Causal pluralists hold that that there is not just one determinate kind of causation. Some causal pluralists hold that ‘cause’ is ambiguous among these different kinds. For example, Hall (2004) argues that ‘cause’ is ambiguous between two causal relations, which he labels dependence and production. The view that ‘cause’ is ambiguous, however, wrongly predicts zeugmatic conjunction reduction, and wrongly predicts the behaviour of ellipsis in causal discourse. So ‘cause’ is not ambiguous. If we are to disentangle causal pluralism from the (...) ambiguity claim, we need to consider what other linguistic approaches are available to the causal pluralist. I consider and reject proposals that ‘cause’ is a general term, that the term is an indexical, and that the term conveys different kinds of causation through implicature or presupposition. Finally, I argue that causal pluralism is better handled by treating ‘cause’ as a univocal term within a dynamic interpretation framework. (shrink)

This book combines insights from philosophy and linguistics to develop a novel framework for theorizing about linguistic meaning and the role of context in interpretation. A key innovation is to introduce explicit representations of context — assignment variables — in the syntax and semantics of natural language. The proposed theory systematizes a spectrum of “shifting” phenomena in which the context relevant for interpreting certain expressions depends on features of the linguistic environment. Central applications include local and nonlocal contextual dependencies with (...) quantifiers, attitude ascriptions, conditionals, questions, and relativization. The result is an innovative, philosophically informed compositional semantics compatible with the truth-conditional paradigm. (shrink)

In this essay, we propose that Peirce’s Existential Graphs can derive the desired uniqueness implication (or in a weaker claim, the definite description readings) of donkey pronouns in conjunctive discourse (A man walks in the park. He whistles), without postulating a separate category of E-type pronouns.

The facts aboutsuch, then, indicate not just thatsuch is a pro-adjective, but also that binding conditions apply broadly to pro-ADJs and pro-CNs, as well as to a wide range of pro-arguments. If this is true, the CN binding process accomplished by rules (40) and (41) might better be expressed in a system that uses a Cooper (1979) store mechanism. In fact, Stump (p. 144) notes that this could easily be done. Meanings of the type of∨ P n could be stored, (...) just as NP meanings are, until an appropriate binding CN phrase was encountered. Binding conditions would simply require that a∨ P n meaning not come out of storage until the derivation had emerged from its governing category. The behavior of the pro-adjectivesuch suggests that an expression of any category, if it is legitimately translatable as a variable, may be a fullfledged proform; many principles and mechanisms described to account for the widely studied pronouns in fact apply to nonargument categories. (shrink)

This paper is truly a joint effort and it could not have been written without the contribution of both authors. Garson, though, deserves credit (or blame) for first seeing the need for two kinds of quantifier scope, and also for devising essentials of the positive theory.