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The article discusses theoretical repercussions of a number of diachronic corpus studies establishing the patters of development of marked indefinites across languages (Aguilar-Guevara et al. 2012). The focus is on the case of wh-based free choice (FC) indefinites. After summarising the key results of two studies on the historical development of Spanish cualquiera and Dutch wie dan ook, we present a semantic analysis of the diachronic phases of these two FC indefinites demonstrating how historical data provide additional support for the abstract operators posited by analyses in Alternative Semantics style (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002, Aloni 2007, Menéndez-Benito 2010).

Free choice inferences represent a much discussed case of a divergence between logic and language (Kamp 1973, Zimmermann 2000). Grice influentially argued that the assumption that such divergence does in fact exist is a mistake originating “from inadequate attention to the nature and importance of the conditions governing conversation” (Grice 1989: 24). I will first show that when applied to free choice phenomena, the standard implementation of Grice’s view, representing semantics and pragmatics as two separate components, is empirically inadequate. I will then propose a different account: a bilateral state-based modal logic modelling next to literal meanings also pragmatic factors and the additional inferences that arise from their interaction. The pragmatic factor I will consider connects to a tendency of language users to neglect empty configurations when engaging in linguistic interpretation. The non-emptiness atom (ne) from team semantics provides a perspicuous way to formally represent this tendency and to rigorously study its impact on interpretation. In terms of ne, I will define a pragmatic enrichment function and show that, in interaction with disjunction occurring in positive contexts and only in these cases, pragmatic enrichment yields non-trivial effects including predicting free choice inferences and their cancellation under negation. The latter result relies on the adopted bilateralism, where each connective comes with an assertion and a rejection condition and negation is defined in terms of the latter notion.

This paper offers an account of the fact that certain verbs license wh-questions as their complement but not whether-questions. For instance, it is felicitous to say It is surprising who Bill had invited but not to say It is surprising whether Bill had invited his wife. We refer to this contrast as the *whether puzzle. We propose an account which crucially rests on the assumption that the relevant kind of verbs are sensitive to the semantic objects that their complement clause brings into salience, rather than just its truth/resolution conditions. It has been argued in previous work that the semantic objects that matrix questions bring into salience are important to understand the role of such questions in discourse. The present paper is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to argue that this aspect of meaning is also crucial for understanding the role of embedded questions in grammar.

This article proposes an account of knowing-who constructions within a generalisation of Hintikka’s (Knowledge and belief. Cornell UP, Ithaca, MA, [10]) quantified epistemic logic employing the notion of a conceptual cover Aloni PhD thesis [1]. The proposed logical system captures the inherent context-sensitivity of knowing-wh constructions Boër and Lycan (Knowing Who. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, [5]), as well as expresses non-trivial cases of so-called concealed questions Heim (Semantics from different points of view. Springer, Berlin, [9]). Assuming that quantifying into epistemic contexts and knowing-who are linked in the way Hintikka had proposed, the context dependence of the latter will translate into a context dependence of de re attitude ascriptions and this will result in a ready account of a number of traditionally problematic cases including Quine’s well-known double vision puzzles Quine (The ways of Paradox and other essays. Random House, New York, [16]).

In logic, disjunction is a binary connective (∨) classically interpreted as a truth function the output of which is true if at least one of the input sentences (disjuncts) is true, and false otherwise. Its supposed connection with disjunctive words of natural language like or has long intrigued philosophers, logicians and linguists. In this entry we give an overview of logical and linguistic analyses of disjunction with focus on developments at the interface between logic and language. Sections 1 and 2 present disjunction as a binary connective in classical logic and in a number of non-classical interpretations. Section 3 discusses some basic facts concerning disjunctive words in natural language, and introduces a generalized, cross-categorial notion of disjunction as the join operator in a (Boolean) algebra. Section 4 and 5 present Grice’s account of the use of or in conversation and recent developments in the discussion on inclusive and exclusive uses of linguistic disjunctive words. Finally, sections 6 and 7 introduce two recent non-classical accounts of linguistic disjunction and discuss applications to phenomena of free choice, disjunctive questions and counterfactuals with disjunctive antecedents.

The article discusses the interpretation of indexicals within the framework of quantified modal logic. The dominant theory on this topic is Kaplan's two-dimensional analysis. Since its appearance in 1977, Kaplan's analysis has been challenged on various grounds. The author will argue that by revising the way of modelling the objects we refer to in conversation, we can account for counterexamples to Kaplan's theory, while maintaining Kaplan's basic insights concerning the meaning of 'you' and 'I'.

In this chapter we give an overview of the research area which studies the meaning of questions. We start with explaining some general notions and insights in this area, and then zoom in on the three most influential semantic theories of questions, which all attempt to characterize question meaning in terms of “answerhood conditions”. (They are thus following up on the notion of “truth conditions” as the core notion of a formal semantics for indicative sentences.) Next, we discuss some special topics in the study of questions and answers, where we focus on issues which are concerned with identity and questions which have to do with scope. Finally, we describe some pragmatic features of answering questions and the general role that questions play in the dynamics of discourse, leading up to a concise introduction of the recent framework of inquisitive semantics.Questions can be studied from various perspectives. For a syntactician, questions are linguistic entities, sentences of a certain kind with distinctive formal features. In English they typically display a change in word order (Is Marco smart? versus Marco is smart), they host wh-expressions with characteristic syntactic features (who, what, where, how, but also which students, which Canadians and the like), and in spoken language a question normally, but not invariably, comes with specific intonation, while in written language it is accompanied by a question mark.For a semanticist, questions are abstract objects taken as the denotations of the above-described type of syntactic expressions. A semanticist here may take his cue from the (formal) study of indicative sentences. There the aim is to uncover a domain of denotations (labeled “propositions” mostly), as, for instance, an algebra which hosts logical constructions (like that of conjunction, disjunction, negation) and logical relations (like entailment, synonymy, and (in-)consistency). In the semantic study of interrogatives the aim is to establish a corresponding domain of denotations that underlies suitable notions of question entailment and answerhood.From a pragmatic perspective, questions are essentially events in a discourse or dialogue. In response to the utterance of an interrogative sentence onemay legitimately ask “Was that a question?” Questions, then, are certain acts in a conversation the very performance of which is subject to linguistic and pragmatic rules.

International audience; Although dysfluent speech is pervasive in spoken conversation , dysfluencies have received little attention within formal theories of dialogue. The majority of work on dysfluent language has come from psy-cholinguistic models of speech production and comprehension (e.g. [10, 3, 1]) and from structural approaches designed to improve performance in speech applications (e.g. [14, 8]). In this paper, we present a detailed formal account which: (a) unifies dysfluencies (self-repair) with Clarification Requests (CRs), without conflating them, (b) offers a precise explication of the roles of all key components of a dysfluency, including editing phrases and filled pauses, (c) accounts for the possibility of self-addressed questions in a dysfluency.

This paper examines how intonation affects the interpretation of disjunctive questions. The semantic effect of a question is taken to be three-fold. First, it raises an issue. In the tradition of inquisitive semantics, we model this by assuming that a question proposes several possible updates of the common ground (several possibilities for short) and invites other participants to help establish at least one of these updates. But apart from raising an issue, a question may also highlight and/or suggest certain possibilities, and intonation determines to a large extent which possibilities are highlighted/suggested.

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The chapter proposes an account of epistemic indefinites cross-linguistically, focusing on the case of German irgendein and Italian un qualche. Four main functions for EIs are identified initially: specific unknown (SU); epistemic unknown (epiU); negative polarity (NPI); and the deontic free choice (deoFC). It is subsequently observed that while irgendein qualifies for all functions, un qualche qualifies only for the first two. The second part of the chapter proposes an account of these data in the framework of a Dynamic Semantics with Conceptual Covers. Our point of departure is the assumption that epistemic indefinites are existentials with two additional characteristics: (i) they induce an obligatory domain shift and (ii) they are felicitous only if such a shift is for a reason.

In this article we investigate how conceptual perspectives and context interact in the determination of the truth of sentences in which ‘knowing-wh’ constructions occur.

Contains fulltext : 40486.pdf (author's version ) (Open Access)

Why have Positive Polarity Items (PPIs) that are universal quantifiers only been attested in the domain of modal auxiliaries (cf. Homer t.a., Iatridou & Zeijlstra 2010, 2013) and never in the domain of quantifiers over individuals? No PPI meaning everybody or everything has ever been reported. In this paper, I argue that universal quantifier PPIs actually do exist, both in the domain of quantifiers over individuals and in the domain of quantifiers over possible worlds, as, I argue, is predicted by the Kadmon & Landman (1993) - Krifka (1995) - Chierchia (2006, 2013) approach to NPIhood. However, since the covert exhaustifier that according to Chierchia (2006, 2013) is induced by these PPIs (and responsible for their PPI-hood) can act as an intervener between the PPI and its anti-licenser, it is concluded in this paper that a universal quantifier PPIs may scope below it and thus appear in disguise; their PPI-like behaviour only becomes visible once they morpho-syntactically precede their anti-licenser. Another conclusion of this paper is that Dutch iedereen (‚everybody’), opposite to English everybody, is actually a PPI.

This squib gives a critical review of the monograph entitled Conflicts in Interpretation (Hendriks et al., 2010) written by Petra Hendriks, Helen de Hoop, Irene Krämer, Henriette de Swart and Joost Zwarts, which was published in 2010 by Equinox Publishing, London. After sketching the relevant background of optimality theoretic approaches to semantics and pragmatics, we give a detailed summary of the contents of this book, discuss its merits and mention a few critical issues that, we feel, future research in this tradition may wish to address more carefully.

Please see full article., Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, Vol 16 No 1 (2012): Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 16

Natural languages possess a wealth of indefinite forms that typically differ in distribution and interpretation. Although formal semanticists have strived to develop precise meaning representations for different indefinite functions, to date there has hardly been any corpus work on the topic. In this paper, we present the results of a small corpus study where English indefinite forms any and some were labelled with fine-grained semantic functions well-motivated by typological studies. We developed annotation guidelines that could be used by non-expert annotators and calculated inter-annotator agreement amongst several coders. The results show that the annotation task is hard, with agreement scores ranging from 52% to 62% depending on the number of functions considered, but also that each of the independent annotations is in accordance with theoretical redictions regarding the possible distributions of indefinite functions. The resulting annotated corpus is available upon request and can be accessed through a searchable online database.

We propose a unified syntactic-semantic account of passive sentences and sentences with an unspecified object (John read). For both constructions, we employ option types for introducing implicit arguments into the syntactic-semantic categorial mechanism. We show the advantages of this approach over previous proposals in the domains of scope and unaccusatives. Unlike pure syntactic treatments, option types immediately derive the obligatory narrow scope of existential quantification over an implicit argument’s slot. Unlike purely semantic, event-based treatments, our proposal naturally accounts for syntactic contrasts between passives and unaccusatives, as in the door *(was) opened by John.

International audience; We propose a unified syntactic-semantic account of passive sentences and sentences with an unspecified object (John read). For both constructions, we employ option types for introducing implicit arguments into the syntactic-semantic categorial mechanism. We show the advantages of this approach over previous proposals in the domains of scope and unaccusatives. Unlike pure syntactic treatments, option types immediately derive the obligatory narrow scope of existential quantification over an implicit argument's slot. Unlike purely semantic, eventbased treatments, our proposal naturally accounts for syntactic contrasts between passives and unaccusatives, as in the door *(was) opened by John.

In this paper we argue that the different scopal relations that deontic modal auxiliaries cross-linguistically exhibit can be explained by assuming that (i) polarity effects arise in the domain of universal deontic modals and therefore not in the domain of existential deontic modals; and (ii) that all deontic modals must be interpreted VP in situ if their polarity requirements allow for that.

The paper presents a study examining the role of working memory in quantifier verification. We created situations similar to the span task to compare numerical quantifiers of low and high rank, parity quantifiers and proportional quantifiers. The results enrich and support the data obtained previously in [1,2,3] and predictions drawn from a computational model [4,5].

In this paper we argue that the different scopal relations that deontic modal auxiliaries cross-linguistically exhibit can be explained by assuming that (i) polarity effects arise in the domain of universal deontic modals and therefore not in the domain of existential deontic modals; and (ii) that all deontic modals must be interpreted VP in situ if their polarity requirements allow for that.