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This paper presents an exploratory production study of Bharatanatyam, a figurative (narrative) dance. We investigate the encoding of coreference vs. disjoint reference in this dance and argue that a formal semantics of narrative dance can be modeled in line with Abusch’s (2013, 2014, 2015) semantics of visual narrative (drawing also on Schlenker’s, 2017a, approach to music semantics). A main finding of our investigation is that larger-level group-boundaries (Charnavel, 2016) can be seen as triggers for discontinuity inferences (possibly involving the dynamic shift from one salient entity to another).
This paper argues that extant approaches to presupposition projection that either rely on strict linear order (Schlenker, 2009) or hierarchy (Romoli and Mandelkern, 2017) cannot provide a uniform account of data drawn from head-final languages. While building on Schlenker’s theory, this paper resolves the issues by restricting the calculation of local contexts to specific points in the parsing process. The consequence is that the theory makes a prediction robust to the head directionality parameter
This paper argues that traces only range over individual semantic types and cannot be type shifted into higher types to circumvent this restriction. The evidence comes from movement targeting positions where DPs must denote properties and the behavior of definite descriptions in these positions. These constraints on possible traces demonstrate that syntactic operations impose active restrictions on permissible semantic types in natural language.
We present an experiment which tests children’s comprehension of the requirements of use of pronouns and definites. An adult-like use of definites and pronouns imposes different but related requirements. In the case of definites, a unique referent is required in the context, whereas in the case of a pronoun, the referent in the context has to be salient. In this experiment, we use a novel word task to test three-year-olds’ sensitivity to these requirements. Our results show that children are adult-like in their sensitivity to salience in their comprehension of pronouns, compared to definites. However, they failed to show sensitivity to the uniqueness requirement on the use of definites.
This paper addresses the question of how to account for the semantic variability of weak free adjuncts. Weak free adjuncts are non-clausal adjuncts that associate with an argument of the main predicate, contribute propositional content, and can interact with temporal or modal operators, which leads to different, adverbial-clause-like interpretations. I focus on a specific type of weak adjuncts, non-clausal as-phrases, and propose a unified semantic analysis for the full range of interpretational possibilities that takes into account the interpretational contingency on different syntactic positions. I show that this analysis improves on Stump’s (1985) original analysis of weak adjuncts. I then go on to discuss the limitations of both Stump’s account and the unified account. Both accounts fail to capture that the interaction of weak adjuncts with modal operators underlies certain restrictions on the properties of the modal operators—an observation that has not been discussed in the literature so far.
This paper investigates the interpretation of Japanese -toka and -tari, two nonexhaustive particles that receive conjunctive interpretations in upward-entailing environments, but disjunctive interpretations in downward-entailing and question contexts.
We analyze -toka and -tari as items that introduce unstructured sets of alternatives in a Hamblin-style alternative semantics (Hamblin, 1973; Kratzer and Shimoyama, 2002), and derive their conjunctive and disjunctive readings via an interaction between these sets and the semantics of the environment containing them.
Tiwa (Tibeto-Burman; India) has two series of epistemic indefinites: one whose epistemic effects arise via an anti-singleton constraint similar to Spanish alg´un (Alonso-Ovalle and Men´endez-Benito, 2010), and another, wide-scope indefinite whose epistemic effects must be derived differently. I propose that for these latter indefinites, ignorance arises not through domain constraints, but as a result of their choice functional nature through competition with other indefinites. Tiwa’s wide scope indefinites then constitute a new kind of epistemic indefinite, showing that ignorance implicatures for indefinites can arise through different sorts of competition.
This paper argues that Double Access sentences in English (Smith, 1978) are a kind of loose talk. When the meaning of a Double Access sentence is computed literally, the result is infelicity. Double Access sentences can be used meaningfully only when rescued by pragmatics which intervenes to interpret the embedded clause loosely. A formal model for loose interpretation, building on Klecha (2018), is provided.
This paper compares the modal particle fei (Schlieben-Lange, 1979; Thoma, 2009) with the modal particle/sentence adverb aber (not to be confused with the conjunction aber, ‘but’). Intuitively, both items express some form of contrast and correction. We will show that both are special among discourse particles in the following sense: They make a contribution that is interpreted at a level distinct from the level where at-issue content (Potts, 2005) is interpreted, as is standard for modal particles (see Gutzmann, 2015 and the references therein). But more interestingly, they exclusively relate to propositions that have not entered the Common Ground via being the at-issue content of an assertion made by the addressee.
Depiction verbs such as paint license i(mage)- and p(ortrait)-readings; for instance, Ben painted a cow can convey that Ben produced an image of an unspecific cow or a portrait of a specific cow. This paper takes issue with a property-based intensional analysis of depiction verbs (Zimmermann, 2006b, 2016) and instead argues for an extensional account. Accordingly, the i-reading is rooted in the introduction of worldly representations by the explicit noun cow as such, whereas the p-reading is rooted in the interpolation of an implicit representation via coercion. This take on the ambiguity captures the following key traits. On i-readings, only representations are accessible to quantifiers and anaphors; moreover, intensional effects such as substitution failure disappear once ordinary objects and representations are adequately distinguished. P-readings, by contrast, involve representations that depend on the portrayed ordinary objects as particulars; correspondingly, only ordinary objects are accessible to quantifiers and anaphors. The proposal is spelled out in Asher’s (2011) Type Composition Logic.