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This paper revisits the question of whether propositions in situation semantics must be persistent (Kratzer (1989)). It shows that ignoring persistence causes empirical problems to theories which use quantification over minimal situations as a solution for donkey anaphora (Elbourne (2005)), while at the same time modifying these theories to incorporate persistence makes them incompatible with the use of situations for contextual restriction (Kratzer (2004)).
The paper investigates the interaction of focus and adverbial quantification in Hausa, a Chadic tone language spoken in West Africa. The discussion focuses on similarities and differences between intonation and tone languages concerning the way in which adverbial quantifiers (AQs) and focus particles (FPs) associate with focus constituents. It is shown that the association of AQs with focused elements does not differ fundamentally in intonation and tone languages such as Hausa, despite the fact that focus marking in Hausa works quite differently. This may hint at the existence of a universal mechanism behind the interpretation of adverbial quantifiers across languages. From a theoretical perspective, the Hausa data can be taken as evidence in favour of pragmatic approaches to the focus-sensitivity of AQs, such as e.g. Beaver & Clark (2003).
Russian predicate cleft constructions have the surprising property of being associated with adversative clauses of the opposite polarity. I argue that clefts are associated with adversative clauses because they have the semantics of S-Topics in Büring's (1997, 2000) sense of the term. It is shown that the polarity of the adversative clause is obligatorily opposed to that of the cleft because the use of a cleft gives rise to a relevance-based pragmatic scale. The ordering principle according to which these scale
This paper looks at sentences with "quantificational indefinites," discussed by Diesing (1992) and others. I propose that these sentences generate sets of alternatives of the form {p, not p and it's possible that p}, which restrict the quantification by an extension of familiar focus principles. For example, in the sentence "I usually read a book about slugs" (on the relevant reading), "usually" quantifies over pairs <x,t> such that x is a book about slugs, t is a time interval, and one alternative is true from the set {I read x at t, I can but do not read x at t}. In addition to accounting for a well-known contrast between creation and non-creation verbs, this also explains a second contrast that Diesing’s analysis cannot account for.
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The interpretation of traces
(2004)
This paper argues that parts of the lexical content of an A-bar moved phrase must be interpreted in the base position of movement. The argument is based on a study of deletion of a phrase that contains the base position of movement. I show that deletion licensing is sensitive to the content of the moved phrase. In this way, I corroborate and extend conclusions based on Condition C reconstruction by N. Chomsky and D. Fox. My result provides semantic evidence for the existence of traces and gives semantic content to the A/A-bar distinction.
There is an elegant account, proposed by Beaver and Condoravdi (2003), that assumes that the temporal connectives before and after are converses (i.e., they are analyzed by means of a unified lexical schema), and that explains away their different logical and veridical behavior appealing to other factors. There is an elegant explanation that connects the licensing of Polarity Items to informational strengthening requirements: Polarity Items are viewed as existentials that lead to a widening of the domain of quantification, and they are predicted to be legitimate only when this widening leads to a stronger statement (roughly, in downward monotone contexts). My plan is to connect these two approaches – by proposing an amendment in the definition Beaver and Condoravdi presented for before and after that is meant to account also for their Polarity Items licensing behavior.
Multiple modals construction
(2006)
Modal items of different semantic types can only be combined in a specific order. Epistemic items, for instance, cannot be embedded under deontic ones. I'll argue that this fact cannot be explained by the current semantic theories of modality. A solution to this problem will be developed in an update semantics framework. On the semantic side, a distinction will be drawn between circumstantial information about the world and information about duties, whereas I'll use Nuyts' notion of m-performativity to account for certain use of the modal items.