We discuss focus sensitivity in English, the phenomenon whereby interpretation of some expressions is affected by placement of intonational focus. We concentrate in particular on the interpretation of always and only, both of which are interpreted as universal quantifiers, and both of which are focus sensitive. Using both naturally occurring and constructed data we explore the interaction of these operators with negative polarity items, with presupposition, with prosodically reduced elements, and with syntactic extraction. On the basis of this data we (...) show that while only lexically encodes a dependency on the placement of focus, always does not. Rather, the focus sensitivity of always results from its dependency on context, and from the fact that focus also reflects what is given in the context. We account for this split using an analysis couched in event semantics. (shrink)

This paper proposes that a core semantic property of temporal locating adverbs is the ability to introduce a new time discourse referent. The core data comes from that same day in narrative discourse. I argue that unlike other previously studied temporal locating adverbs—which introduce a new time discourse referent and relate it to the speech time or a salient time introduced into the discourse context—that same day is ‘twice anaphoric’, i.e. it retrieves two salient times from the input context without (...) introducing one of its own. Moreover, I argue that the adverb currently is like that same day in not introducing a new time discourse referent. Unlike that same day, however, currently has both a deictic and an anaphoric usage analogous to on Sunday. The analysis that I propose is implemented within Compositional Discourse Representation Theory. It illustrates how adverbial meaning can be integrated within a more general theory of temporal interpretation. (shrink)

This paper is about a topic in the semantics of interrogatives.1 In what follows a number of assumptions figure at the background which, though intuitively appealing, have not gone unchallenged, and it seems therefore only fair to draw the reader’s attention to them at the outset. The first assumption concerns a very global intuition about the kind of semantic objects that we associate with interrogatives. The intuition is that there is an intimate relationship between interrogatives and their answers: an interrogative (...) determines what counts as an answer.2 Given a certain, independently motivated, view on what constitutes the meaning of an answer, this intuition, in return, determines what constitutes the meaning of an interrogative. For example, starting from the observation that answers are true or false in situations, we may be led to the view that answers express propositions, i.e., objects which determine a truth value in a situation. Given that much, our basic intuition says that interrogatives are to be associated with objects which determine propositions. Such objects will be referred to as ‘questions’ in what follows. Notice that all this is largely framework independent: we have made no assumptions yet about what situations, propositions, and questions are, we have only related them in a certain systematic way. In fact we will use a more or less standard, but certainly not uncontroversial, specification in what follows: situations are identified with (total) possible worlds; propositions with sets of worlds; and questions with equivalence relations on the set of worlds. The second assumption that plays a role in what follows is of a more linguistic nature. Interrogatives typically occur in two ways: as independent expressions, and as complements of certain verbs. The assumption is that these two ways of occurring are systematically related, not just syntactically but also semantically.3 Notice that the exact nature of this relationship is underdeter.. (shrink)

As Donnellan (1966) and many others have pointed out, a sentence like (1) has two readings: 1. The person who's parked in front of the restaurant is in a hurry. On the attributive reading, the description the person who's parked in front of the restaurant is interpreted as a quantifier: it says that the unique person who's parked in front of the restaurant is in a hurry, with no implication that the speaker has a particular person in mind — maybe (...) she simply inferred his haste from his choice of a parking spot. On the referential reading, the description picks out a particular person — say Jones, who's waiting for his car at the valet parking station with visible impatience. The question is, is (1) semantically ambiguous? Not if you accept the Russellian view, which holds that the description in (1) is always interpreted as a quantifier, with the referential interpretation arising via a conversational implicature that arises from the hearer's assumption that the speaker is trying to say something relevant and has a particular person in mind. In that case the utterance doesn't literally say anything about Jones, though the speaker may succeed in identifying him by uttering it. (shrink)

I outline a discourse-based account of presuppositions that relies on insights from the writings of Peter Strawson, as well as on insights from more recent work by Robert Stalnaker and Barbara Abbott. One of the key elements of my account is the idea that presuppositions are “assertorically inert”, in the sense that they are background propositions, rather than being part of the “at issue” or asserted content. Strawson is often assumed to have defended the view that the falsity of a (...) presupposition leads to catastrophe, in the sense that a false presupposition “wrecks the assertive enterprise”. I argue that the discourse-based account in terms of assertoric inertia can explain how cases of presupposition failure can sometimes be non-catastrophic; there are cases in which the assertive enterprise operates smoothly, despite presupposition failure. The chief problem facing this line of argument is to account for cases in which presupposition failure is catastrophic. If presuppositions are assertorically inert, then how can their falsity ever wreck the assertive enterprise? I offer a principled account that delineates the circumstances in which false presuppositions are, and those in which they are not, catastrophic. (shrink)

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 (...) resolution. I argue that the apparent effects of topic/focus articulation and presuppositional information on the interpretation of quantifiers are not the result of a direct and local mechanism of sentence grammar. Instead, I develop an analysis where the link is established via the anaphoric dependence of quantifier domains on the discourse context. Chapter 3 discusses the analysis of conditional clauses as quantifier restrictors, concentrating on the question whether conditional clauses restrict quantifiers directly or indirectly. A treatment is explored which has if-clauses constrain the value of the hidden domain variable of the restricted quantifier. Chapter 4, on unless-clauses, and Chapter 5, on only if- and even if-clauses, present some issues in the compositional analysis of complex conditional clauses. These chapters significantly expand the data coverage of the theory of A-quantification. Building on previous work of mine on exceptives, I analyze unless-clauses as exceptive operators on A-quantifiers. The analysis of only if-clauses, treated as conditional clauses that combine if with the focus adverb only, unearthes some interesting new properties. Chapter 6, finally, examines the phenomenon of donkey-anaphora in the light of the results of the previous chapters. I show that a solution to the proportion problem may become possible once we combine the situation-semantic approach to adverbial quantification with the pragmatic theory developed in Chapter 2 and further elaborated in the analysis of donkey anaphora in complex conditionals. (shrink)

The paper proposes a novel analysis of quantificational subordination, e.g. Harvey courts a woman at every convention. {She is very pretty. vs. She always comes to the banquet with him.} (Karttunen 1976), in particular of the fact that the indefinite in the initial sentence can have wide or narrow scope, but the first discourse as a whole allows only for the wide scope reading, while the second discourse allows for both readings. The cross-sentential interaction between scope and anaphora is captured (...) in terms of structured anaphora to quantifier domains, formalized in a new dynamic system couched in classical type logic; given the underlying type logic, Montague-style compositionality at sub-clausal level follows automatically. Modal subordination (Roberts 1987) is analyzed in a parallel way, thereby capturing the parallels between the individual and modal domains argued for in Stone (1999). Several other phenomena are analyzed in terms of structured anaphora: exceptional wide scope, weak / strong donkey readings, anaphoric / uniqueness-implying definite descriptions and interactions between same / different and quantifier scope. (shrink)

Most studies of the so-called proportion problem seek to understand how lexical and structural properties of sentences containing adverbial quantifiers give rise to various proportional readings. This paper explores a related but distinct problem: given a use of a particular sentence in context, why do only some of the expected proportional readings seem to be available? That is, why do some sentences allow an asymmetric reading when other, structurally similar sentences seem to require a symmetric reading? Potential factors suggested in (...) the literature include the distribution of donkey pronouns, certain uniqueness implications, and focus structures. I argue here that the use of an adverbial quantifier presupposes HOMOGENEITY: all individual situations that get lumped into a single case for the purposes of evaluating the quantification must agree on whether they satisfy the nuclear scope. For instance, in order for a token of Usually, if a farmer owns a donkey, he beats it to be felicitous when construed under a farmer-dominant asymmetric reading, the context must be consistent with the proposition that each farmer either beats all or none of his donkeys. Thus proportional sentences are indeed systematically ambiguous, but only some readings will be felicitous in a given context. (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)

It is well known that occurrences of sentences such as “Every bottle is empty” will sometimes be understood relative to a subset of the set of all bottles in the universe. Much has been written about what mechanism should be used to model this phenomenon of domain restriction. However, comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of when domain restriction is triggered. I will begin by challenging a recent partial answer to this question. I will then develop my (...) own partial answer based on observations pertaining to information structure. (shrink)

This paper examines a type of discourse structure we here call ‘generic passages’. We argue that generic passages should be analyzed as sequences of generic sentences, each sentence containing its own GEN operator (Krifka et al. 1995). The GEN operators produce tripartite matrix/restrictor structures; the main discourse connection among the sentences is that the restrictor produced by each sentence in the sequence has as its contents the information in the matrix produced by the previous sentence in the discourse. We also (...) argue that an identity of reference times is required for this process to occur. In the end generic passages are a natural product of the interaction of generic operators in sentences with independently- established principles structuring ordinary extensional narrative. (shrink)