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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.

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’).

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.

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.

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.

This paper presents corpus-based evidence for a typology of multidimensional adjectives, like for example, healthy and sick. The interpretation of the latter is sensitive to multiple dimensions, such as blood pressure, pulse, sugar, cancer, etc. The study investigated the frequency of exception phrases, which operate on an implicit universal quantifier over adjectival dimensions, as in healthy, except for a slight cold, and not sick, except for high cholesterol. On the emerging typology, adjectives classify by the way their dimensions are glued together to create a single, uniform interpretation. The default interpretation of adjectives such as healthy involves implicit universal quantification over dimensions (dimension conjunction), while that of adjectives such as sick involves existential quantification (dimension disjunction). In adjectives like intelligent, the force of quantification over dimensions is context relative. Moreover, the paper presents support to the hypotheses that antonym polarity and modifier distribution guide our choice of quantifiers over dimensions in different adjectives. Thus, this research sheds new light on the nature of negative antonymy in multidimensional adjectives, and on the distribution of degree modifiers and exception phrases among multidimensional antonyms. Finally, it raises new questions pertaining to multidimensional comparisons.

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.

The aim of this paper is to capture the similarities and differences between assertions and polar questions so as to be able to account for the systematic partial overlap that exists in reactions to these speech acts in English and beyond. We first discuss the discourse components we assume, and then define default assertions and default polar questions in a way that allows us to characterize two types of responses to these speech acts, confirming and reversing reactions. The common characteristics of assertions and polar questions are responsible for the fact that both allow these reactions; the differences between the two speech acts explain the different contextual effects confirming and reversing moves have depending on whether they react to an assertion or a polar question. We then examine the distribution of a set of ‘polarity’ particles in Romanian in terms of the notions defined in the rest of the paper, and end with a series of predictions concerning polarity particles across languages.

This paper presents some arguments against a unilateral account of numerically quantified noun phrases (NQNPs) and for a bilateral account of such expressions. It is proposed that where NQNP give rise to at least readings, this is the result of one of the two forms of pragmatic reasoning. To that end, the paper develops an independently motivated account of specificity and existential closure involving diagonalization.

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.

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).

This paper proposes a compositional model-theoretic account of the way the interpretation of indicative conditionals is determined and constrained by the temporal and modal expressions in their constituents. The main claim is that the tenses in both the antecedent and the consequent of an indicative conditional are interpreted in the same way as in isolation. This is controversial for the antecedents of predictive conditionals like ‘If he arrives tomorrow, she will leave’, whose Present tense is often claimed to differ semantically from that in their stand-alone counterparts, such as ‘He arrives tomorrow’. Under the unified analysis developed in this paper, the differences observed in pairs like these are explained by interactions between the temporal and modal dimensions of interpretation. This perspective also sheds new light on the relationship between ‘non-predictive’ and ‘epistemic’ readings of indicative conditionals.

The central topic of this inquiry is a cross-linguistic contrast in the interaction of conjunction and negation. In Hungarian (Russian, Serbian, Italian, Japanese), in contrast to English (German), negated definite conjunctions are naturally and exclusively interpreted as 'neither'. It is proposed that in Hungarian-type languages conjunctions simply replicate the behaviour of plurals, their closest semantic relatives. The 'neither' reading is due to the homogeneity presupposition accompanying distributive prediction over pluralities. More puzzling is why English-type languages present a different range of interpretations. By teasing out finer distinctions in focus on connectives, syntactic structure, and context, the paper tracks down missing readings and argues that it is eventually not necessary to postulate a radical cross-linguistic semantic difference. In the course of making that argument it is observed that negated conjunctions on the 'neither' reading carry the expectation that the predicate hold of both conjuncts. The paper investigates several hypotheses concerning the source of this expectation.

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.

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.

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.

In a series of papers, Petra Hendriks, Helen de Hoop, and Henriette de Swart Lave applied optimality theory (OT) to semantics. These authors argue that there is a fundamental difference between the form of OT as used in syntax on the one hand and its form as used in semantics on the other hand. Whereas in the first case OT takes the point of view of the speaker, in the second case the point of view of the hearer is taken. The aim of this paper is to argue that the proper treatment of OT in natural language interpretation has to take both perspectives at the same time. A conceptual framework is established that realizes the integration of both perspectives. It will be argued that this framework captures the essence of the Gricean maxims and gives a precise explication of Atlas & Levinson's (1981) idea of balancing between informativeness and efficiency in natural language processing. The ideas are then applied to resolve some puzzles in natural language interpretation.

There are two influential theories that deal with the role of the context in determining the meaning of sentences: Kaplan's logic of demonstratives and Kamp's discourse representation theory. How Kaplan would deal with the donkey sentences must remain a matter of speculation, but there is an obvious and reasonable answer to the question of how demonstratives should be handled within discourse representation theory. The latter question is addressed in the first part of this paper. The account proposed here makes demonstratives and indexicals a special case of the treatment of definite NPs in terms of presupposition, like the account of names in Geurts (1997) or treatments of definite descriptions like Van der Sandt (1992), Asher & Lascarides (1998) and others. The treatment turns out to be rather different from Kaplan's account of demonstratives and indexicals in that it appears to lack direct referentiality and in that direct referentiality does not entail rigid designation. These problems have been noted before by Kamp and have led to his controversial introduction of external anchors. This paper develops the notion of intensional anchors as an alternative and shows that they - for normal indexicals and demonstratives - allow a proper reconstruction of Kaplan's theory that avoids the problems which come with external anchors. Additional evidence for intensional anchors is provided by an application to the problems of intentional identity discussed by Edelberg.

It has sometimes been proposed that generic sentences make statements about prototypic members of a category. In this paper I will elaborate this view and develop an account where generic sentences express quantification about the normal exemplars in a category - here and in counterfactual worlds sufficiently similar to our own. Comparing the account to the currently most widespread analysis which views generic sentences as universal quantifications in carefully chosen best-possible worlds, we find that an analysis that is based on the choice of normal objects does better justice to the data in question than an analysis that relies on a choice of normal worlds alone. A further conceptual advantage of an explicit separation of (a) a choice of best exemplars and (b) a modal component of generic quantification consists in the fact that it highlights that different generic sentences can rely on different kinds of choice of best exemplar. Comparing their logical behaviour, I will demonstrate that we should at least distinguish between normal-generic sentences and ideal-generic sentences. Finally, the paper proves that the account I propose is a modal variant of some recent purely extensional default logics, developed in AL. published

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.

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.

Polar interrogatives with preposed negation (e.g., Didn’t Cam help?) convey positive epistemic bias. Polar interrogatives with even-type expressions, including prosodically stressed NPIs and minimizer NPIs (e.g., Did Cam lift a finger to help?), convey negative epistemic bias and often have a rhetorical flavor. This paper examines hybrid PQ constructions with both preposed negations and even-type expressions (e.g., Didn’t Cam lift a finger to help?; henceforth even-PNQs). It first presents a series of experimental studies which reveal that even-PNQs are characterized by complex, dual dimensions of bias contributed compositionally by both the preposed negation on the one hand and the even-type expression on the other. It then explores the theoretical implications of these results. The emerging data are shown to impose certain constraints on and generate additional desiderata for both the analyses of preposed negation questions and the analyses of even-type questions. Building on this discussion, a compositional analysis of even-PNQs is proposed. The analysis supports the presence of inner vs. outer negation ambiguity in PNQs, and identifies even-PNQs as inner-negation PNQs. It also adopts an informativity-based approach to the meaning contribution of even, formulated around the settledness of alternative issues.

This paper investigates cumulative readings of sentences in which some, but not all of the plural expressions have a de dicto reading, i.e. sentences where the lower plural is interpreted in the scope of an attitude verb like believe. I argue that such cases represent a problem for existing accounts of cumulativity, because the required cumulative relation cannot be formed. I then motivate and propose an alternative analysis where all plural expressions are interpreted in situ: I expand the ‘plural projection’ framework put forth by Haslinger & Schmitt (2018, 2019), Schmitt (2019), where embedded pluralities ‘project’ to the denotations of higher nodes in the sense that the latter reflect the part-structure of the former and where cumulativity is derived via a compositional rule in a step-by-step fashion. I show that if the denotations of the plurals with the de dicto construal are analyzed as pluralities of individual concepts, which project in the afore-mentioned sense to pluralities of propositions, the data can be explained straightforwardly. This proposal differs from treatments in terms of collective belief that don’t appeal to pluralities of propositions ( Pasternak 2018a, b), in that it (i) arguably generalizes to a larger number of examples and (ii) links grammatical plurality in the embedded clause to the availability of cumulative readings.

The German Konjunktiv II is known for its reportative and irrealis uses. This paper argues for a third, realis, use which is independent of the other two uses. Thus by uttering ‘Da wäre Saft im Kühlschrank there is.[realis subjunctive] juice in the fridge’ a speaker can signal that not only is she certain that there is juice in the fridge, but also that she is offering the juice to an interlocutor. I show that the meaning contribution of the realis subjunctive is strictly not-at-issue, and I develop a multi-dimensional formal semantics that captures both the distribution of the realis subjunctive, and its interaction with operators such as negation and tense. The conditions of use of the construction are modelled in terms of decision theory.

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.

Following a recent discussion in Fox & Spector 2018, this paper provides an argument for a particular view of the theory of scalar implicatures and exhaustification where exhaustification is only allowed if it alters the overall sentence meaning without weakening it.I show that this idea is helpful to make sense of the so-called dependent plural interpretations, addressed within the theory of scalar implicatures in Zweig 2009 (see also Zweig 2008). Even though Zweig’s account is based on insightful and plausible assumptions (most crucially, the idea that the multiplicity component of the meaning of plurals is a scalar implicature), it ultimately fails to derive dependent plural readings. The main reason for this is the use of the Strongest Candidate Principle of Chierchia 2006 that happens to filter out the needed interpretation. Replacing the Strongest Candidate Principle with a weaker constraint on exhaustification along the lines of Fox & Spector 2018 resolves the issue, while keeping most of Zweig’s insights intact.

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.

This paper revisits a study by Machery et al. (2004), suggesting that, in experimental versions of Kripke’s (1980) fictional cases on the use of proper names, Westerners are more likely than East Asian participants to show intuitions compatible with Kripke’s causal-historical (CH) theory of reference. We conducted two experiments, recruting participants from Norway and Bangladesh, either in English (experiment 1; N = 75) or in the participants’ native languages (experiment 2; N = 60), using modified cases and a new approach to data analysis. We replicated the results of Machery et al. (2004), but we show that the residual finding—i.e., that participants who are not aligned with CH produce responses consistent with a definite descriptions (DD) theory of reference—does not hold. Most participants in our experiments, and nearly all those who do not provide CH answers, respond as predicted by a theory that accommodates speaker’s reference in reasoning about uses of proper names, not according to DD. We suggest that cross-cultural variation in this task is real. However, explanations of variation within or across cultures need not invoke competing theories of reference (CH vs DD), and can be unified within a single, broadly Kripkean analysis that honors the basic distinction between semantic reference and speaker’s reference. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Many languages have particles that possess multiple logical functions. Take the Mandarin particle dou for example. Varying by the item it is associated with and the prosodic pattern of the environment it appears in, dou can trigger a distributivity effect, license a pre-verbal free choice item, or evoke an even-like inference. Considering universal grammar a simple system, we need to figure out, for a multi-functional particle, which of its functions is primary, what parametric variations are responsible for the alternations in function, and how these variations are conditioned. In this paper, I argue that the seemingly unrelated functions of dou share the same source: dou is a pre-exhaustification exhaustifier operating on sub-alternatives. Uniformly, dou affirms the truth of its propositional prejacent, negates the exhaustification of each sub-alternative, and presupposes a non-vacuity inference that there is at least one sub-alternative. Alternations in function result from minimal weakening operations on the semantics of sub-alternatives. In particular, sub-alternatives are primarily weaker alternatives, and the non-vacuity presupposition of dou yields a distributivity effect. When the semantics of sub-alternatives is weakened under particular syntactic or prosodic conditions, dou gains its other logical functions.

A semantic universal, which we here dub the Veridical Uniformity Universal, has recently been argued to hold of responsive verbs (those that take both declarative and interrogative complements). This paper offers a preliminary explanation of this universal: verbs satisfying it are easier to learn than those that do not. This claim is supported by a computational experiment using artificial neural networks, mirroring a recent proposal for explaining semantic universals of quantifiers. This preliminary study opens up many avenues for future work on explaining semantic universals more generally, which are discussed in the conclusion.

Natural language appears to allow the ascription of properties of numeral symbols to the denotation of number referring phrases. The paper describes the phenomenon and presents two alternative explanations for why it obtains. One combining an intuitive semantics for number referring phrases and a predicate-shifting mechanism, the other assigning number referring phrases a structured denotation consisting of two parts: a mathematical object (the number) and a contextually determined numeral symbol. Some preliminary observations in favor of the second analysis are offered.

In this paper, we investigate the temporal interpretation of propositional attitude complement clauses in four typologically unrelated languages: Washo (language isolate), Medumba (Niger-Congo), Hausa (Afro-Asiatic), and Samoan (Austronesian). Of these languages, Washo and Medumba are optional-tense languages, while Hausa and Samoan are tenseless. Just like in obligatory-tense languages, we observe variation among these languages when it comes to the availability of so-called simultaneous and backward-shifted readings of complement clauses. For our optional-tense languages, we argue that a Sequence of Tense parameter is active in these languages, just as in obligatory-tense languages. However, for completely tenseless clauses, we need something more. We argue that there is variation in the degree to which languages make recourse to res-movement, or a similar mechanism that manipulates LF structures to derive backward-shifted readings in tenseless complement clauses. We additionally appeal to cross-linguistic variation in the lexical semantics of perfective aspect to derive or block certain readings. The result is that the typological classification of a language as tensed, optionally tensed, or tenseless, does not alone determine the temporal interpretation possibilities for complement clauses. Rather, structural parameters of variation cross-cut these broad classes of languages to deliver the observed cross-linguistic picture.

Among the words that describe initial or final parts of events, words describing finishing stand out in a number of ways: in a language like English, there is a transitive verb which is singularly flexible regarding the type of event retrievable from the context; in a language like German, there is no verb but there is a verbal particle; in either case, there is a requirement of telicity and there is a requirement of theme incrementality. The present paper documents these facts and offers an analysis of the verbal particle.

Chemla & Spector (2011) have found experimental evidence that a universal sen- tence embedding a weak scalar term like Every student read some of the books has the strong inference that no student read all of the books, in addition to the weak one that not every student did (see also Clifton Jr & Dube 2010, Potts et al. 2015, Gotzner & Benz 2015). While it is controversial how this strong inference should be derived, there is consensus in the literature that this inference is an inference of the sentence above. On the other hand, the corresponding case of a negative quantifier embedding a strong scalar term like No student read all of the books with its corresponding potential strong inference that every student read some of the books, in addition to the weak one that some student read some of the books, is more controversial (Chemla 2009a,b,c, Romoli 2012, 2014, Trinh & Haida 2015). And, to our knowledge, there is no convincing experimental evidence for the existence of this strong inference. In this paper, we report on two experiments, building on Chemla & Spector 2011 and Chemla 2009c, systematically comparing sentences like the above with every and no. In our results, we find evidence for the strong inferences of both every and no. We discuss how standard theories of alternatives (e.g. Sauerland 2004b) can account for our data but also how they incur in an over- and under-generation problems which have been pointed out in connection with the combination of alternatives for sentences with multiple scalar terms (Fox 2007, Magri 2010, Chemla 2010, Romoli 2012). We discuss the two more constrained theories of alternatives by Fox 2007 and Romoli 2012 and we show that only the latter, combined with an independent account of the inferences of disjunction under universal modals (Crnic et al. 2015, Bar-Lev & Fox 2016), can account for our data without incurring in the above-mentioned problems.

This paper investigates two types of data that appear to motivate complicating the semantics for weak necessity modals. I argue that these data can be captured using the same conceptual resources within a conservative extension of the standard quantificational semantics. The resulting analysis illuminates previously puzzling and underappreciated semantic and pragmatic properties of weak and strong necessity modals, and clarifies the special role that expressions of weak necessity play in conversation, deliberation, and planning.

This paper proposes a semantics for declarative and interrogative complements and for so-called responsive verbs, like know and forget, which embed both kinds of complements. Following Groenendijk & Stokhof (1984), we pursue a uniform account in the sense that we take both kinds of complements to be of the same semantic type and we assume a single lexical entry for each responsive verb. This approach avoids a number of problems for non-uniform theories, such as the reductive theories of Karttunen (1977), Heim (1994), Lahiri (2002), Spector & Egré (2015), among others, and the twin relations theory of George (2011). On the other hand, our account also addresses the main limitation of Groenendijk & Stokhof's (1984) proposal, which is that it is primarily designed to derive strongly exhaustive readings for interrogative complements. Our account is more flexible in that it straightforwardly derives non-exhaustive and intermediate exhaustive readings as well.

Presupposition triggers can be divided in two groups, ‘soft’ and ‘hard,’ based on whether the presuppositions they give rise to are easily defeasible and whether they project uniformly in quantificational sentences (Abusch 2002, 2010, Charlow 2009). Recently, two ideas have been put forward in the literature in connection to this problem. First, soft triggers should be thought of as non-presuppositional items associated with lexical alternatives (Abusch 2002, 2010). Second, the projection behavior of presuppositions can be accounted for by a theory based on scalar implicatures (Chemla 2009a, Chemla 2010). In this paper, building on these two ideas, I propose a scalar approach to the presuppositions of soft triggers. The contribution of the proposal is twofold. First, I propose a theory of soft presuppositions as scalar implicatures that provides an account of their behaviour in quantificational sentences that makes more accurate predictions than Chemla’s (2009a), Chemla’s (2010) and Abusch’s (2010) proposals and other non-alternative-based theories that I am aware of. Second, I develop an account of the differences between soft and hard presuppositions, on the one hand, and the similarities between soft presuppositions and scalar implicatures, on the other. Finally, the proposed approach also reduces the pattern of presupposition suspension to independent principles needed in the theory of scalar implicatures.

The paper provides a compositional account of cumulative readings with non-increasing modified numerals (aka van Benthem's puzzle), e.g., Exactly three boys saw exactly five movies. The main proposal is that modified numerals make two kinds of semantic contributions. Their asserted/at-issue contribution is a maximization operator that introduces the maximal set of entities that satisfies their restrictor and nuclear scope. The second contribution is a post-supposition, i.e., a cardinality constraint that needs to be satisfied relative to the context that results after the at-issue meaning is evaluated. We take contexts to be sets of variable assignments relative to which quantificational expressions are interpreted and which are updated as a result of their interpretation.

The combination of a modal verb and a modal adverb that is similar in modal force (possibility/necessity) and flavor (epistemic/deontic, etc.) allows a concord interpretation in which the two modals somehow ‘fuse’ and communicate just a single modality. This paper presents a case study of modal concord, as it is exemplified in Dutch. It seems that speakers of this language tend to add modal adverbs to modal verbs in order to disambiguate the meaning of that verb. To deal with this phenomenon, I propose modal adverbs are domain restriction devices, not unlike if -clauses, but that come with additional information about the force of the quantifier for which they provide the restrictor.

Quantifiers, unlike proper names or definite descriptions, cannot be given the semantics of referring expressions. This fact has triggered a long-standing debate in formal semantics and syntax as to the combinatorial means by which quantifiers are integrated into a sentence. The present paper contributes to this debate through an investigation of quantifier comprehension during real-time sentence processing. We present evidence showing that two potentially independent processes—the integration of a quantifier in object position and the resolution of antecedent-contained deletion (ACD)—are linked. Our data show, more specifically, that the resolution of a downstream ACD site is facilitated during real-time sentence processing if the upstream DP hosting the ACD site is quantificational but not if it is definite. We discuss these findings in the context of a QUANTIFIER RAISINGbased approach and a type-shifting-based approach to quantifier integration. We argue that facilitation of ACD resolution by an upstream quantifier is only expected by theories, such as the QUANTIFIER RAISING approach, which employ the same mechanism for both processes. We then compare the QUANTIFIER RAISING-based account with a non-grammatical experience-based approach to our data, which attempts to explain the findings in terms of corpus frequencies. Although we cannot rule out such an alternative at this stage, we offer reasons to believe that an account that exploits QUANTIFIER RAISING has an explanatory advantage.

In this paper, we discuss the fact that not only adverbially quantified sentences with singular indefinites or bare plurals but also ones containing plural definites show Quantificational Variability Effects (QVEs), that is, they receive readings according to which the quantificational force of the respective DP seems to depend on the quantificational force of the Q-adverb. We show that if the Q-adverb is a frequency adverb like usually, there is strong evidence that QVEs come about as indirect effects of a quantification over situations. This conclusion is based on the fact that in such cases the availability of QVEs is constrained in ways that have no parallel in sentences containing adverbs of quantity like for the most part or quantificational DPs instead of frequency adverbs. We show that these constraints can be derived from plausible assumptions about how the situations to be quantified over are constrained: they have to be located in time on the basis of the most specific locally available information, and their running times are not allowed to overlap.

This paper explores what children and adults know about three specific ways that meaning and context interact: the interpretation of expressions whose extensions vary in different contexts (semantic context dependence); conditions on the felicitous use of expressions in a discourse context (presupposition accommodation) and informative uses of expressions in contexts in which they strictly speaking do not apply (imprecision). The empirical focus is the use of unmodified (positive form) gradable adjectives (GAs) in definite descriptions to distinguish between two objects that differ in the degree to which they possess the property named by the adjective. We show that by 3 years of age, children are sensitive to all three varieties of context– meaning interaction and that their knowledge of this relation with the definite description is appropriately guided by the semantic representations of the GA appearing in it. These findings suggest that children’s semantic representations of the GAs we investigated and the definite determiner the are adult-like and that they are aware of the consequences of these representations when relating meaning and context. Bolstered by adult participant responses, this work provides important experimental support for theoretical claims regarding the semantics of gradable predicates and the nature of different types of ‘interpretive variability’, specifically semantic context dependence v. pragmatic tolerance of imprecision.

This paper considers a set of presupposition triggers including focus, questions, ‘contrastive’ statives and an ‘affirmation/negation’ construction involving and not, where presuppositions are cancellable. It is proposed that these constructions, rather than having strict semantic presuppositions, have representations involving alternative sets in the sense of alternative semantics of questions and focus and that a default process generates a presupposition from the alternative set. Presupposition projection facts are dealt with by stating a default constraint referring to dynamic denotations. The analysis can be extended to other constructions and lexical items with defeasible presupposition-triggering behaviour, such as inchoatives, by hypothesizing a representation involving alternatives.

This paper presents three experimental studies investigating the processing of presupposed content. The first two experiments employ the German additive particle auch 'too', and the third uses English also. In experiment 1, participants were given a questionnaire containing biclausal, ambiguous sentences containing auch. The presupposition introduced by auch was only satisfied on one of the two readings, which corresponded to a syntactically dispreferred parse of the sentence. The prospect of having the auch presupposition satisfied made participants choose this syntactically dispreferred reading more frequently than in a control condition. Experiment 2 used the self-paced reading paradigm and compared the reading times on clauses containing auch, which differed in whether the presupposition of auch was satisfied or not. Participants read the clause more slowly when the presupposition was not satisfied. Experiment 3 followed up a number of issues that arose from experiment 2 and confirmed the results found there. These studies show that presuppositions play an important role in online sentence comprehension and affect the choice of syntactic analysis. Some theoretical implications of these findings for the semantic analysis of auch/also and dynamic accounts of presuppositions as well as for theories of semantic processing are discussed.

In Cuzco Quechua, reciprocity is marked by means of two verbal suffixes, one of which is a marker of reflexivity, the other of which is a marker of pluractionality. The paper develops an analysis that composes reciprocity from these more basic notions. Two further ingredients that are needed will be argued to derive from independent principles: universal quantification over parts of the reciprocal plural agent derives from plural predication, as has been argued by other researchers for English reciprocity, and distinctness of the participants in the reciprocal subevents derives from a semantic version of Condition B. This way of composing reciprocity is not universal, and other languages have dedicated reciprocal markers or make other reciprocal ingredients overt. The compositional derivation of reciprocity is therefore a clear candidate for cross-linguistic semantic variation.

Recently, several authors have argued that Gricean theories of scalar implicature computation are inadequate, and, as an alternative, one author has proposed a grammatical system for computing scalar implicatures. The present paper provides arguments, counter to the'claims of these authors, that Gricean reasoning can account for the implicatures of certain complex sentences and does not generate undesirable implicatures for others. Moreover, it is shown that a putative advantage of grammatical scalar implicature computation, that it informs a theory of intervention in negative polarity item licensing, is spurious. These arguments, plus general conceptual advantages of Gricean theory, lead to the conclusion that scalar implicature computation is not carried out in the grammar.

This paper considers the possibility of anaphoric dependencies to the objects of creation verbs in progressive aspect. It is shown that such dependencies are possible in the right circumstances and a classification of the felicitous cases is proposed. A formal analysis making use of pragmatic information and discourse structure is given. Finally, some broader implications of the analysis are discussed.

In communicative exchanges one of the most familiar phenomena is accommodation, which enables the addressee to incorporate a missing piece of information into her own view of the common ground. A less familiar, but equally important, phenomenon is what I call discommodation, whose main feature consists in the fact that the missing piece of information, although essential to the comprehension of the utterance, cannot be shared by the addressee because it sounds problematic or even false to her. In such cases it is possible to open a 'presuppositional slot' to take into account the assumptions that serve to select the reference of the noun phrase, but that are not incorporated into the revised context. One of the main purposes of the paper is to propose a definition of truth (with respect to a presuppositional apparatus) that does not ignore the role of discommodation when different views of the common ground are involved.

This paper provides an update semantics for counterfactual conditionals. It does so by giving a dynamic twist to the 'Premise Semantics' for counterfactuals developed in Veltman (1976) and Kratzer (1981). It also offers an alternative solution to the problems with naive Premise Semantics discussed by Angelika Kratzer in 'Lumps of Thought' (Kratzer, 1989). Such an alternative is called for given the triviality results presented in Kanazawa et al. (2005, this issue).

Theories of aspectual composltlon assume that accomplishments arise when a transitive verb has an incremental theme argument which is realized as a quantized NP-foremost, an NP which is not a mass noun or a bare plural-in direct object position. A problem confronting this assumption is the large number of intransitive, unergative verbs in Getman and English that occur in accomplishment expressions. The paper argues that this problem can be solved within a Standard theory of aspectual composition if additional, independently motivated lexical assumptions about argmnent structure, the representation of implicit arguments and lexical presuppositions are made. It turns out that a distinction between lexically detennined definitcness versus non-definiteness of implicit arguments in particular plays a cmcial role, as weil as one between implicitly reflexive and non-reflexive arguments in that implicitly definite and implicitly reflexive arguments allow for accomplishment expressions. This is explained by the semantics of definiteness and refl.exivity, respectively. Apart from these verbs, there is another large group of unergatives which show that, in contrast to a common assumption in aspectual composition theory, verbs thermselves and not only VPs can be quantized. This leads to a lexical distinction between "mass" and "count" verbs.