In this paper I propose a novel treatment of generic sentences, which proceeds by means of different levels of analysis. According to this account, all generic sentences (I-generics and D-generics alike) are initially treated in a uniform manner, as involving higher-order predication (following the work of George Boolos, James Higginbotham and Barry Schein on plurals). Their non-uniform character, however, re-emerges at subsequent levels of analysis, when the higher-order predications of the first level are cashed out in terms of quantification over (...) individuals: this last step, I suggest, involves knowledge concerning the lexical meaning of the predicates in question. (shrink)

There is a long tradition of drawing metaphysical conclusions from investigations into language. This paper concerns one contemporary variation on this theme: the alleged ontological significance of cognitivist truth-theoretic accounts of semantic competence. According to such accounts, human speakers’ linguistic behavior is in part empirically explained by their cognizing a truth-theory. Such a theory consists of a finite number of axioms assigning semantic values to lexical items, a finite number of axioms assigning semantic values to complex expressions on the basis (...) of their structure and the semantic values of their constituents, and a finite number of production schemata. The theory enables the derivation of truth-conditions for each sentence of the language: something of roughly the form ‘S is true iff P’.1 The claim that speakers stand in a cognitive relation to such theories is advanced, not as a conceptual analysis of semantic competence or understanding, but rather as an empirical hypothesis about human speakers in particular, one part of a broader empirical account of our linguistic competence and cognition generally. It therefore must mesh with the rest of our theorizing in these areas and whatever relevant data from neighboring inquiries there may be. The precise nature of the cognitive relation a speaker is supposed to bear to a truththeory is a matter of some dispute. I speak of ‘‘cognizing’’ (following. (shrink)

Plato did it. Aristotle did it. All the great philosophers did it. You do it and we do it: we draw philosophical conclusions from linguistic data. Although we all do it, the degree, manner, and intensity to which it is done varies. Some have made piecemeal observations about language (e.g., “all these different things have the same term predicated of them”) to draw metaphysical conclusions (e.g., “there is some one existing thing that all these different entities share”). Others have made (...) observations about how all people – or at least, some important subset of them – employ a term (e.g., “we don’t say an action is voluntary unless we wish to say that it was done for (or in) an unusual reason (or manner)”) to draw conclusions about human agency (e.g., “actions that are done in the normal way in the normal course of events are neither free nor compulsory”). And others have looked to how people would talk were certain actual conditions not to be true (e.g., “we would say that we were still talking about Aristotle even if it were to turn out that he didn’t teach Alexander the Great”) to infer necessary features of the semantic realm (e.g., that some propositions must contain an actual individual and not a description of an individual). Still others have looked to empirical results from the science of linguistics (e.g., “the types of complements allowed by the verbs believes and knows are different”) to draw epistemological conclusions (e.g., “knowledge of something does not imply belief of it”), or again “the distributional facts concerning knows that and knows how are the same” to draw the conclusion “practical knowledge is a kind of theoretical knowledge”. (shrink)

The paper is about the interpretation of opaque verbs like “seek”, “owe”, and “resemble” which allow for unspecific readings of their (indefinite) objects. It is shown that the following two observations create a problem for semantic analysis: (a) The opaque position is upward monotone: “John seeks a unicorn” implies “John seeks an animal”, given that “unicorn” is more specific than “animal”. (b) Indefinite objects of opaque verbs allow for higher-order, or “underspecific”, readings: “Jones is looking for something Smith is looking (...) for” can express that there is something unspecific that both Jones and Smith are looking for. Given (a) and (b), it would seem that the following inference is hard to escape, if the premisses are construed unspecifically and the conclusion is taken on its under- specific reading: Jones is looking for a sweater. Smith is looking for a pen. Smith is looking for something Jones is looking for. (shrink)

Wayne Davis’s Meaning, Expression and Thought argues that linguistic meaning is conventional use to express ideas. An obvious problem with this proposal is that complex expressions that have never been used are nonetheless meaningful. In response to this concern, Davis associates conventions of use not only with linguistic expressions but also with the modes in which such expressions can combine into larger expressions. I argue that such constructive conventions are in conflict with the principle of compositionality (as it is usually (...) understood) and that (at least in the cases Davis considers) they are unnecessary for semantic explanations. (shrink)

Case-based reasoning has played an important role in legal reasoning systems. As one criteria for similarity of cases, temporal relationsamong affairs in legal cases should be compared. Thus far in many legalreasoning systems, cases have been described as sequences of pointwiseevents, or at best, simple time intervals, and they have been related bypredicates such as before, after, while,and so on. However, such relations may depend on each implementer'spersonal view, and also require much labor to write down by hand. In this (...) paper, we first propose a classification of affair types by their temporal features, and according to those types, we propose several assumption rules that prescribe the temporal relations between affair types. The temporal relations are automatically generated by these rules. Thereafter, we discuss how thesetemporal relations work in the comparison of similarity of cases. Inthe process of comparison, inadequate temporal relations need to beamended. For this purpose, we introduce revision rules, that refute theresults of assumption rules. (shrink)

While monadic second-order logic (MSO) has played a prominent role in model theoretic syntax, modal logics have been used in this context since its inception. When comparing propositional dynamic logic (PDL) to MSO over trees, Kracht (1997) noted that there are tree languages that can be defined in MSO that can only be defined in PDL by adding new features whose distribution is predictable. He named such features “inessential features”. We show that Kracht’s observation can be extended to other modal (...) logics of trees in two ways. First, we demonstrate that for each stronger logic, there exists a tree language that can only be defined in a weaker logic with inessential features. Second, we show that any tree language that can be defined in a stronger logic, but not in some weaker logic, can be defined with inessential features. Additionally, we consider Kracht’s definition of inessential features more closely. It turns out that there are features whose distribution can be predicted, but who fail to be inessential in Kracht’s sense. We will look at ways to modify his definition. (shrink)

In the tradition of quantified modal logic, it was assumed that significantly different linguistic systems underlie reference to individuals, to times and to 'possible worlds'. Various results from recent research in formal semantics suggest that this is not so, and that there is in fact a pervasive symmetry between the linguistic means with which we refer to these three domains. Reference to individuals, times and worlds is uniformly effected through generalized quantifiers, definite descriptions, and pronouns, and in each domain grammatical (...) features situate the reference of terms as near, far or 'further' from the actual or from a reported speech act. We outline various directions in which a program of ontological symmetry could be developed, and we offer in the Appendix a symmetric fragment developed in a logic that can be seen as a compromise between an extensional and an intensional system. (shrink)

In the tradition of quantified modal logic, it was assumed that significantly different linguistic systems underlie reference to individuals, to times and to ‘possible worlds’. Various results from recent research in formal semantics suggest that this is not so, and that there is in fact apervasive symmetrybetween the linguistic means with which we refer to these three domains. Reference to individuals, times and worlds is uniformly effected through generalized quantifiers, definite descriptions, and pronouns, and in each domain grammatical features situate (...) the reference of terms as near, far or ‘further’ from the actual or from a reported speech act. We outline various directions in which a program ofontological symmetrycould be developed, and we offer in theAppendixa symmetric fragment developed in a logic that can be seen as a compromise between an extensional and an intensional system. (shrink)

In this paper, we show how the problem of accounting for the semanticsof temporal preposition phrases (tPPs) leads us to some surprisinginsights into the semantics of temporal expressions ingeneral. Specifically, we argue that a systematic treatment of EnglishtPPs is greatly facilitated if we endow our meaning assignments with context variables, a device which allows a tPP to restrict domainsof quantification arising elsewhere in a sentence. We observe that theuse of context variables implies that tPPs can modify expressions intwo ways, and (...) we use this observation to predict the behaviour of tPPswhose complements are themselves modified by other tPPs. (shrink)

This article discusses what may be referred to as ``adjectival relatives''''in Japanese and related constructions in other languages (such asadjectival passives in English). The most intriguing characteristicof this construction is that the verb contained in it occurs in the pasttense form, but its primary role is to describe a state that obtains atthe local evaluation time, rather than the past event that producedthis state. In fact, in some cases, the putative event that presumablyproduced the target state is non-existent, and the (...) entire constructionreceives a purely stative interpretation. In other words, it is possiblefor an adjectival relative to describe a target state without having itstriggering event. The proposal I put forth in the article states that whatI refer to as an adjectival relative does not have a clausal structure.It rather has a verbal projection (technically a Tense Phrase, or TP). Mod(the modifier head) then combined with TP to yield a MP (modifierphrase), which denotes a property of states that appear to have resultedfrom an event the verb describes. In order to reach this conclusion, I adopttwo additional ideas: (i) Kratzer''s (1996) idea that the so-called externalargument of a verb is not really its argument at all; (ii) direct causationdoes not have to be overtly represented in natural language syntax (Bittner1999). Having incorporated these two ideas, the proposal explains therelation between the state that the adjectival relative describes and theputative event as a modal one, thereby accounting for the non-existenceof putative past events in some examples. (shrink)

This paper examines some aspects of the grammar of measurement based on data from non-split and split measure phrase (MP) constructions in Japanese. I claim that the non-split MP construction involves measurement of individuals, while the split MP construction involves measurement of events as well as of individuals. This claim is based on the observation that, while both constructions are subject to some semantic restrictions in the nominal domain, only the split MP construction is sensitive to restrictions in the verbal (...) domain (namely, incompatibility with single-occurrence events and with individual-level predicates, and (un)availability of collective readings). It is shown that these semantic restrictions can be explained by a uniform semantic constraint on the measure function, namely, Schwarzschild’s [(2002). The grammar of measurement. The Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistics Theory, 24, 241–306] monotonicity constraint. In particular, I argue that, in the two constructions at issue, the measure function is subject to the monotonicity constraint, and that we observe different semantic restrictions depending on whether the measure function applies to a nominal or a verbal domain. (shrink)

Nominalizations are expressions that are particularly challenging philosophically in that they help form singular terms that seem to refer to abstract or derived objects often considered controversial. The three standard views about the semantics of nominalizations are [1] that they map mere meanings onto objects, [2] that they refer to implicit arguments, and [3] that they introduce new objects, in virtue of their compositional semantics. In the second case, nominalizations do not add anything new but pick up objects that would (...) be present anyway in the semantic structure of a corresponding sentence without a nominalization. In the first and third case, nominalizations in a sense ‘create’ new objects’, enriching the ontology on the basis of the meaning of expressions. I will argue that there is a fourth kind of nominalization which requires a quite different treatment. These are nominalizations that introduce ‘new’ objects, but only partially characterize them. Such nominalizations generally refer to events or tropes. I will explore an account according on which such nominalizations refer to truth makers. (shrink)

Methodological dualism in linguistics occurs when its theories are subjected to standards that are inappropriate for them qua scientific theories. Despite much opposition, methodological dualism abounds in contemporary thinking. In this paper, I treat linguistics as a scientific activity and explore some instances of dualism. By extracting some ubiquitous aspects of scientific methodology from its typically quantitative expression, I show that two recent instances of methodologically dualistic critiques of linguistics are ill-founded. I then show that there are nonetheless some divergences (...) between linguistic and other ordinary scientific methods, reflecting yet a third instance of methodological dualism. (shrink)

Notice that each of (1)–(4) is an instance of a more general pattern. For example, we could replace ‘black’ in (1) with any of a wide range of other adjectives such as ‘furry’ or ‘hungry’ or ‘three-legged’, without rendering the entailment invalid or any less obvious. Similarly, there are a number of verbs that occur in entailments parallel to (3): ‘Moe boiled the water; so the water boiled’; ‘Bart blew up the school; so the school blew up’; ‘Homer sank the (...) boat; so the boat sank’ and so on. (shrink)

The view that dominates the literature on intentional attitudes holds that beliefs and desires both have propositional content. A commitment to what I call “content uniformity” underlies this view. According to content uniformity, beliefs and desires are but different psychological modes having a uniform kind of content. Prima facie, the modes don’t place any constraint on the kinds of content the attitude can have. I challenge this consensus by pointing out an asymmetry between belief contents and desire contents which shows (...) content uniformity to be mistaken. I do this by revisiting the arguments of Richard (Philosophical Studies, 39(1): 1–13, 1981), and show that arguments which purport to show the temporal specificity of belief contents yield the opposite results for desire contents. I defend this preliminary conclusion from various strategies to neutralize the asymmetry claim. My defense provides occasions to respond to objections by Brogaard (2012) and Recanati (2007) to the Richard argument, and to get clearer on the role of temporal adjuncts in desire ascriptions. Finally, I consider whether the construal of attitude content as centered propositions (as in Lewis Philosophical Review, 88(4): 513–543, 1979) can be invoked to vindicate content uniformity. My conclusion is that while the framework itself doesn’t vindicate content uniformity, it could, but only if it availed itself of a further, substantive thesis about desire, which itself is in need of defense. (shrink)

Williamson’s Knowledge and its Limits is the most important philosophical discussion of knowledge in many years. It sets the agenda for epistemology for the next decade and beyond.

I propose the first strictly compositional semantic account of same. New data, including especially NP-internal uses such as two men with the same name, suggests that same in its basic use is a quantificational element taking scope over nominals. Given type-lifting as a generally available mechanism, I show that this follows naturally from the fact that same is an adjective. Independently-motivated assumptions extend the analysis to standard examples such as Anna and Bill read the same book via a mechanism I (...) call PARASITIC SCOPE, in which the scope of same depends on the scope of some other scopetaking element in the sentence. Although I will initially discuss the analysis in terms of a familiar Quantifier Raising framework, I go on to implement the analysis within an innovative continuation-based Type-Logical Grammar. The empirical payoff for dealing in continuations is that a simple generalization of the basic analysis gives the first ever formal account of cases in which same distributes over objects other than NP denotations, as in the relevant interpretation of John hit and killed the same man. (shrink)

Since 1970-ties in the theory of syntax of natural language quite a number of competing, incommensurable theoretic frameworks have emerged. Today the lack of a leading paradigm and kaleidoscope of perspectives deprives our general understanding of syntax and its relation to semantics and pragmatics. The present book is an attempt to reestablish the most fundamental ideas and intuitions of syntactic well-formedness within a new general account. The account is not supposed to compete with any of today’s syntactic frameworks, but to (...) provide a deeper understanding of why these frameworks succeed or fail when they do and to show a new way for cooperation between logicians and linguists which may lead in future to a unified, yet more specific account. (shrink)

Many languages have past-and-counterfactuality markers such as English simple past. There have been various attempts to find a common definition for both uses, but I will argue in this paper that they all have problems with ruling out unacceptable interpretations, or accounting for the contrary-to-fact implicature of counterfactual conditionals, or predicting the observed cross-linguistic variation, or a combination thereof. By combining insights from two basic lines of reasoning, I will propose a simple and transparent approach that solves all the observed (...) problems and offers a new understanding of the concept of counterfactuality. (shrink)

Is there a principled difference between entailments in natural language that are valid solely in virtue of their form or structure and those that are not? This paper advances an affirmative answer to this question, one that takes as its starting point Gareth Evans’s suggestion that semantic theory aims to carve reality at the joints by uncovering the semantic natural kinds of the language. I sketch an Evans-inspired account of semantic kinds and show how it supports a principled account of (...) structural entailment. I illustrate the account by application to a case study involving the entailment properties of adverbs; this involves developing a novel proposal about the semantics for adverbs like ‘quickly’ and ‘slowly’. In the course of the discussion I explore some implications of the account for the place of model-theoretic tools in natural language semantics. (shrink)

A-theorists think there is a fundamental difference between the present and other times. This concern shows up in what kinds of properties they take to be instantiated, what objects they think exist and how they formalize their views. Nearly every contemporary A-theorist assumes that her metaphysics requires a tense logic – a logic with operators like and. In this paper, I show that there is at least one viable A-theory that does not require a logic with tense operators. And I (...) will argue that three common indispensability arguments for tense operators are unsound. (shrink)

Reverse Compositionality (RC) is the thesis that one understands a complex expression only if one understands its parts. I argue that this thesis is false for natural languages. I then argue that the phenomenon that motivates the thesis is more likely to be a fact about human sentence-processing than linguistic understanding per se. Finally, I argue that RC is not useful in the debates about prototype-style theories of concepts in which it figures heavily.

According to the contemporary consensus, when reaching in the lexicon grammar looks for items like nouns, verbs, and prepositions while logic sees items like predicates, connectives, and quantifiers. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a single lexical category contemporary grammar and logic both make use of. I hope to show that while a perfect match between the lexical categories of grammar and logic is impossible there can be a substantial overlap. I propose semantic definitions for all the major parts (...) of speech . I argue that the differences among these categories can be captured in terms of distinctions recognized in logic. (shrink)

This paper gives an analysis of the adverbial quantifiers exemplified in “I regretted it every time I had dinner with him.” Sentences of this kind display what I call a ‘matching effect’; they are true if every event in the denotation oftime I had dinner with him can be matched with an event regretting that dinner event. They are thus truth-conditionally equivalent to sentences of the form “There are at least as many As as Bs.” The difficulties of giving a (...) compositional interpretation to sentences of this form have been discussed in, e.g., Boolos 1981. I first show that the matching effect is semantic and not pragmatic. I then give an analysis of these sentences in a neo-Davidsonian framework, interpreting the adverbials as quantifiers over events. Syntactically they are analyzed as objects of a null preposition. This allows a simple compositional semantic interpretation in which the null preposition is interpreted exactly as other prepositions are by Davidson (1967), namely as denoting a function from the event argument of the matrix verb to the prepositional object. The matching effect then follows automatically. I extend the analysis to account for other sentences which directly instantiate the schema “For every A there is a B” and its equivalents, and show how the matching effect follows in general from the functional nature of thematic roles and prepositions. (shrink)

The Problem of Doxastic Shift may be stated as a dilemma: on the one hand, the distribution of nominal complements of the form `the ψ that p’ strongly suggests that `that’-clauses cannot be univocally assigned propositionaldenotations; on the other hand, facts about quantification strongly suggest that `that’-clauses must be assigned univocal denotations. I argue that the Problem may be solved by defining the extension of a proposition to be a set of facts or, more generally, conditions. Given this, the logical (...) operation of descriptive predication can be introduced in a way that resolves the dilemma withoutsacrificing the singular term analysis of `that’-clauses. (shrink)

The proponents of strong lexicalism hold the view that “words” are formed in the lexicon and are opaque for the syntax ((Dowty 1979), (DiSciullo and Williams 1987), (Jackendoff 1990) and many others). Modular morphology, on the other hand, offers the possibility that at least some words are partially formed in the syntax ((Baker 1988), (Borer 1988), (Hale and Keyser 1994), (Chomsky 1995) and many others). In (Stechow 1995) and (Stechow 1996) it has been argued that facts observed with German wieder (...) “again” cannot be accounted for within the framework of strong lexicalism and therefore favour the second position. The authors of this paper want to check these claims by investigating the behaviour of the German adverb fast “ almost”, the other classical adverb to which the method of decomposition has been applied in the linguistic literature (cf. (McCawley 1971)). Most adverbs cannot look into lexical decomposition structures, but some can. In order to have a suitable name, let us call these D-adverbs. Again and almost are the prototypical representatives of this class. The method adopted is to investigate whether fast has access to different aspects of verbal meaning depending on its position. Following (Dowty 1979), resultative verbs and prepositions are decomposed into BECOME + XP, where XP is the result state. Agentive verbs contain an additional AGENT part. Other thematic relations connecting the subject and the event are HOLDER and cause. If the syntax tells us that an adverb like wieder or fast must have wide scope with respect to BECOME, then we expect other readings than in a configuration where fast can have narrow scope with respect to BECOME. In other words, the motivation for decomposition is syntactic and semantic. The idea is that certain function projections in the classical VP have a meaning and hence scopally interact with adverbs. (shrink)

Ryle (1949, Chapter V) discusses a range of predicates which in different ways exemplify a property I shall call quasi-duality - they appear to report two actions or events in one predicate. Quasi-duality is the key property of predicates Ryle classed as achievements. Ryle's criteria for classification were not temporal or aspectual, and Vendler's subsequent adoption of the term achievement for the aktionsart of momentary events changes the term - Rylean achievements and Vendlerian achievements are in principle different classes. Nevertheless, (...) I shall argue in this paper that certain kinds of quasi-duality do have aspectual significance. This paper examines a number of quasi-dual predicates which are not generally discussed in the aktionsart literature, including break a promise, miscount, and cure the patient. Two types of quasi-dual predicates are identified and dubbed criterion predicates and causative upshot predicates. It is shown that both types of quasi-dual predicate lack process progressives, despite being durative, and it is argued that the lack of process progressives identifies these predicates as (aspectual) achievements. They are termed durative achievements to distinguish them from canonical, momentary achievements. It is argued that these predicates lack process progressives, and hence are achievements, because they express individual-level predicates on the event argument. A process progressive is stage-level for the event, and hence is incompatible with a predicate which is lexically individual-level for the event. (shrink)

This paper presents a diagnostic for identifying distributive constructions and shows that it applies to pseudopartitives and for -adverbials. On this basis, a unified account is proposed for the parallels between the constructions involved. This account explains why for -adverbials reject telic predicates (*run to the store for five hours), why pseudopartitives reject count nouns (*five pounds of book ), and why both reject certain measure functions like temperature and speed (*30 of water, *drive for 5 mph). These restrictions all (...) follow from a general constraint on distributive constructions. Related concepts such as the D operator (Link, 1987), the subinterval property (Bennett and Partee, 1972), and divisive reference (Cheng, 1973) can be understood as formalizing special cases of this constraint. (shrink)

Proceedings of the 11th Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference, held May 11-13, 2001, at New York University.

Theories about the ontological structure of the world have generally been described in informal, intuitive terms. This book offers an account of the general features and methodology of formal ontology. The book defends conceptual realism as the best system to adopt based on a logic of natural kinds. By formally reconstructing an intuitive, informal ontological scheme as a formal ontology we can better determine the consistency and adequacy of that scheme.

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)

This is the first in a pair of papers that aim to provide a comprehensive analysis of the semantic phenomenon of distributivity in natural language. This paper investigates and formalizes different sources of covert distributivity. Apart from lexical distributivity effects, which are modeled by meaning postulates, phrasal distributivity is captured via two covert operators: (i) a D operator distributing over atoms only (Link 1987), and (ii) a cover-based Part operator, which can also distribute over non-atomic pluralities under contextual licensing (Schwarzschild (...) 1996). The resulting theory surpasses accounts in which nonatomic distributivity is freely available, or not available at all; furthermore, it correctly predicts differences between lexical and phrasal nonatomic distributivity. D and Part are reformulated in Neo-Davidsonian algebraic event semantics, so that they apply to event predicates and make the sum event available for further modification by arguments and adjuncts. This paves the way for an account of the context-dependency of distributivity phenomena under for-adverbials, which improves on theories that predict indefinites to either always or never covary with for-adverbials. The paper and its companion include an explicit proposal for the compositional process in event semantics. (shrink)

Davidsonian analyses of action reports like ‘Alvin chased Theodore around a tree’ are often viewed as supporting the hypothesis that sentences of a human language H have truth conditions that can be specified by a Tarski-style theory of truth for H. But in my view, simple cases of adverbial modification add to the reasons for rejecting this hypothesis, even though Davidson rightly diagnosed many implications involving adverbs as cases of conjunct-reduction in the scope of an existential quantifier. I think the (...) puzzles in this vicinity reflect “framing effects,” which reveal the implausibility of certain assumptions about how linguistic meaning is related to truth and logical form. We need to replace these assumptions with alternatives, instead of positing implausible values of event-variables or implausible relativizations of truth to linguistic descriptions of actual events. (shrink)

(2013). What are the primary bearers of truth? Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 43, Essays on the Nature of Propositions, pp. 558-574.

This paper investigates some aspects of the semantics of deontic should-conditionals. The main objective is to understand which actual world facts make deontic statements true. The starting point for the investigation is a famous puzzle known as Chisholm’s Paradox. It is important because making sense of the data in Chisholm-style examples involves arriving at some conclusion regarding the interaction between what we consider ideal and what is actually true. I give an account of how facts affect the evaluation of should (...) formulated in a way that does not predict that the divergence between ideals and facts leads to contradictions. The proposed semantics for should and should-conditionals allows for factual detachment without giving rise to paradoxes. The proposal has several parts: a situation-based semantics for the modal should, a view of the propositions embedded under should that allows aspect to play a crucial role in anchoring propositions to the context set, and a proposal for if-clauses that distinguishes between epistemic if-clauses and if-clauses in the scope of should, treating the latter as restrictors on the quantificational domain of the modal. (shrink)

As part of a recent attempt to extend the methods of formal semantics beyond language, it has been claimed that music has an abstract truth-conditional semantics, albeit one that has more in common with iconic semantics than with standard compositional semantics. After summarizing this approach and addressing a common objection, we argue that music semantics should be enriched in three directions by incorporating insights of other areas of Super Semantics. First, it has been claimed by Abusch 2013 that visual narratives (...) make use of discourse referents akin to those we find in language. We argue that a similar conclusion extends to music, and we highlight it by investigating ways in which orchestration and dance may make cross-referential dependencies more explicit. Second, we show that by bringing music semantics closer to the semantics of visual narratives, we can give an account of the semantics of mixed visual and musical sequences. Third, it has been claimed that co-speech gestures trigger characteristic conditionalized presuppositions, called ‘cosuppositions’, and that their semantic status derives from their parasitic character relative to words. We argue that the same conclusion extends to some instances of film and cartoon music: it may trigger cosuppositions that can be revealed by embedding film excerpts or gifs in sentences so as to test presupposition projection. We further argue that under special discourse conditions, pro-speech gestures and pro-speech music alike can trigger cosuppositions as well. These results suggest that new insights can be gained not just by extending the methods of semantics to new objects, but also by drawing new connections among them. (shrink)

Numerous authors have attempted to carve an ontological distinction between events and processes on the basis of a widely noted linguistic datum involving count and mass nouns, where events are thought to be analogous to countable objects while processes to non-countable stuff. By assessing the most developed of these proposals—that of Helen Steward’s—this paper locates the motivations behind the project of carving some such distinction between events and processes, and proceeds to offer considerations toward an alternative account of processes—one whose (...) ontology is more akin to that of states than it is to stuff. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the fact that not only adverbially quantified sentences with singular indefinites or bare plurals but also ones containing plural definites show Quantificational Variability Effects, that is, they receive readings according to which the quantificational force of the respective DP seems to depend on the quantificational force of the Q-adverb. We show that if the Q-adverb is a frequency adverb like usually, there is strong evidence that QVEs come about as indirect effects of a quantification over (...) situations. This conclusion is based on the fact that in such cases the availability of QVEs is constrained in ways that have no parallel in sentences containing adverbs of quantity like for the most part or quantificational DPs instead of frequency adverbs. We show that these constraints can be derived from plausible assumptions about how the situations to be quantified over are constrained: they have to be located in time on the basis of the most specific locally available information, and their running times are not allowed to overlap. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the distribution and the interpretation of the temporal suffix -kue in Mbyá, a Guaraní language that is closely related to Paraguayan Guaraní. This suffix is attested both inside noun phrases and inside clauses. Interestingly, its nominal uses give rise to inferences that are unattested in its clausal uses. These inferences were first identified in Paraguayan Guaraní by Tonhauser, who called them the existence property and the change of state property. Tonhauser further argued that these properties (...) are built into the lexical entry of the nominal temporal marker -kue. By contrast, I argue that -kue denotes a relative past tense both in its nominal and clausal uses, and that the existence and change of state properties are pragmatic inferences that arise from the interaction of the literal meaning of -kue with general constraints on the interpretation of noun phrases, notably constraints on the topicality of the time of evaluation of noun phrases. This allows me to maintain a uniform analysis of -kue across its nominal uses and its clausal uses. The analysis of -kue in Mbyá is relevant to a number of current debates on the expression of tense crosslinguistically. Firstly, the existence of relative tenses has sometimes been called into question. Klein notably argues that relative tenses are actually combinations of tense with the perfect aspect. Others have argued that there exist true relative tenses in certain languages. I argue that facts of Mbyá support the latter view. Secondly, Klein famously defined tenses as relations between topic times and the time of utterance. I argue, on the other hand, that relative tenses only denote relations between times, and that the topicality or non-topicality of their temporal arguments depends on their context of use, including their syntactic environment. Thirdly, this paper contributes to debates on the nature and reality of nominal tenses The Oxford handbook of tense and aspect, 2012), by arguing that tense in Mbyá is a genuinely nominal category, in the sense that temporal functional projections are part of the extended projection of the noun phrase. (shrink)

This paper considers the possibility of anaphoric dependencies to the objects of creation verbs in progressive aspect. It is shown that such dependencies are possible in the right circumstances and a classification of the felicitous cases is proposed. A formal analysis making use of pragmatic information and discourse structure is given. Finally, some broader implications of the analysis are discussed.