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Negation and polarity items

In Shalom Lappin (ed.), The handbook of contemporary semantic theory. Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell Reference. pp. 321--341 (1996)

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  1. Why language acquisition is a snap.Stephen Crain & Paul M. Pietroski - 2002 - Linguistic Review.
    Nativists inspired by Chomsky are apt to provide arguments with the following general form: languages exhibit interesting generalizations that are not suggested by casual (or even intensive) examination of what people actually say; correspondingly, adults (i.e., just about anyone above the age of four) know much more about language than they could plausibly have learned on the basis of their experience; so absent an alternative account of the relevant generalizations and speakers' (tacit) knowledge of them, one should conclude that there (...)
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  • Three kinds of ellipsis: Syntactic, semantic, pragmatic?Jason Merchant - 2010 - In François Récanati, Isidora Stojanovic & Neftalí Villanueva (eds.), Context Dependence, Perspective and Relativity. Mouton de Gruyter.
    The term ‘ellipsis’ can be used to refer to a variety of phenomena: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. In this article, I discuss the recent comprehensive survey by Stainton 2006 of these kinds of ellipsis with respect to the analysis of nonsententials and try to show that despite his trenchant criticisms and insightful proposal, some of the criticisms can be evaded and the insights incorporated into a semantic ellipsis analysis, making a ‘divide-and-conquer’ strategy to the properties of nonsententials feasible after all. (...)
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  • The loss of uniqueness.Szabó Zoltán Gendler - 2005 - Mind 114 (456):1185 - 1222.
    Philosophers and linguists alike tend to call a semantic theory ‘Russellian’ just in case it assigns to sentences in which definite descriptions occur the truth-conditions Russell did in ‘On Denoting’. This is unfortunate; not all aspects of those particular truth-conditions do explanatory work in Russell's writings. As far as the semantics of descriptions is concerned, the key insights of ‘On Denoting’ are that definite descriptions are not uniformly referring expressions, and that they are scope-bearing elements. Anyone who accepts these two (...)
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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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  • Are there semantic natural kinds of words?Kent Johnson - 2003 - Mind and Language 18 (2):175–193.
    Gareth Evans proposes that there are semantic natural kinds of words. In his development of this theory,he argues for two constraints on the identification of these kinds. I argue that neither of these constraints are justified. Furthermore,my argument against Evans' second constraint constitutes a direct argument for the existence of semantic natural kinds,something Evans himself never offers. I conclude by sketching some positive details of a more plausible theory of semantic natural kinds.
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  • The meaning of free choice.Anastasia Giannakidou - 2001 - Linguistics and Philosophy 24 (6):659-735.
    In this paper, I discuss the distribution and interpretation of free choice items (FCIs) in Greek, a language exhibiting a lexical paradigm of such items distinct from that of negative polarity items. Greek differs in this respect from English, which uniformly employs any. FCIs are grammatical only in certain contexts that can be characterized as nonveridical (Giannakidou 1998, 1999), and although they yield universal-like interpretations in certain structures, they are not, I argue, universal quantifiers. Evidence will be provided that FCIsare (...)
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  • Affective dependencies.Anastasia Giannakidou - 1999 - Linguistics and Philosophy 22 (4):367-421.
    Limited distribution phenomena related to negation and negative polarity are usually thought of in terms of affectivity where affective is understood as negative or downward entailing. In this paper I propose an analysis of affective contexts as nonveridical and treat negative polarity as a manifestation of the more general phenomenon of sensitivity to (non)veridicality (which is, I argue, what affective dependencies boil down to). Empirical support for this analysis will be provided by a detailed examination of affective dependencies in Greek, (...)
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  • Reasoning with quantifiers.Bart Geurts - 2003 - Cognition 86 (3):223--251.
    In the semantics of natural language, quantification may have received more attention than any other subject, and one of the main topics in psychological studies on deductive reasoning is syllogistic inference, which is just a restricted form of reasoning with quantifiers. But thus far the semantical and psychological enterprises have remained disconnected. This paper aims to show how our understanding of syllogistic reasoning may benefit from semantical research on quantification. I present a very simple logic that pivots on the monotonicity (...)
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  • Chamorro evidence for compositional asymmetry.Sandra Chung & William A. Ladusaw - 2006 - Natural Language Semantics 14 (4):325-357.
    In earlier work, we developed an composition in which predicates can be composed with arguments by operations other than Function Application, and it makes a difference which composition operation is employed. Here we take our approach further by examining two nonsaturating operations that combine property contents: Restrict, which composes a predicate with the property content of an indefinite; and Modify, which is involved in predicate modification. Nonsaturating operations that combine property contents are often formalized in terms of predicate intersection, which (...)
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  • The disunity of truth.Josh Dever - 2009 - In Robert Stainton & Christopher Viger (eds.), Compositionality, Context and Semantic Values: Essays in Honour of Ernie Lepore. 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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  • Montague semantics.Theo M. V. Janssen - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • The Monotonicity of 'No' and the No-Proposition View.Bradley Armour-Garb - 2012 - American Philosophical Quarterly 49 (1):1-14.
    This article reveals a tension between a fairly standard response to "liar sentences," of which -/- (L) Sentence (L) -/- is not true is an instance, and some features of our natural language determiners (e.g., 'every,' 'some,' 'no,' etc.) that have been established by formal linguists. The fairly standard response to liar sentences, which has been voiced by a number of philosophers who work directly on the Liar paradox (e.g., Parsons [1974], Kripke [1975], Burge [1979], Goldstein [1985, 2009], Gaifman [1992, (...)
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  • Trees and Fields and Negative Polarity.Sten Vikner - 2011 - Hermes: Journal of Language and Communication Studies 47:39-55.
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