxeberria - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9:279225.
    This paper reviews a series of experimental studies that address what we call ‘interface judgement’, which is the complex judgment involving integration from multiple levels of grammatical representation such as the syntax-semantics and prosody-semantics interface. We first discuss the results from the ERP literature connected to NPI licensing in different languages, paying particular attention to the N400 and the P600 as neural correlates of this specific phenomenon and focusing on the study by Xiang et al. (2016). The results of this (...)
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  • Lost maps and memories.James A. Horel - 1979 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2 (4):506-507.
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  • Inner and outer space: the neuroanatomical bases of spatially organized behaviors.David S. Olton - 1979 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2 (4):511-512.
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  • How relevant?Pieter A. M. Seuren - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (4):731.
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  • Givenness, avoidf and other constraints on the placement of accent.Roger Schwarzschild - 1999 - Natural Language Semantics 7 (2):141-177.
    This paper strives to characterize the relation between accent placement and discourse in terms of independent constraints operating at the interface between syntax and interpretation. The Givenness Constraint requires un-F-marked constituents to be given. Key here is our definition of givenness, which synthesizes insights from the literature on the semantics of focus with older views on information structure. AvoidF requires speakers to economize on F-marking. A third constraint requires a subset of F-markers to dominate accents.The characteristic prominence patterns of "novelty (...)
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  • The Case‐Slot Identity Theory.Eugene Charniak - 1981 - Cognitive Science 5 (3):285-292.
    Many people have noted the similarities between case theories in linguistics and frame representations in artificial intelligence. In particular, the cases of a verb seem to correspond to the slots of a frame. This has led many people, including Fillmore [1977] and Winston [1977] to assert that cases and slots are one and the same. This hypothesis has not attracted much attention, probably because the notion of “slot” in frame representations is so underconstrained that the theory would seem to be (...)
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  • The disunity of truth.Josh Dever - 2008 - In Robert Stainton & Christopher Viger (eds.), Compositionality, Context, and Semantic Values: Essays in Honor of Ernie Lepore. Springer. pp. 174-191.
    §§3-4 of the Begriffsschrift present Frege’s objections to a dominant if murky nineteenth-century semantic picture. I sketch a minimalist variant of the pre-Fregean picture which escapes Frege’s criticisms by positing a thin notion of semantic content which then interacts with a multiplicity of kinds of truth to account for phenomena such as modality. After exploring several ways in which we can understand the existence of multiple truth properties, I discuss the roles of pointwise and setwise truth properties in modal logic. (...)
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  • Phase theory and prosodic spellout: The case of verbs.Angelika Kratzer - 2007 - The Linguistic Review 24 (2-3):93-135.
    In this article we will explore the consequences of adopting recent proposals by Chomsky, according to which the syntactic derivation proceeds in terms of phases. The notion of phase – through the associated notion of spellout – allows for an insightful theory of the fact that syntactic constituents receive default phrase stress not across the board, but as a function of yet-to-be-explicated conditions on their syntactic context. We will see that the phonological evi- dence requires us to modify somewhat the (...)
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  • Interpreting concatenation and concatenates.Paul M. Pietroski - 2006 - Philosophical Issues 16 (1):221–245.
    This paper presents a slightly modified version of the compositional semantics proposed in Events and Semantic Architecture (OUP 2005). Some readers may find this shorter version, which ignores issues about vagueness and causal constructions, easier to digest. The emphasis is on the treatments of plurality and quantification, and I assume at least some familiarity with more standard approaches.
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  • Coherence and the resolution of ellipsis.Andrew Kehler - 2000 - Linguistics and Philosophy 23 (6):533-575.
    Despite the attention that various forms of ellipsis have received inthe literature, the conditions under which a representation of anutterance may serve as a suitable referent for interpreting subsequentelliptical forms remain poorly understood. This fundamental questionremains as a point of contention, particularly because there are datato support various conflicting approaches that attempt to characterizethese conditions within a single module of language processing. Weshow a previously unnoticed pattern in VP-ellipsis data with respectto the type of coherence relation extant between the antecedentand (...)
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