This book revives the study of conventional implicatures in natural language semantics. H. Paul Grice first defined the concept. Since then his definition has seen much use and many redefinitions, but it has never enjoyed a stable place in linguistic theory. Christopher Potts returns to the original and uses it as a key into two presently under-studied areas of natural language: supplements and expressives. The account of both depends on a theory in which sentence meanings can be multidimensional. The theory (...) is logically and intuitively compositional, and it minimally extends a familiar kind of intensional logic, thereby providing an adaptable, highly useful tool for semantic analysis. The result is a linguistic theory that is accessible not only to linguists of all stripes, but also philosophers of language, logicians, and computer scientists who have linguistic applications in mind. (shrink)

This paper investigates the structure of English restrictive relative clauses. It provides support for the view that restrictive relative clauses are structurally ambiguous between two structures: the head-internal, raising structure and the matching structure, which has both an internal and an external head. We present a new test from extraposition facts that distinguishes between the raising and matching structures for relative clauses. Furthermore, this paper presents an account of the semantics of raising relative clauses which is intended to complete the (...) picture of the semantics of relative clauses. In particular, we argue that raising relative clauses are not islands for Quantifier Raising (QR) and that in these clauses there is successive cyclic movement through a CP-adjoined position. (shrink)

The second half of the book extends the theory of predication to cover copular constructions; it includes an account of the structure of small clauses in Hebrew ...

A unified theory is offered to account for three types of definite descriptions: with singular, plural, & mass predicates, & to provide an account for the word the in descriptions. It is noted that B. Russell's analysis ("On Denoting," Mind, 1905, 14, 479-493) failed to account for plural & mass descriptions. The proposed theory differs from Russell's only by the substitution of the notation (less than or equal to) for Russell's =. It is suggested that for every predicate G there (...) is an appropriate "part of" or "some of" relation on the extension of G. For singular predicates, (less than or equal to) becomes just the identity relation =. The predicate G is formulated as "the G" & analyzed with the formula ((schwa)x) (Gx . (Gy (includes) yy (less than or equal to) x)), which accounts for all cases of definite descriptions. It is suggested that the primary use of the is not to indicate uniqueness, but totality. C. Ornatowski. (shrink)

This paper studies the distribution of ‘list readings’ in questions like who does everyone like? vs. who likes everyone?. More generally, it focuses on the interaction between wh-words and quantified NPs. It is argued that, contrary to widespread belief, the pattern of available readings of constituent questions can be explained as a consequence of Weak Crossover, a well-known property of grammar. In particular, list readings are claimed to be a special case of ‘functional readings’, rather than arising from quantifying into (...) questions. Functional readings are argued to be encoded in the syntax as doubly indexed traces, which straightforwardly leads to a Crossover account of the absence of list readings in who likes everyone?. Empirical and theoretical consequences of this idea for the syntax and semantics of questions are considered. (shrink)

This paper provides a new argument for the raising analysis of relative clauses. This argument is based on the observation that certain adjectival modifiers on the head of a relative clause can be interpreted in positions internal to the relative clause. It is shown that the raising analysis of relative clauses is able to generate the readings corresponding to the relative clause internal interpretation of adjectival modifiers and that two competing analyses of relative clauses, the matching analysis and the head (...) external analysis, are not able to do so. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that there are more kinds of relative clause constructions between the linguistic heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the classical lore, which distinguishes just restrictive relative clauses and appositives. We start with degree relatives. Degree, or amount, relatives show restrictions in the relativizers they allow, in the determiners that can combine with them, and in their stacking possibilities. To account for these facts, we propose an analysis with two central, and novel, features: First, (...) we argue that the standard notion of degree (a number on a measuring scale) needs to be replaced by a notion of structured degree, which keeps track of the object measured. Second, we argue that at the CP-level of degree relatives an operation of (degree) maximalization takes place. We show that the observed facts concerning degree relatives follow from these assumptions. We then broaden the discussion to other relative clause constructions. We propose that the operation of maximalization takes place in relative clauses when the head noun is semantically interpreted CP-internally, while syntactically the CP is part of a DP that also contains CP-external material. Based on this, we argue that degree relatives form part of a linguistically coherent class of relative clause constructions -- we call them maximalizing relatives -- which all show restrictions similar to those observed for degree relatives, and which differ semantically (and often also syntactically) both from restrictive relative clauses and from appositives. We discuss free relatives, internally-headed relatives, and correlatives. (shrink)