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This book investigates the phenomenon of actuality inferences, in which claims of ability are-in certain temporal contexts-interpreted as descriptions of actual events, instead of as descriptions of potentialities or possibilities. Although actuality inferences evidently arise in the interaction between modality and aspect, they have long resisted compositional explication in standard treatments of these semantic categories. Prerna Nadathur here pursues a new approach, in which actuality inferences are linked to a novel component in the semantics of ability: causal dependence relations. The account is developed through a comparative, crosslinguistic semantic analysis of three predicate classes that license similar inferences: implicative verbs in Finnish and English, enough/too predicates in French and English, and (modal) ability predicates in French, Hindi, and English. Similarities in the inferential profiles of these predicates are tied to their shared causal background structure, while their differences-including in sensitivity to grammatical aspect-derive from differences in asserted content and associated aspectual class contrasts. The central argument is that a complex causal structure for ability interacts with the compositional requirements of aspect to derive the observed actuality-ability ambiguity. The volume shows that causal structure and causal relationships shape patterns of linguistic inference beyond the overtly causal domain, and thus contributes to a new and growing body of research in which formal, computational causal models are employed as an analytic tool for lexical and compositional semantics.

This book provides an introduction to compositional semantics and to the syntax/semantics interface. It is rooted within the tradition of model theoretic semantics, and develops an explicit fragment of both the syntax and semantics of a rich portion of English. Professor Jacobson adopts a Direct Compositionality approach, whereby the syntax builds the expressions while the semantics simultaneously assigns each a model-theoretic interpretation. Alongside this approach, the author also presents a competing view that makes use of an intermediate level, Logical Form. She develops parallel treatments of a variety of phenomena from both points of view with detailed comparisons. The book begins with simple and fundamental concepts and gradually builds a more complex fragment, including analyses of more advanced topics such as focus, negative polarity, and a variety of topics centering on pronouns and binding more generally. Exercises are provided throughout, alongside open-ended questions for students to consider. The exercises are interspersed with the text to promote self-discovery of the fundamentals and their applications. The book provides a rigorous foundation in formal analysis and model theoretic semantics and is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, philosophy of language, and related fields.

Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist es, das sogenannte Kompositionalitätsprinzip systematisch auf die Substantivkomposition anzuwenden und zu untersuchen, ob das semantische Prinzip als hinreichende Voraussetzung für das Verständnis unbekannter Benennungseinheiten gelten kann. Im Zentrum steht dabei die Frage, inwieweit sich die Bedeutung eines Substantivkompositums mit zwei nominalen Elementen aus den Bedeutungen seiner Konstituenten ‚errechnen‘ lässt und welche semantischen Eigenschaften die Anwendbarkeit des Kompositionalitätsprinzips begünstigen bzw. verhindern. Anhand verschiedener empirischer Untersuchungen kann gezeigt werden, dass eine Reformulierung des Kompositionalitätsprinzips vorgenommen werden muss, wenn dem semantischen Prinzip ein heuristischer Nutzen bei der Kompositadekodierung zugesprochen werden soll. Das Datenmaterial zeigt darüber hinaus die Notwendigkeit auf, dass die Theorie der Komposition modifiziert werden muss. Nur so kann sie zukünftig auch die Bedeutungen von solchen Komposita erklären, die gängigen Theorien zufolge als ‚irregulär‘ gelten, weil sie beispielsweise über ein umgekehrtes Determinationsverhältnis verfügen oder weil in ihnen Negation elliptifiziert wird.

Are natural languages genuinely compositional? What roles does context play in linguistic communication, and by what means? In particular, does context interfere with the compositional determination of truth conditions? What meanings should theorists assign to sentences if compositionality is to be retained? These are the central questions of this important volume of new philosophical essays in honour of Ernie Lepore.

This book investigates the semantics and syntax-semantics interface of measurement constructions, such as (non-)split quantifiers and comparatives. The cross-linguistic investigation reveals that seemingly diverse constructions can be categorized into two classes depending on whether they measure nominal or verbal predicates, and shows that the classification accounts for why certain constructions have certain characteristics concerning distributivity and single-event predicates. Throughout the book, particular emphasis is placed on issues of compositionality.