The distinction between telic and atelic predicates has been described in terms of the algebraic properties of their meaning since the early days of model-theoretic semantics. This perspective was inspired by Aristotle’s discussion of types of actions that do or do not take time to be completed1 which was taken up and turned into a linguistic discussion of action-denoting predicates by Vendler (1957). The algebraic notion that seemed to be most conducive to express the Aristotelian distinction appeared to be the (...) mereological notion of a part, applied to the time at which these predicates hold: atelic predicates, like push a cart, have the subinterval property, that is, whenever they are true at a time interval, then they are true at any part of that interval; this does not hold for telic predicates, like eat an apple, cf. Bennett & Partee (1972), Taylor (1977), and Dowty (1979)2. Bach (1986) integrated these insights into a semantics based on events. (shrink)

This paper discusses three potential varieties of update: updates to the common ground, structuring updates, and updates that introduce discourse referents. These different types of update are used to model different aspects of natural language phenomena. Not-at-issue information directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary mood of a sentence structures the context. Other updates introduce discourse referents of various types, including propositional discourse referents for at-issue information. Distinguishing these types of update allows a unified treatment of a broad range of (...) phenomena, including the grammatical evidentials found in Cheyenne (Algonquian) as well as English evidential parentheticals, appositives, and mood marking. An update semantics that can formalize all of these varieties of update is given, integrating the different kinds of semantic contributions into a single representation of meaning. (shrink)

1 This paper has been presented at the workshop “Time and Modality: A Round Table on Tense, Mood, and Modality”, Paris, December 2005, at a CUNY linguistics colloquium in May 2006, and at the 6th Workshop on Formal Linguistics in Florian´opolis, Brazil, August 2006. We thank the audiences at those presentations, in particular Orin Percus, Tim Stowell, Marcel den Dikken, Anna Szabolcsi, Chris Warnasch, Roberta Pires de Oliveira, Renato Miguel Basso, and Ana M¨uller. We thank Noam Chomsky, Cleo Condoravdi, and (...) Irene Heim for very helpful conversations about this material. We thank Bridget Copley for sharing with us her recent manuscript “What Should Should.. (shrink)

When I tell you that it’s raining, I describe a way the world is—viz., rainy. I say something whose truth turns on how things are with the weather in the world. Likewise when I tell you that the weatherman thinks that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I say turns on how things are with the weatherman’s state of mind in the world. Likewise when I tell you that I think that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I (...) say turns on how things are with my state of mind in the world. (shrink)

Polarity phenomena in language are pervasive and quite diverse. A quite familiar polarity item (PI) is any. Any a PI because it exhibits limited distribution: it is ungrammatical in positive sentences, but becomes fine with negation, in questions, with modal verbs, and in the scope of downward entailing quantifiers like few.

In modal subordination, a modal sentence is interpreted relative to a hypothetical scenario introduced in an earlier sentence. In this paper, I argue that this phenomenon reflects the fact that the interpretation of modals is an ANAPHORIC process. Modal morphemes introduce sets of possible worlds, representing alternative hypothetical scenarios, as entities into the discourse model. Their interpretation depends on evoking sets of worlds recording described and reference scenarios, and relating such sets to one another using familiar notions of restricted, preferential (...) quantification. This proposal relies on an extended model of environments in dynamic semantics to keep track of associations between possible worlds and ordinary individuals; it assumes that modal meanings and other lexical meanings encapsulate quantification over possible worlds. These two innovations are required in order for modals to refer to sets of possible worlds directly as static objects in place of the inherently dynamic objects—quite different from the referents of pronouns and tenses—used in previous accounts. The simpler proposal that results offers better empirical coverage and suggests a new parallel between modal and temporal interpretation. (shrink)

The paper explains response particles like yes and no as anaphoric elements that pick up propositional discourse referents that are introduced by preceding sentences. It is argued that negated antecedent clauses introduce two propositional discourse referents, which results in ambiguities of answers that are partly resolved by pragmatic optimization. The paper also discusses response particles like okay, right, uh-huh, uh-uh, and German ja, nein and doch.

The Proviso Problem is the discrepancy between the predictions of nearly every major theory of semantic presupposition about what is semantically presupposed by conditionals, disjunctions, and conjunctions, versus observations about what speakers of certain sentences are felt to be presupposing. I argue that the Proviso Problem is a more serious problem than has been widely recognized. After briefly describing the problem and two standard responses to it, I give a number of examples which, I argue, show that those responses are (...) inadequate. I conclude by briefly exploring alternate approaches to presupposition that avoid this problem. -/- . (shrink)

Writers on presupposition, and on the ‘‘projection problem’’ of determining the presuppositions of compound sentences from their component clauses, traditionally assign presuppositions to each clause in isolation. I argue that many presuppositional elements are anaphoric to previous discourse or contextual elements. In compound sentences, these can be other clauses of the sentence. We thus need a theory of presuppositional anaphora, analogous to the corresponding pronominal theory.

In the semantic literature, there is a class of examples involving anaphora in intensional contexts, i.e. under the scope of modal operators or propositional attitude predicates, which display anaphoric relations that appear at first glance to violate otherwise well-supported generalizations about operator scope and anaphoric potential. In Section 1,I will illustrate this phenomenon, which, for reasons that should become clear below, I call modal subordination; I will develop a general schema for its identification, and show how it poses problems for (...) most theories of scope and anaphoric relations. In Section 2, I will review the main approaches which have been considered in attempting to account for modal subordination and argue that only an approach involving accommodation can account for the full range of examples. The notion of accommodation is due to Lewis, who defines it as follows: If at time t something is said that requires presupposition P to be acceptable, and if P is not presupposed just before t, then - ceteris paribus and within certain limits - presupposition P comes into existence at t.(Lewis 1979: 340) The interesting question, of course, is what the limits on accommodation might be. I believe that the proper account of modal subordination has something to say about this. I will argue this briefly in section 3, where I draw some conclusions and also sketch some ... (shrink)

The current literature on presupposition focuses almost exclusively on the projection problem: the question of how and why the presuppositions of atomic clauses are projected to complex sentences which embed them. Very little attention has been paid to the question of how and why these presuppositions arise at all. As Kay (1992, p.335) observes, “treatments of the presupposition inheritance problem almost never deal with the reasons that individual words and constructions give rise, in the first place, to the particular presuppositions (...) that they do.”1 This is the question on which this paper will focus. (shrink)

“Be Articulate: A Pragmatic Theory of Presupposition Projection” is a remarkable paper in at least two respects: First, it is the only broadly Gricean treatment of presuppositions that generates precise and accurate predictions about the pattern of presupposition projection. Schlenker proposes that presuppositions arise as a result of a pragmatic prohibition against using one short construction to express two independent meanings. This basic idea is quite an old one.1 But no one has ever elaborated this pragmatic story in a way (...) that yields a systematic theory of presupposition projection. Indeed, for many, the fact that pragmatic approaches to presupposition did not easily account for a wide range of projection behavior (most previous accounts contented themselves by treating projection out of negation) was a reason to be skeptical of such pragmatic approaches. Schlenker’s work puts this worry about Gricean accounts to rest. (shrink)

Presents a version of dynamic semantics for a language with presuppositions that predicts basic facts about presupposition projection in a non-stipulative way.

The neo-Gricean account: the source of these scalar implicatures is a reasoning process (undertaken by the hearer), which culminates in an inference about the belief state of the speaker.

The interpretation of conditionals in the scope of a quantifier (as in ‘No student will succeed if he goofs off’) presents a troubling puzzle. Either we are forced to abandon the thesis that natural language obeys the compositionality principle, or we must commit to a semantics for conditionals that involves an uncomfortably high degree of stipulation. This article surveys the recent literature on quantified conditionals and aims to pinpoint the issues that stand in the way of a compositional analysis.

The term ‘ellipsis’ can be used to refer to a variety of phenomena: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. In this article, I discuss the recent comprehensive survey by Stainton 2006 of these kinds of ellipsis with respect to the analysis of nonsententials and try to show that despite his trenchant criticisms and insightful proposal, some of the criticisms can be evaded and the insights incorporated into a semantic ellipsis analysis, making a ‘divide-and-conquer’ strategy to the properties of nonsententials feasible after all. (...) -/- Editor's comment: To find the contribution, please go to item 16 of the URL, which contains the full text. Professor Merchant has permitted this. (shrink)

This paper will be concerned with the conjunctive interpretation of a family of disjunctive constructions. The relevant conjunctive interpretation, sometimes referred to as a “free choice effect,” (FC) is attested when a disjunctive sentence is embedded under an existential modal operator. I will provide evidence that the relevant generalization extends (with some caveats) to all constructions in which a disjunctive sentence appears under the scope of an existential quantifier, as well as to seemingly unrelated constructions in which conjunction appears under (...) the scope of negation and a universal quantifier. (shrink)

I will assume (without explicitly argue for it here) that the verb’s external argument is not an argument of the verb root itself, but is introduced by a separate head in a neo-Davidsonian way. The content argument can be saturated by DPs denoting the kinds of things that can be believed or reported.

This paper explores the role that the scalar properties and presuppositions of even play in creating polarity sensitive even meanings crosslinguistically (henceforth EVEN). I discuss the behavior of three lexically distinct Greek counterparts of even in positive, negative, subjunctive sentences, and polar questions. These items are shown to be polarity sensitive, and a three-way distinction is posited between a positive polarity (akomi ke), a negative polarity (oute), and a ‘flexible scale’even(esto) which does not introduce likelihood, but is associated with scales (...) made salient by the context. The analysis is a refinement of Rooth’s original idea that negative polarity is involved in the interpretation of English even, and establishes further that the “negative” polarity domain of EVEN includes a sensitivity that is not strictly speaking negative (flexible scale esto). The distributional restrictions of EVEN items are shown to follow from distinct presuppositions (positive polarity and flexible scale EVEN), or from their lexical featural specification (negative polarity EVEN), a result that squares neatly with the fact that ill-formedness is systematic pragmatic deviance in the former case but robust ungrammaticality in the latter. This result supports the by now widely accepted view that polarity dependencies are not of uniform nature, and that we need to distinguish presupposition failures (which are weaker and possibly.. (shrink)

The main focus of this article is the occurrence of some polarity items (PIs) in the complements of emotive factive verbs and only. This fact has been taken as a challenge to the semantic approach to PIs (Linebarger 1980), because only and factive verbs are not downward entailing (DE). A modification of the classical DE account is proposed by introducing the notion of nonveridicality (Zwarts 1995, Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2001) as the one crucial for PI sanctioning. To motivate this move, (...) it is first shown that two solutions in the direction of weakening classical monotonicity do not work: Strawson DE (von Fintel 1999) and weak DE (Hoeksema 1986). Weakening DE systematically either overgenerates or undergenerates, in either case failing to characterize the correct set of licensers. Nonveridicality is introduced as a conservative extension of DE and is shown to account for PIs also in contexts that are not DE (i.e. questions, modal verbs, imperatives, directive propositional attitudes). This theory, augmented with the premise that certain PIs (i.e. the liberal class represented by any) are subject to a weaker polarity dependency identified not as LICENSING but as RESCUING by nonveridicality, explains the occurrence of this particular class with only and emotive factive verbs. Crosslinguistic comparisons illustrate that the occurrence of PIs with only and emotive factives is not a general phenomenon, and further support the dual nature of polarity dependency and the semantic characterization of the elements that license or rescue PIs. (shrink)

This paper argues that Hindi incorporation is, in fact, pseudoincorporation, involving noun phrases rather than nouns. Furthermore, it shows that there is no requirement that the incorporated nominal form a morphological or even a syntactic unit with the verb. Such loosely aligned nominals can nevertheless be identified as incorporation on the basis of semantic intuitions having to do with number interpretation, anaphora, and certain properties typically associated with lexical processes. Contrary to standard assumptions, it is argued that the targets of (...) pseduo-incorporation are specified for number. Singular incorporated nominals in Hindi are shown to be semantically singular, with number neutrality arising as a consequence of interaction with aspectual specification. Taking aspectual information into account is also shown to have interesting implications for current approaches to the semantics of incorporation, one in which the incorporated nominal introduces a discourse referent, and one in which it functions as a predicate modifier. A closer look at the effect of aspect on anaphora, for example, does not unequivocally support the predicate modification view of pseudoincorporation. The paper also explores the cross-linguistic applicability of the claims made on the basis of Hindi. Most notably, a distinction between Hungarian verbs with respect to incorporation of bare singulars provides striking confirmation of the claims that number morphology is semantically visible in pseudo-incorporation. It also discusses the restrictions on the productivity of pseudo-incorporation in light of the findings for Hindi and Hungarian. (shrink)

Jason Merchant (2004, and Chap. 3, this volume) proposes to account for all speech acts performed with “fragments,” whether in discourse-initial position or otherwise, by appealing to syntactic ellipsis. Though his proposal is insightful, I offer empirical and methodological considerations against it. Empirical problems include: (a) His alleged “elliptical sentences” do not embed the way they should; (b) in some cases where Merchant requires fronting to take place, it is blocked – either by an island (e.g., in English) or because (...) nonsubject fronting is not allowed in the language in question (e.g., in Malagasy); and (c) his “limited ellipsis” strategy, allowing do it and this is __ to be licensed in discourse-initial position, is not general enough. The methodological problem is that, his protests to the contrary, Merchant’s view multiplies hidden structure without necessity. (shrink)

Aspectual particles (the term is due to (König 1991)) appear to come in groups, related by negation, and therefore have attracted the attention of formal semanticists. The following examples list the particles of English, German and Hebrew; they show that the system is semantically transparent in various degrees.

This paper proposes a formalization of ability that is motivated in part by linguistic considerations and by the philosophical literature in action theory and the logic of ability, but that is also meant to match well with planning formalisms, and so to provide an account of the role of ability in practical reasoning. Some of the philosophical literature concerning ability, and in particular [Austin, 1956], suggests that some ways of talking about ability are context-dependent. I propose a way of formalizing (...) this dependency. (shrink)

This paper contributes to two debates: (i) the debate about whether or not ancient Greek has Free Indirect Discourse (FID), and (ii) the debate about how we should analyze FID semantically. We do this by showing that there is a distinction between FID and what we call Unembedded Indirect Discourse (UID). The semantic analysis that we develop for the latter shows that the two phenomena, though superficially similar, are semantically fundamentally different. We conclude that UID would have been more deserving (...) of the title ‘free indirect discourse’ than the more quotative and direct discourse-like narrative technique that is now confusingly called so. 1. (shrink)

Our immediate intuition about (1) is that –ever indicates speaker’s ignorance. We hear the speaker as signaling that she doesn’t know what Arlo is cooking, while at the same time asserting that no matter what Arlo is cooking, there’s a lot of garlic in it. The FR without –ever in (2) carries no such signal of ignorance.

The interpretation of if -clauses in the scope of ordinary quantifiers has provoked semanticists into extraordinary measures, such as abandoning compositionality or claiming that if has no meaning. We argue that if -clauses have a normal conditional meaning, even in the scope of ordinary quantifiers, and that the trick is to have the right semantics for conditionals.