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Discourses in the historical (or narrative) use of the simple present in English prohibit backshifting, though they allow forward sequencing. Unlike both reference time theories and discourse coherence theories of these temporal inferences, we propose that backshifting has a different source from narrative progression. In particular, we argue that backshifting arises through anaphora to a salient event in the preceding discourse.
The semantics of adjectives related to nominals denoting societal roles, such as presidential (from president), have remained understudied. We examine the semantics of what we call role-denoting relational adjectives, providing a formal analysis using the notion of a frame, a unified representation for lexical knowledge, world knowledge, and context. The frames we propose are based on a constructivist philosophical understanding of social roles, leading us to posit a multi-tiered ontology of events and individuals. Using frames and our ontology, we provide a general semantics for role-denoting relational adjectives and roles
This paper presents a new account of the generalization that focused elements cannot be elided, framed within Unalternative Semantics, a framework that does away with syntactic F-marking. We propose the mirror image of the generalization: what is elided cannot introduce alternatives. We implement this as a focus restriction in UAS and then go on to show how to account for MAXELIDE effects using the same technique, without making reference to any transderivational constraints.
According to Ogihara (1995), the usage of the embedded present in a speech report such as John said that Mary is in the room is restricted by the cause of John’s belief (the state that made John think that Mary is in the room): the present tense can be used only if this cause still holds at the time that John said that Mary is in the room is uttered.
This paper presents experimental evidence demonstrating that this is only one of the factors that licenses a felicitous usage of the embedded present tense. In particular, we show that the cause of belief still holding is not a necessary condition, and identify two additional, sufficient (but not necessary) factors: in cases of false belief, who is aware of the falsity of the belief and duration of the reported state. While these factors are independent, they collectively support the idea that the present tense encodes ‘current relevance’, even in embedded contexts (e.g. Costa 1972; McGilvray 1974). This gives rise to the question of how we can derive ‘current relevance’ and, in particular, whether previous analyses of the embedded present tense are adequately equipped to do so.
Analyses of scope reconstruction typically fall into two competing approaches: 'semantic reconstruction', which derives non-surface scope using semantic mechanisms, and 'syntactic reconstruction', which derives it by positing additional syntactic representations at the level of Logical Form. Grosu and Krifka (2007) proposed a semantic-reconstruction analysis for relative clauses like the gifted mathematician that Dan claims he is, in which the relative head NP can be interpreted in the scope of a lower intensional quantifier. Their analysis relies on type-shifting the relative head into a predicate of functions. We develop an alternative analysis for such relative clauses that replaces type-shifting with syntactic reconstruction. The competing analyses diverge in their predictions regarding scope possibilities in head-external relative clauses. We use Hebrew resumptive pronouns, which disambiguate a relative clause in favor of the head-external structure, to show that the prediction of syntactic reconstruction is correct. This result suggests that certain type-shifting operations are not made available by Universal Grammar.
Sentences containing subjective predicates - e.g., "The movie was awesome"” - are intuitively anchored to a particular perspective; this makes them different from sentences describing objective facts - e.g., "The movie was set in 1995".
While authors have long debated on whether this intuition tracks a lexical distinction between subjective and factual predicates, much remains to be explored on whether, and how, the difference between these two assertions is reflected at the illocutionary level. Relying on evidence from two experiments, we show that assertions containing subjective predicates display different discourse behavior from objective assertions. We take these findings to support the idea that SAs should be assigned a special illocutionary profile, unveiling a genuine empirical difference between subjective and factual speech.
Alternative Questions with "or not" (NAQ) convey a cornering effect, which is not found with they polar counterparts (PQ). This effect has been claimed to consist of two parts (Biezma 2009): NAQs (i) cannot be used discourse-initially and (ii) they do not license followup questions/subquestions.
In this paper, we ask the following: Are both parts of cornering linked to the same property of NAQs? Or do they reflect distinct linguistic phenomena? We explore the issue by comparing the behavior of NAQs to Complement Alternative Questions (CAQ), a type of question that, like NAQs, presents logically opposite alternatives but, unlike NAQs, fully spells out the second one. Results from two experiments suggest that both parts of cornering can instead be explained in terms of independent semantic and pragmatic principles, which operate beyond the domain of alternative questions.
In recent years, experimental research has demontrated great variability in the rates of scalar inferences across different triggering expressions (Doran et al. 2009, 2012, van Tiel et al. 2016). These studies have been taken as evidence against the so-called uniformity assumption, which posits that scalar implicature is triggered by a single mechanism and that the behaviour of one scale should generalize to the whole family of scales. In the following, we present an experimental study that tests negative strengthening for a variety of strong scalar terms, following up on van Tiel et al. (2016). For example, we tested whether the statement John is not brilliant is strengthened to mean that John is not intelligent (see especially Horn 1989). We show that endorsement rates of the scalar implicature (e.g., John is intelligent but not brilliant) are anti-correlated with endorsements of negative strengthening. Further, we demonstrate that a modified version of the uniformity hypothesis taking into account negative strengthening is consistent with van Tiel et al.’s data. Therefore, variation across scales may be more systematic than suggested by the van Tiel et al. study.
The Wolof imperfective auxiliary di is compatible with event-in-progress, habitual and future readings. Furthermore, while varieties of all these readings are available for di when it sits in a syntactically low position, only future readings are available when it sits in a syntactically high position. We aim to account for this puzzle by combining several ingredients independently motivated in the literature: (i) event-relative circumstantial modality for event-in-progress, habitual, and a subset of future readings; (ii) metaphyisical modality for generalized future readings; (iii) the idea that syntactic height determines the type of modal anchor that projects a modal base. This study contributes to our understanding of the relation between syntactic height and modal flavor, as well as the nature of modal-aspectual interactions cross-linguistically.
Miners and modals
(2018)
I generalise Kolodny and MacFarlane’s miners puzzle by showing epistemic analogues of their case exist. After motivating various conservative approaches to the original problem, I show how they fail to solve the problem in its epistemic guise. I argue that a probabilistic approach to information-sensitivity gives a general solution to the problem.