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In this paper, we derive a notion of word meaning in context that characterizes meaning as both intensional and conceptual. We introduce a framework for specifying local as well as global constraints on word meaning in context, together with their interactions, thus modelling a wide range of lexical shifts and ambiguities observed in utterance interpretation. We represent sentence meaning as a situation description system , a probabilistic model which takes utterance understanding to be the mental process of describing to oneself one or more situations that would account for an observed utterance. We show how the system can be implemented in practice, and apply it to examples containing various contextualisation phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue against two common claims about so-called privative adjectives like 'fake': first, I argue against the idea that their semantic complexity requires a richer notion of lexical meaning than the standard one (see, e.g. Del Pinal, 2018); second, I argue against the idea that 'fake' is a subsective adjective 'in disguise' and does not semantically negate its input (see, e.g. Partee, 2010). I propose that a fake P is (i) intended to resemble a P and (ii) is not a P. This makes correct predictions for multiple applications of 'fake', a task at which other theories fail. In cases of double application of 'fake', the interaction between its conjunctive meaning and the negation hard-coded into clause (ii) yields a complex meaning, compatible with a variety of objects, which aligns with intuitions about what should count as a fake N. While the core meaning of 'fake' is quite simple, its mode of composition bears some complexity. In line with Martin (2022) , I propose that 'fake' can alternatively (a) combine directly with the noun via Functional Application or (b) saturate its property argument via an implicit, contextually provided variable via Functional Application and then combine with the noun via Predicate Modification. Mode of composition (a) is clearly visible in syntactic parses that only allow for Functional Application: for instance, in Italian, if pre-nominal, 'fake' can only directly take the noun as an input (cf. Cinque, 2010). Positing (b) correctly predicts readings where 'fake' is not apparently privative: 'fake watch' can designate a watch that is made to resemble a Rolex but isn't one, i.e. a fake(-as-a-Rolex) watch. When the intersection between the |$[\![ \mathit{fake} ]\!] (*\mathit{implicit\ argument}*)$| complex and the noun is empty, rescuing principles originally proposed by Partee kick in to rescue from vacuous modification: this explains why we can refer to a fake gun as a gun, as in the sentence 'this gun is fake'. As a result, besides correctly predicting iterated 'fake', this theory provides clear predictions on when and how Partee's pragmatic principles of noun modulation apply. I conclude the paper arguing that this view of privatives calls for a classification of adjectives in terms of their mode of composition, rather than in terms of their emergent entailment pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I observe a number of new plural and (apparently) quantified examples of free indirect discourse (FID) and protagonist projection (PP). I analyse them within major current theoretical approaches, proposing extensions to these approaches where needed. In order to derive the wide range of readings observed with plural protagonists, I show how we can exploit existing mechanisms for the interpretation of plural anaphora and plural predication. The upshot is that the interpretation of plural examples of perspective shift relies on a remarkable concert of covert semantic and pragmatic operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents two experiments comparing presupposition triggers that differ with respect to Focus-sensitivity. The hypothesis was that Focus-sensitive (+ focus) triggers require a linguistic antecedent in the discourse model, whereas presuppositions of triggers lacking Focus-sensitivity (– focus) are satisfied as entailments of the Common Ground. Each experiment tested a distinct prediction of this hypothesis, namely (i) being subject to salience, operationalized relative to the QUD, and (ii) global accommodation difficulty. Experiment 1 compared too as a + focus trigger and again as a – focus trigger in short dialogues and manipulated the presence or absence of material intervening between the target sentence containing the trigger and the utterance satisfying its presupposition. Intervening material led to a decrease in ratings as well as longer full sentence reading times of the target sentence for too but not again , in line with the prediction. Experiment 2 compared four trigger pairs that differed in Focus-sensitivity relative to presuppositionless control in a rating study in contexts that did not explicitly satisfy their presupposition. As predicted, + focus triggers showed a larger decrease in ratings than – focus triggers. The picture that emerges from these results is that the same kind of meaning - presuppositions - can be grounded in different aspects of the context in relation to an independent property of the trigger - Focus-sensitivity - which directly affects the discourse behavior of a trigger. The paper concludes with a discussion of some implications of the findings for linguistic theory, in particular anaphoricity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the interpretation of the exclamation point in German; for example, Es hat geschneit! 'It has been snowing!'. I argue that the exclamation point contributes a lexical operator for verum at the layer of writing acts. Specifically, it introduces the writer's wish to ensure the recognition of the writing act in its scope. This lexicon-based proposal builds on a lexicon-based analysis of verum focus. However, while verum focus is related to the propositional layer, the exclamation point is argued to relate to the act layer. The following advantages are defended: (i) The proposal accounts for both the functional kinship between exclamation points and verum focus and their distributional differences. On the one hand, both means introduce affirmative emphasis by a bouletic attitude; on the other hand, the exclamation point has a much wider distribution than verum focus, as it is not bound to contexts that provide a controversy between a proposition and its negation. (ii) The difference in semantic scope can be traced back to a structural difference. While verum focus is integrated into its host clause, exclamation points occupy a peripheral structural position, which is typical of act modifiers. (iii) The lexicon-based approach to the interpretation of exclamation points has noteworthy broader implications. It provides an independent cross-modal piece of evidence in favor of a lexicon-based analysis of verum focus instead of a focus-based one. Furthermore, it is amenable to a formal compositional implementation. This implementation comprises first steps toward a formal model of writing acts in terms of Commitment Space Semantics and advances the general hypothesis that the graphematic form licenses a systematic mapping from form to meaning in its own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has indicated that abstract grammatical rules and forms fall short of predicting quantifier scope and that lexical/pragmatic knowledge plays a significant part in quantifier scope disambiguation (QSD). More recent works have argued that world knowledge in the form of relations among objects may be salient to QSD. This paper contributes to this line of research by providing support to the claim that there is a connection between our lexical knowledge about preposition meanings and quantifier scope. More specifically, we propose that certain prepositional senses encode dependency relations that have an effect on scope-taking preferences. For example, the preposition of expressing 'part-whole sense' contributes to our choice of the inverse scope reading for the construction a day of every month by introducing a dependency between wholes (months) and their respective parts (days). Quantifying over this dependency yields the inverse scope reading: for every month, there is a different day that belongs to it (every month > a day). Furthermore, universal quantification in locative and temporal prepositional phrases tends to support inverse scope. For example, the locative preposition on — as in a store on each side of the street — implies 'disjointness' (objects do not occupy more than one place at a time), and hence can be interpreted as a dependency between each side of the street and the respective stores located on them. Quantifying over this dependency yields the inverse scope reading: for each side of the street, there is a different store located on it (each side of the street > a store). For studying the connection between prepositional senses and quantifier scope in the wild, we use a scope-disambiguated corpus created by AnderBois et al. (2012), additionally annotated with prepositional senses using the Semantic Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses (SNACS) scheme proposed in Schneider et al. (2018, 2020). The results of the corpus study combined with psycholinguistic experiments support the claim made here that certain prepositional senses are strong predictors of quantifier scope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a familiar point that we can use generic sentences to express generalisations that are tolerant to exceptions and then go on to state those exceptions explicitly. It is a less familiar point that switching the order of the generics has deleterious effects on their felicity. For example, the sequences 'Ravens are black, but albino ravens aren't' is perfectly felicitous and judged to be true, whereas its reverse 'Albino ravens aren't black, but ravens are' is infelicitous and contradictory-sounding. This paper argues that such sequences pose a problem for extant theories of generics: while they have no trouble predicting the felicity of the first sequence of generics, they are unable to explain why reversing the order results in infelicity. I propose to account for these observations by adopting a dynamic semantic theory of generic sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an investigation of Ignorance Inferences by looking at the superlative modifier at least. The formal properties of these inferences are characterized in terms of the epistemic conditions that they impose on the speaker, thereby establishing how much can and must be inferred about what the speaker is ignorant about. The paper makes two main contributions. First, it argues that the form of these inferences depends solely on the structural properties of the expression that at least is modifying, which do not necessarily coincide with semantic entailment. Rather, rank and order seems to matter: with totally ordered associates, at least triggers Ignorance Inferences that may be formally different than those obtained with partially ordered associates (Mendia (2016b)). Second, it builds on neo-Gricean double alternative generation mechanisms (like Schwarz (2016)) arguing that one of them must be provided by focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel cross-linguistic exploration of the phenomenon of Interrogative Flip at the semantics-pragmatics interfaces. Most previous studies describe an obligatory shift in the anchor of an evidential from the speaker to the addressee in interrogatives, across a diverse set of languages. In this work, we discuss a lesser-studied set of facts, which show that in many languages this shift does not take place. Modeling the contribution of evidentials with 'judge'-sensitivity in the semantics and with newly refined notions of commitment and sourcehood in an extended dynamic pragmatics framework, the presence or absence of Interrogative Flip is shown to lie in an evidential's ability to license a commitment update operator |$\uparrow $|⁠. All attested evidential systems are shown to fall in either the class of |$\uparrow $| licensors or not, with apparent exceptions explained across a heterogeneous array of data. A dynamic polar question operator is formulated and its interaction with |$\uparrow $| explored. Finally, a novel link between evidentiality and bias is established, by arguing that the lack of the Flip results in biased questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of inquisitive rising declaratives (Gunlogson 2001 , Jeong 2018) within the Table model (Farkas & Bruce 2010). On this account, intonational tunes are modifiers of context update functions: rising intonation removes the speaker commitment component of a context update. This delivers a compositional account of the contributions of sentence type and intonational tune to the illocutionary mood of an utterance, showing how the semantic type of declarative sentences, the rising intonational tune, and a general-purpose utterance function (Farkas & Roelofsen 2017) conspire to derive the basic discourse effect of rising declaratives without any construction-specific stipulations. The account makes use of only the most fundamental representational primitives independently necessary to model assertions and neutral questions, showing that rising declaratives can be accounted for without recourse to projected commitments, metalinguistic issues, or explicit marking of commitment strength, evidence source, or epistemic bias (cf. Gunlogson 2008 , Northrup 2014 , Malamud & Stephenson 2015 , Farkas & Roelofsen 2017). Inferences of bias generated by rising declaratives are accounted for with a novel pragmatics for the Table model, formalizing what is implicit in discussions of the role played in the model by speaker commitments and projected Common Grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the semantics of the German adverb eher , which has three, or perhaps four, readings: temporal, epistemic, metalinguistic and—depending on whether it is accepted as a genuine reading—preference. In its epistemic reading, eher gained prominence in semantics because it was used by Kratzer (1981) to argue that the notion of possibility is gradable. Eher has also received attention from a diachronic perspective, where it has been compared to the English adverb rather (Gergel 2009). Our analysis starts from the temporal reading which, first of all, expresses temporal precedence. We argue that temporal eher is indexical (unlike früher /'earlier'), comparing closeness to a perspectival center, and that the non-temporal readings inherit their basic structure from the temporal one. The analysis of the non-temporal readings will be embedded in a Kratzer-style ordering semantics, deviating from the standard picture in assuming (i), that both the modal base and the ordering source are relativized to a perspective holder and (ii), that in the case of metalinguistic eher , interpretations (in the sense of Barker 2002 / Krifka 2012) are compared instead of worlds. Our analysis is different from that developed by Herburger & Rubinstein (2018), which ignores the temporal as well as the metalinguistic reading and takes recourse to "degrees of belief". At the end of the paper, we briefly look at expressions related to eher , including English more and its German counterpart mehr as well as English rather , and also at the modal reading of German schon ('already'). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that English present ability modal statements like "I can see Saturn" are ambiguous in the same way as past ability statements like "I was able to lift a fridge": they can express either a general ability ('I have the ability to see Saturn, in general'), or have an actualized (episodic) interpretation ('I'm seeing Saturn, right now'). The challenge is to explain why in the present, actualized interpretations are only licensed when the modal's prejacent is a perception verb like see , and not with other predicates: "I can watch Saturn" only has the general ability reading available, and not the actualized one. I propose that (i) similar to what has been shown for past modal statements in the literature on Actuality Entailments (AEs) (Bhatt 1999), the ambiguity depends on grammatical aspect: general ability readings are due to the imperfective, which "removes" AEs by having the event occur in worlds introduced by a generic operator (Bhatt 1999), and actualized readings are due to the perfective, which directly combines with the prejacent event across the modal (Hacquard 2009); (ii) The usual unavailability of actualized interpretations in the present comes from the Present Perfective Paradox (Malchukov 2009): perfective aspect is incompatible with present tense, because the event time, a time interval, cannot be contained within the punctual speech time. (iii) Perception verbs are special in that they, and only they, are able to combine with perfective in the present, either because the PPP does not arise at all, or because they allow a specific type of aspectual coercion. This also explains their behavior in (non-modal) simple present sentences. A second challenge is that actualized interpretations in the present appear to occur exclusively with ability modals, and not when modals express other root flavors (e.g. teleological or deontic). I propose that this restriction is due to a further temporal orientation constraint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to proponents of the continuity hypothesis, metaphors represent one end of a spectrum of linguistic phenomena, which includes various forms of loosening/broadening, such as category extensions and approximations, as well as hyperbolic interpretations. The continuity hypothesis is used to establish that the inferences derived from the set of linguistic expressions mentioned above result from the same or nearly similar pragmatic processes. In this paper, we want to challenge that particular aspect of the continuity hypothesis. We do so based on considerations and analysis of an understudied linguistic phenomenon that we call the metaphorical uses of proper names (MPNs). We first explain how MPNs represent a unique linguistic class distinguishable from, for example, nicknames. In addition, we offer some remarks on how MPNs can be understood against the background of current debates between referentialists and predicativists about names. Our discussion leads us to conclude that MPNs are categorically different from literal interpretations of proper names. We spell out the consequences that the results of our analysis have for the continuity hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Hintikkan tradition, attitude verbs are viewed as relations between individuals and propositions. Previous work on know and believe with Content DP s like the rumour has tended to treat know CP vs. know DP as polysemy. In this paper, I show that polysemy runs into conceptual and empirical problems, and propose instead a new decompositional approach to know -verbs, which avoids polysemy; linking both know DP and know CP to the same lexical root, which describes, broadly speaking, acquaintance. This analysis thus provides an explicit and compositional morpho-semantic link between know DP and know CP that accounts for the interpretation of DPs as objects of acquaintance, and further captures the idea that knowledge, and factivity more broadly, is tied to acquaintance with a situation, the res (Kratzer 2002 , a.o.). Based on detailed examination of the morpho-syntax and interpretation of DP and CP complements of believe , I further show that DPs can either combine with believe in the same fashion as CPs, as a direct object (saturating a propositional argument slot, as in Uegaki 2016), or as an indirect object, via a type of attitudinal applicative (proposed here). The former option is defined for Content DPs and the latter for agentive DPs, so-called Source DP s. Together, these proposals account for the observation that the interpretation of believe DP sentences varies depending on the type of DP (believe the rumour vs. believe the referee), whereas for know -verbs, both types of DPs are interpreted as objects of acquaintance. At the core of the current proposal is the idea that verbs like know and believe differ fundamentally at the level of argument structure and internal morpho-semantic composition, and thus combine with DPs via different routes; contrary to uniform approaches to know and believe. Whereas believe -verbs describe relations to intensional content, and require external licensing mechanisms to combine with DPs, know -verbs describe complex relations, fundamentally anchored in the attitude holder's acquaintance with (abstract or concrete) individuals in the world, and thus make reference to individuals as part of their argument structure. The current proposal also builds on and adds to previous insights about connections between factivity, DP-complementation, and question-embedding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a class of exceptionally narrow-scoping singular indefinites in English (e.g. "Sam drove a car for several years before switching to a truck"), which pattern more closely with what have been termed "weak definites" in the literature (e.g. Poesio, 1994 ; Carlson et al. 2006) than with regular indefinites. While the existence of such exceptional "weak" indefinites has been previously anticipated by Klein et al. (2013) , the category is difficult to distinguish from simple narrow-scoped singular indefinites in most contexts. Here, we argue that there is one environment where weak singular indefinites can be distinctively identified: namely, when they appear with for -adverbials. We sketch a concrete implementation of a semantic incorporation-based account for such nominals, bringing them analytically in line with incorporation analyses of weak definites, building closely on the ideas in Dayal (2011). We further briefly discuss how the proposed analysis adjudicates between two competing analyses for for -adverbials, one which assumes that for encodes a universal quantifier (e.g. Deo & Piñango, 2011) and another which takes for to be non-quantificational (e.g. Champollion, 2013), in favor of the latter view. We close by considering some remaining issues surrounding semantically incorporated DPs in English: specifically, how weak (in) definites relate to other nominals that receive covarying interpretations across contexts—such as bare plurals on the one hand (which we do not take to be semantically incorporated) and bare singulars on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a DRT-based analysis of epistemic specificity. Following Farkas (1996), we distinguish between scopal, partitive and epistemic specificity. After arguing in Section 1 that the three main variants of specificity are irreducible to each other, the paper then focuses on epistemic specificity. In the analysis of epistemically specific indefinites we distinguish between specific use and specific interpretation. Specific use is defined as a relation between (the semantic representation of) a linguistic form and (the representation of) the speaker's mental state: In the speaker's state the sentence containing the relevant indefinite corresponds to a singular proposition. Specific interpretation is in a sense a derivative notion: It characterises the representation constructed by the hearer just in case he construes an indefinite as having been used specifically by the speaker, and builds his own representation accordingly. The representation language we employ is a descendant of the original DRT-language presented in Kamp & Reyle (1993). This framework is tailor-made for the representations of attitudes of cognitive agents (for discussion see Kamp (2013)); in the analysis reported in the present paper it enables us to distinguish between (i) the representation of an utterance that is derived via (standard) linguistic analysis, and (ii) – (iii) the representations that the individual discourse participants have or construct for this utterance. The key concept of the analysis is the notion of an anchored entity representation: Anchored entity representations are constituents of mental states that are causally linked, via their anchors, to the entities that they represent. In general, when a speaker uses a noun phrase to refer to an entity represented by one of her entity representations and thereby activates an entity representation in the mind of the hearer, the anchor of the hearer's representation, |$ER_H$|⁠, will often be structurally different from that of the speaker's own entity representation |$ER_S$|⁠, although normally the two representations will be coreferential. There will be a structural difference in particular when the speaker refers to the entity represented by |$ER_S$| through making a specific use of an indefinite noun phrase. If the hearer takes her to have used the indefinite specifically, he will construct an entity representation |$ER_H$| whose anchor links it to its referent as the entity represented by the speaker's representation |$ER_S$|⁠. Anchors of this type are called 'vicarious anchors'. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the linguistic status of epistemic specificity. Data from English have been taken to suggest that specificity is an epiphenomenon, viz. that it need not be captured at the level of grammatical representation. But data from Romanian appear to suggest otherwise: The behaviour of Romanian indefinites marked with the Accusative preposition pe suggests that the specificity properties of these indefinites need to be marked at the level of (compositional) semantics, viz. at the level of those representations that are obtained directly from syntactic input. Our (tentative) conclusion is that the linguistic status of specific indefinites can be subject to cross-linguistic variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Magri (2009a , b) proposed a generalization according to which a sentence is infelicitous whenever exhaustification over the full set of formal alternatives of the sentence leads to contextual contradiction. While Magri proposes an account of obligatory implicatures which explains some cases where this generalization expects infelicity, he does not provide a general account of this generalization. In this paper I argue for a perspective on the 'pruning' of alternatives which predicts this generalization, building on the counter-intuitive idea that contradictions are relevant in every context (Lewis 1988). I further argue, using disjunction in the scope of a universal quantifier as a test case, that an extension of this view to obligatory ignorance inferences provides a new perspective on the Logical Integrity Generalization put forward by Anvari (2018b) , while avoiding some empirical problems for this generalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a formal judgment study of Mandarin intervention effects, that is, structures containing a wh -phrase c-commanded by a focus-sensitive or a quantificational expression. There has been significant disagreement in the literature regarding which type of wh -phrases gives rise to intervention, as well as which one among the c-commanding scopal operators is an intervener. There are competing empirical claims in the literature, which have to this day not been subject to experimental evaluation. The results of our study show that wh -nominals and wh -adverbials exhibit a similar pattern of degraded acceptability. Our results further show a clear distinction between why and other wh -phrases, favoring Ko's (2005) idea that a separate, why -induced scope effect is disentangled from the garden-variety case of wh -intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

X-marked want is identified by von Fintel & Iatridou (2023) (vF&I) as one of the crosslinguistic challenges for what they call X-marking , the kind of morphology traditionally referred to as 'subjunctive' or 'counterfactual'. This paper's main goal is to spell out vF&I's idea that X-marking on want reflects a widening of want 's quantificational domain, thereby doing the same job as it does in conditionals under an influential view originating with Stalnaker (1975). With Sode (2021) , but also Grano & Phillips-Brown (2022) , the proposition |$\phi $| denoted by want 's complement is treated as the antecedent of a "hidden conditional" that Heim (1992) sees in want and desire-ascriptions more generally, a treatment in whose favor vF&I's Conditional/Desire Pattern provides morphosyntactic evidence. In line with the Stalnakerian view, but also more recent ones under which X-marking is semantically vacuous (Crowley 2022 ; Leahy 2011, 2018), X-marking on want is treated as reflecting the absence of a presuppositional constraint that the O-marked counterpart comes with: a limitation of closest antecedent-worlds to the attitude holder's belief set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) with emphatic prosody such as ANY or EVER, and minimizers such as lift a finger or sleep a wink are known to generate particular contextual inferences that are absent in the case of non-emphatic NPIs such as unstressed any or ever. It remains an open question, however, what the exact status of these inferences is and how they come about. In this paper, we analyze these cases as NPIs bearing focus, and examine the interaction between focus semantics and the lexical semantics of NPIs across statements and questions. In the process, we refine and expand the empirical landscape by demonstrating that focused NPIs give rise to a variety of apparently heterogeneous contextual inferences, including domain widening in statements and inferences of negative bias in questions. These inferences are further shown to be modulated in subtle ways depending on the specific clause-type in which the NPI occurs (e.g. polar questions vs. wh-questions) and the type of emphatic NPI involved (e.g. ANY vs. lift a finger). Building on these empirical observations, we propose a unified account of NPIs which posits a single core semantic operator, even , across both focused and unfocused NPIs. What plays a central role in our account is the additive component of even , which we formulate in such a way that it applies uniformly across statements and questions. This additive component of even , intuitively paraphrased as the implication that all salient focus alternatives of the prejacent of the operator must be settled in the doxastic state of the speaker, is selectively activated depending on the presence of focus alternatives, and is shown to be able to derive all the observed contextual inferences stemming from focused NPIs, both in statements and in questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the conditions under which the temporal expression immer noch ("still") and related phase particles are allowed or excluded in German adjectival passive sentences. A detailed discussion of the phenomenon is provided, and it is argued that not only the semantics of involved linguistic expressions and constructions, but also background script knowledge must be taken into account to fully understand the combinatorics. A notion of scripts is developed as a finite sequence of cognitive frames, where one frame precedes and provides an occasion for the next one. The paper determines a new condition for the exclusion of immer noch that up to now went unnoticed. Specifically, it is claimed that adjectival passives denoting the result state of a script-final event cannot be combined with immer noch due to conflicting inferences. The proposed integration of linguistic material with background frame and script knowledge is based on the central assumption that event kinds correspond to frames, which opens up a new perspective on the relation between conceptual structure and compositional semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an experimental study that provides evidence for the existence of two types of rising declaratives in English which differ systematically in their forms and their functions. The two are labelled assertive rising declaratives and inquisitive rising declaratives, respectively. Guided by the experimental results, the paper develops a semantic analysis of them. Having as backdrop an extended Lewisian model of discourse involving a conversational scoreboard, the analysis associates assertive and inquisitive rising declaratives with distinct sets of contextchanging conventions that bring about fundamentally different updates to core elements of the context. In the process, it highlights their respective partial overlaps with the conventions for two other sentence types, falling declaratives and polar interrogatives. The analysis fully captures the experimental results presented in the paper and reconciles disparate, seemingly contradictory observations about English rising declaratives noted in previous work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As formal theoretical linguistic methodology has matured, recent years have seen the advent of applying it to objects of study that transcend language, e.g. to the syntax and semantics of music (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983 , Schlenker 2017a ; see also Rebuschat et al. 2011). One of the aims of such extensions is to shed new light on how meaning is construed in a range of communicative systems. In this paper, we approach this goal by looking at narrative dance in the form of Bharatanatyam. We argue that a semantic approach to dance can be modeled closely after the formal semantics of visual narrative proposed by Abusch (2013 , 2014 , 2021). A central conclusion is that dance not only shares properties of other fundamentally human means of expression, such as visual narrative and music, but that it also exhibits similarities to sign languages and the gestures of non-signers (see, e.g. Schlenker 2020) in that it uses space to track individuals in a narrative and performatively portray the actions of those individuals. From the perspective of general human cognition, these conclusions corroborate the idea that linguistic investigations beyond language (see Patel-Grosz et al. forthcoming) can yield insights into the very nature of the human mind and of the communicative devices that it avails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how children figure out that modals like must can be used to express both epistemic and "root" (i.e. non epistemic) flavors. The existing acquisition literature shows that children produce modals with epistemic meanings up to a year later than with root meanings. We conducted a corpus study to examine how modality is expressed in speech to and by young children, to investigate the ways in which the linguistic input children hear may help or hinder them in uncovering the flavor flexibility of modals. Our results show that the way parents use modals may obscure the fact that they can express epistemic flavors: modals are very rarely used epistemically. Yet, children eventually figure it out; our results suggest that some do so even before age 3. To investigate how children pick up on epistemic flavors, we explore distributional cues that distinguish roots and epistemics. The semantic literature argues they differ in "temporal orientation" (Condoravdi, 2002): while epistemics can have present or past orientation, root modals tend to be constrained to future orientation (Werner 2006 ; Klecha, 2016 ; Rullmann & Matthewson, 2018). We show that in child-directed speech, this constraint is well-reflected in the distribution of aspectual features of roots and epistemics, but that the signal might be weak given the strong usage bias towards roots. We discuss (a) what these results imply for how children might acquire adult-like modal representations, and (b) possible learning paths towards adult-like modal representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The felicity, or acceptability, of IS generics, i.e. generic sentences with indefinite singulars, is considerably more restricted compared to BP generics, generics with bare plurals. The goal of this paper is to account for the limited felicity of IS generics compared to BP generics, on the one hand, while preserving the close similarity between the two types of generics, on the other. We do so by proposing a causal analysis of IS generics, and show that this corresponds closely with a probabilistic analysis of BP generics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentences involving embedded disjunctions give rise to distributive and free choice inferences. These inferences exhibit certain characteristics of Scalar Implicatures (SIs) and some researchers have proposed to treat them as such. This proposal, however, faces an important challenge: experimental results have shown that the two inferences are more robust, faster to process, and easier to acquire than regular SIs. A common response to this challenge has been to hypothesise that such discrepancies among different types of SIs stem from the type of alternative used to derive them. That is, in contrast to regular SIs, distributive and free choice inferences are computed on the basis of sub-constituent alternatives, which are alternatives that are formed without lexical substitutions. This paper reports on a series of experiments that tested this hypothesis by comparing positive, disjunctive sentences giving rise to the two inference types to variants of these sentences involving either negation and conjunction, or negation and disjunction, for which the implicature approach predicts similar inferences on the basis of the same type of alternatives. The investigation also included deontic and epistemic modality, different positions of negation, and was extended to similar comparisons with simple disjunctions and the related ignorance inferences they give rise to. Our results show that, while the inferences are indeed quite robust in the disjunctive cases, regardless of whether negation is present or not, the inferences that their negative, conjunctive variants give rise to are not. These findings are challenging for the hypothesis that the type of alternatives involved in SI computation is a major factor responsible for differences in robustness. We outline two possible alternative explanations of our data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an investigation into the nature of Negative Polarity Item (NPI) licensing conditions from a processing perspective. We found that the processing cost of Downward Entailingness (a k a the Monotonicity Effect) is determined by the number of monotonicity reversals of NPI domains, rather than by the number of Downward-Entailing (DE) operators. This conclusion is not based on the standard judgment paradigm, but rather, on the measurement of continuous variables (error rates, Reaction Times (RTs)) in a verification task, in which the truth value of a sentence is determined against a scenario. We conducted two experiments with sentences that contained one or two DE operators, which featured in different syntactic configurations. We explored how RT is affected by the manipulation of both the number of DE operators, and the syntactic environments in which they reside. We ran these experiments in Hebrew and in English, with different participant populations and different testing methods. Despite the linguistic subtlety of the theoretical issues, our results were remarkably sharp, leading to two firm conclusions: (i) that processing time is determined not by the number of DE operators, but rather, by the monotonicity of the minimal constituent in which they reside; (ii) that DE-ness is not a property of operators, but of environments. We show how our results bear directly on the current debate about the nature of monotonicity, which we describe below. Finally, we provide quantitative tests of alternative, non-semantic explanations, and show how our results do not support them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose to characterize imaginative resistance as the failure or unwillingness of the reader to take a fictional description of a deviant reality at face value. The goal of the paper is to explore how readers deal with such a breakdown of the default Face Value interpretation strategy. We posit two distinct interpretative 'coping' strategies which help the reader engage with the resistance-inducing fiction by attributing the offending content to one of the fictional characters. We present novel empirical evidence that shows that actual readers use these strategies and we flesh out the exact workings of these strategies by integrating them into a general formal semantic framework for interpreting fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exclusive particles, which have been attested in a wide range of languages, give rise to a rank-order interpretation and=or to an exhaustive interpretation. Based on novel data from Ga, the paper identifies an exclusive particle that not only gives rise to the exhaustive meaning but also operates on an NP denotation allowing, for example, plural count nouns to be combined with an indefinite determiner which encodes the cardinality 'one'. In particular, the paper shows that the Ga exclusive particle too functions as Landman's (1989, 2010, 2013) group-forming operator. The Ga data thus extend the typology of exclusive particles and point to a previously unattested variation in the semantics of exclusives in a cross-linguistic perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly argued that weak negative polarity items (NPIs) (e.g. any) can occur in any (Strawson) downward-entailing environment. This generalization, however, is challenged by Wagner's (2006) observations with the NPI-licenser only, although an only-clause is (Strawson) downward-entailing in its unfocused part, NPIs are not necessarily licensed there. In particular, DP-only does not license an NPI that appears within the unfocused part of its left argument (as seen in *Only a chair of any HUMANITIESF department met with the president), and VP-only does not license an NPI if this NPI and the focused item appear within the same island (as seen in *The president only met with a chair of any HUMANITIESF department). These observations suggest that the licensing status of an NPI in an only-sentence is not just determined by the polarity pattern of the environment where this NPI gets interpreted. To explain Wagner's (2006) observations, I argue that only is not just an NPI-licenser but also an 'NPI-unlicenser.' Following Chierchia (2006, 2013), I assume that an NPI carries a domain feature [D] which activates domain alternatives, and that an NPI is unlicensed if exhaustifying its domain alternatives yields a contradiction. I further propose that only can check off the [D] feature of an NPI that appears within its syntactic argument. If the argument of only is downward-entailing with respect to an NPI, using only to check off the [D] feature of this NPI would return an inference that contradicts the prejacent presupposition and make this NPI unlicensed. In the case of VP-only association, if an NPI is not focused and doesn't appear within a focus-contained island, the contradiction can be avoided by F-movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the English instrumental markers with and verbal use. As with other thematic roles, the semantic generalizations encoded by the role Instrument have been difficult to precisely characterize. In this study, we analyze the distinct semantic contributions of with and use, illuminating several properties of instrumental meaning. In particular, use specifies that the agent must act intentionally, which we formalize as universal quantification over possible worlds within a Montague-style compositional framework. By contrast, with encodes a constraint whereby an instrument is a direct extension of the force initiated by the agent. This analysis is most consistent with theories in which thematic roles are clusters of event properties, rather than categories defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions; our analysis does not make use of Instrument as a primitive role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces on the scene a new type of non-canonical question, dubbed non-intrusive , exemplified by interrogatives marked by the particle oare in Romanian. It does so by providing an account of the distribution and interpretation of this particle using an updated version of the context components in Fălăuş & Laca (2014) , and an elaboration of the general assumptions in Faller (2002). The intuition the account captures is that by marking an interrogative with oare , the speaker signals that she does not assume that the issue she raises will be resolved in a future state of the conversation. It is further argued that non-intrusive questions are empirically close to but not identical with conjectural questions , discussed most recently in Eckardt (2018) , and therefore have to be recognized as a separate category. The predictions and theoretical implications of the account are discussed relative to a general typology of canonical and non-canonical questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common assumption about our internal lexicon is that the meaning of words is underspecified and this underspecified representation is filled in based on the context in which the word occurs. In this paper I would like to explore a different hypothesis, that words are stored with overspecified representations which are 'trimmed down' by the context. This view seems to be in line with a well-known mechanism from psycholinguistics: suppression. Many studies have shown that conceptual properties of a word are initially activated but subsequently suppressed when these properties are in conflict with the context the word occurs in. This mechanism has not been tested, however, in a context where compositional application takes place as between an adjective and a noun. In this study I will discuss two lexical decision experiments testing the interpretation of two types of adjective noun combinations. For both types of combinations it is expected that the representation of the noun undergoes a change due to the conflicting information provided by the adjective. It is hypothesized that the properties of the noun that are in conflict with the adjective are initially activated, but subsequently suppressed to form a coherent representation of the adjective noun combination. While the results provide evidence for the initial activation of the conceptual properties, no evidence for the subsequent suppression was found. The initial activation shows that also in the case of adjective noun combinations, conceptual features do not 'wait for' an initial well-formed semantic structure. The lack of evidence for suppression primarily suggests the need for further research. If future experiments confirm that suppression does not take place within the time frame tested in the experiments, we must conclude, based on experimental findings by Schumacher (2013), that conceptual specification takes place after the shift in reference of the noun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an account of notional belief attributions, that is, belief attributions where the belief content is fully specified. The proposal combines a Hintikka style possible-worlds semantics for the belief operator and a structured meanings approach for giving a structured mode of presentation of the belief content. The semantics is not standard compositional, but it satisfies a more general notion of compositionality, explained in the paper. This notion, general compositionality, allows semantic switching : the semantic function relevant for an embedded term is distinct from that which applies to the term in which it is embedded. The general relation between compositionality and hyperintensional contexts is discussed in detail. In the first section, it is argued that we need to combine structured and unstructured meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends the analysis of Fox & Sauerland (1996) of scope illusions and argues that what look like inverse scope readings in clefts with indefinite noun phrase pivots are really illusory cases of scope inversion. Instead, inverse scope comes about due to generic quantification over situations. Furthermore, the present paper adds to Fox and Sauerland by observing differences between a and some indefinites, where only the former yields illusory scope. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present collection addresses a number of issues in the semantic interpretation of modal and temporal expressions. Despite the variety the papers exhibit both in the selection of topics and the choice of formal frameworks, they are interconnected through several overarching themes that are at the centre of much ongoing research. The purpose of this brief introduction is to put the papers into context and draw the reader's attention to some of these connections. The topics we will discuss in the remainder are: counterfactuals, causality, partiality, compositionality of conditionals, and context dependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are sentences that are coherent and possibly true, but in which there is at the very least the appearance of a conflict between the requirements of two (or more) predicates that are applied to the same argument. This phenomenon, known as copredication , raises various issues for linguistic theory. In this paper I defend and develop an approach to the issues of counting and individuation in copredication put forward in previous work, in dialogue with criticisms made by Liebesman & Magidor and their own positive account of copredication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Binominal each is known to exhibit selectional requirements on the noun phrase that immediately precedes it. The goal of this paper is to reduce these selectional requirements to a single requirement of monotonic growth of measurement in relation to the 'size' of distributivity. More concretely, it is argued that binominal each imposes a constraint on the functional dependencies arising from distributive quantification, requiring that the measurement of its host grows monotonically with the number of values being distributively quantified. To make constraints on dependencies formally explicit, I devise a version of dynamic plural logic with features from van den Berg (1996) and Brasoveanu (2008, 2013) to semantically represent dependencies arising from evaluating distributive quantification. The use of a dynamic logic, coupled with a delayed evaluation mechanism in terms of higher order meaning (Cresti, 1995 ; Swart, 2000 ; Charlow, 2021 , allows the constraint to act as an output context constraint on distributive quantification, which mirrors the use of output constraints pioneered by Farkas (1997, 2002b) and and further developed in Brasoveanu (2013) , Henderson (2014) and Kuhn (2017). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally assumed that ellipsis requires parallelism between the clause containing the ellipsis and some antecedent clause. We argue that the parallelism requirement generated by ellipsis must be applied in accordance with discourse structure: a matching antecedent clause must be found that locally c‐commands the clause containing the ellipsis in the discourse tree. We show that this claim makes several correct predictions concerning the interpretation of ellipsis, both in terms of the selection of the antecedent (in sluicing and verb phrase ellipsis), and in terms of the possible readings assuming a particular antecedent (in the ‘many‐clause’ puzzle and in antecedent‐contained deletion). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents results from two experimental studies that address a theoretical debate in semantics about the meaning of evidentiality and its relation to epistemic modality (Faller 2002 ; 2011 ; Izvorski 1997 ; Koev 2017 ; Lee 2013 ; Matthewson et al. 2007 ; McCready & Ogata 2007 ; Murray 2010 ; Smirnova 2013). According to modal analyses, evidentiality, in addition to the information source, encodes that the proposition in the scope of the evidential is possibly/necessarily true. Non-modal analyses postulate that evidential sentences entail the proposition in their scope and have the same semantic strength as non-evidential sentences. The predictions of the two approaches are tested for Bulgarian. In Study 1, I hold knowledge source—inference—constant and vary the type of logical argument, deductive versus abductive (cf. Lassiter & Goodman 2015 ; Douven & Verbrugge 2010). I find that evidential choices are influenced by both the type of the argument and the perceived subjective strength of the argument. In Study 2, I show that evidential and non-evidential sentences are associated with different degrees of certainty, where certainty can be viewed as an operationalization of semantic strength. These results are predicted by modal analyses but not by the non-modal view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the linguistics literature, the derivation of scalar implicatures has often been handled in a relatively modular way, using computations that are sensitive to logical relations among alternatives such as entailment but are blind to other notions such as the probabilities that participants in a conversation might associate with these alternatives (or with related propositions). In recent years, a family of models that we refer to as iterated rationality models (IRMs) have offered an interestingly different perspective on such alternative-sensitive processes in terms of multiple iterations of (typically probabilistic) reasoning. Our paper investigates what at first sight seems like a very interesting argument for the adequacy of IRMs as models of scalar implicatures, coming from the conjunctive interpretation of disjunctive sentences. We then outline challenges for the argument based on a theoretical comparison with the grammatical theory of scalar implicatures. The comparison focuses on the full distribution of conjunctive interpretation, on the question of sensitivity to priors, and on other results achieved within the grammatical theory that the IRM literature has yet to engage with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Projective content is utterance content that a speaker may be taken to be committed to even when the expression associated with the content occurs embedded under an entailment-canceling operator (e.g. Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 1990). It has long been observed that projective content varies in how projective it is (e.g. Karttunen, 1971 ; Simons, 2001 ; Abusch, 2010), though preliminary experimental research has been able to confirm only some of the intuitions about projection variability (e.g. Smith & Hall, 2011 ; Xue & Onea, 2011). Given the sparse empirical evidence for projection variability, the first goal of this paper was to investigate projection variability for projective content associated with 19 expressions of American English. The second goal was to explore the hypothesis, called the Gradient Projection Principle, that content projects to the extent that it is not at-issue. The findings of two pairs of experiments provide robust empirical evidence for projection variability and for the Gradient Projection Principle. We show that many analyses of projection cannot account for the observed projection variability and discuss the implications of our finding that projective content varies in its at-issueness for an empirically adequate analysis of projection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the central topics in semantic theory over the last few decades concerns the nature of local contexts. Recently, theorists have tried to develop general, non-stipulative accounts of local contexts (Ingason, 2016 ; Mandelkern & Romoli, 2017a ; Schlenker, 2009). In this paper, we contribute to this literature by drawing attention to the local contexts of subclausal expressions. More specifically, we focus on the local contexts of quantificational determiners, e.g. 'all', 'both', etc. Our central tool for probing the local contexts of subclausal elements is the principle Maximize Presupposition! (Percus, 2006 ; Singh, 2011). The empirical basis of our investigation concerns some data discussed by Anvari (2018b) , e.g. the fact that sentences such as 'All of the two presidential candidates are crooked' are unacceptable. In order to explain this, we suggest that the local context of determiners needs to contain the information carried by their restrictor. However, no existing non-stipulative account predicts this. Consequently, we think that the local contexts of subclausal expressions will likely have to be stipulated. This result has important consequences for debates in semantics and pragmatics, e.g. those around the so-called "explanatory problem" for dynamic semantics (Heim, 1990 ; Schlenker, 2009 ; Soames, 1982). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an extension of Dependency Tree Semantics (DTS), an underspecified formalism originally proposed in Robaldo (2007). The crucial advantage of DTS as compared to other contemporary proposals is its ability to represent Independent Set (IS) readings (a.k.a. scopeless readings), e.g. cumulative and collective readings. DTS achieves the expressivity needed to represent IS readings because it underspecifies Skolem-like functional dependencies. This paper extends DTS by introducing additional meta-constraints in First-Order Logic dedicated to disambiguating underspecified structures. However, it is worth noting that the meta-constraints are independent from DTS, and could be easily re-implemented in any underspecified theory. The meta-constraints achieve flexible disambiguation, in the sense that they allow ambiguous structures to be specified independently of the linguistic (rather than logical) knowledge used. Secondly, DTS, equipped with the meta-constraints, becomes an expressively complete formalism in the sense of Ebert (2005). Expressive completeness is a desirable property for an underspecified formalism, because it allows a representation for each possible subset of available readings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accounting for the behavior of conjoined and disjoined if -clauses is not easy for standard theories of conditionals that treat if as either an operator or restrictor. In this paper, I discuss four observations about coordinated if -clauses, and motivate a semantics for conditionals that reorients the compositional structure of the restrictor theory. On my proposal, if -clauses provide restrictions on modal domains, but they do so by way of a higher type intermediary—a set of propositions—that is collapsed by the modal. I argue that combining this view with an independently plausible type-shifting operation applied to or and and predicts the range of data we find for conditionals with coordinated if -clauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Degree semantics has been developed to study how the meanings of measurement and comparison are encoded in natural language. Within degree semantics, this paper proposes a difference-based (or subtraction-based) approach to analyze the semantics of comparatives. The motivation is the measurability and comparability of differences involved in comparatives. The main claim is that comparatives encode a subtraction equation among three scalar values: two measurements along an interval scale and the difference between them. We contribute two innovations: (i) using interval arithmetic to implement subtraction, and (ii) analyzing comparative morpheme -er / more as an additive particle, denoting the default, most general, positive difference. Our analysis inherits existing insights in the literature. Moreover, the innovations bring new conceptual and empirical advantages. In particular, we address the interpretation of comparatives containing than -clause-internal quantifiers and various kinds of numerical differentials. We also account for three puzzles with regard to the scope island issue, the monotonicity of than -clauses, and the discourse status of the standard in comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that proper names have deferred uses. Following Geoffrey Nunberg, we describe the deferred reference mechanism by which a linguistic expression refers to something in the world by exploiting a contextually salient relation between an index and the referent in question. Nunberg offered a thorough analysis of deferred uses of indexicals but claimed that proper names do not permit such uses. We, however, offer a number of examples of uses of proper names which pass grammatical tests for deferred usage, as put forward by Nunberg. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]