What is the proper way to draw the semantics‐pragmatics distinction, and is what is said by a speaker ever enriched by pragmatics? An influential but controversial answer to the latter question is that the inputs to semantic interpretation contains representations of every contribution from context that is relevant to determining what is said, and that pragmatics never enriches the output of semantic interpretation. The proposal is bolstered by a controversial argument from syntactic binding designed to detect hidden syntactic structure. The (...) following contains an exposition and consideration of the argument. (shrink)

This article points out problems in current dynamic treatments of anaphora and provides a new account that solves these by grafting Muskens' Compositional Discourse Representation Theory onto a partial theory of types. Partiality is exploited to keep track of which discourse referents have been introduced in the text (thus avoiding the overwrite problem) and to account for cases of anaphoric failure. Another key assumption is that the set of discourse referents is well-ordered, so that we can keep track of the (...) order in which they have been introduced, allowing a semantic characterization of anaphoric accessibility across stretches of discourse. Unlike other dynamic approaches, the system defines semantic values for unresolved anaphors. This leads to a clear separation of monotonic and non-monotonic content (in this case anaphoric resolution) and arguably provides a sound basis for a non-monotonic theory of anaphoric resolution. (shrink)

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 (...) is commutative. Using Austronesian language Chamorro, we argue that Restrict and Modify are not ‘commutative’, but instead incorporate an asymmetry: they take one content to supply a domain that is narrowed further by combination with the other content. Syntactically, it is transparent which category’s content supplies the domain. But semantically, this information can be recovered only from the way in which the composition operation affects the contents that it composes, since—as we show—the same contents can be composed with distinct results. (shrink)

The Eskimo language Kalaallisut (alias West Greenlandic) has traditionally been described as having a rich tense system, with three future tenses (Kleinschmidt 1851, Bergsland 1955, Fortescue 1984) and possibly four past tenses (Fortescue 1984). Recently however, Shaer (2003) has challenged these traditional claims, arguing that Kalaallisut is in fact tenseless.

Pictorial free perception reports are sequences in comics or film of one unit that depicts an agent who is looking, and a following unit that depicts what they see. This paper proposes an analysis in possible worlds semantics and event semantics of such sequences. Free perception sequences are implicitly anaphoric, since the interpretation of the second unit refers to the agent depicted in the first. They are argued to be possibly non-extensional, because they can depict hallucination or mis-perception. The semantics (...) proposed here employs an account of anaphora using discourse referents, a formalized possible worlds semantics for pictorial narratives, and, to model the epistemic consequences of perceptual events, the event alternative construction from dynamic epistemic logic. In intensional examples, the second unit depicting what is seen is analyzed as embedded. It is argued that a semantics for embedding where the attitudinal state of the depicted agent is required to entail the semantic content of the picture attributes too much information to the agent. This is addressed with a model of normal looking, and a semantics for the embedding construction that uses existential quantification over alternatives, rather than universal quantification. (shrink)

The central claim of this paper is that surface-faithful word-by-word update is feasible and desirable, even in languages where word order is supposedly free. As a first step, in sections 1 and 2, I review an argument from Bittner 2001a that semantic composition is not a static process, as in PTQ, but rather a species of anaphoric bridging. But in that case the context-setting role of word order should extend from cross-sentential discourse anaphora to sentence-internal anaphoric composition. This can be (...) spelled out as a two-part hypothesis. First, in all languages anaphoric composition derives incremental updates based on the topological order rather than the syntactic hierarchy. And secondly, rigid vs. free word order is simply rigid vs. free mapping from syntax to topology. To formalize this hypothesis, I first present, in section 3, Sevensorted Logic of Change with Centering. This makes it possible, in section 4, to articulate a system of constraints on basic meanings in Kalaallisut — a polysynthetic language with free word order, ideally suited to test the hypothesis of incremental update. The key assumptions about topology as the input to anaphoric composition are spelled out in section 5, which concludes the development of a general formal framework. This formal framework then serves, in sections 6 through 8, t o explicate topologically based incremental updates for increasingly more complex samples of an actual Kalaallisut text. This reveals ubiquitous patterns of prominence-guided anaphora, in all semantic domains, t o increasingly more complex types of discourse referents. These anaphoric patterns show that the context-setting role of word order indeed does extend from discourse to word-to-word anaphora. And this, in turn, strongly supports the hypothesis of topologically based anaphoric composition. Finally, in section 9 I adduce evidence from English that this hypothesis also holds for languages with rigid word order, albeit the fixed mapping keeps the topology close to the syntax. I conclude that both free and rigid word orders receive a natural account if semantic composition is viewed as topologically based anaphoric bridging.. (shrink)