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Utterances of sentences with an indefinite can sometimes be reported with a referential term instead, notably if the indefinite was ‘specific’ but a referential term would not have been appropriate in the original utterance situation. This motivates a reassessment of indefinites and of speech reports. Under the proposed analyses, specific indefinites are referential with respect to what will be called the speaker’s context, as distinct from the common context, and this can shine through in speech reports because they can be sensitive to that context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is sometimes assumed that there is a special exclamative semantics, in particular, that some wh clauses have an exclamative semantics even when embedded, maybe beside an interrogative semantics. In this paper I investigate what such an exclamative semantics might consist in, arguing that there are indeed different readings of wh clauses involved, but that these nuances do not concern the meaning type common to exclamatives and interrogatives: a function assigning to any world a true proposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Additive particles or adverbs like too or again are sometimes obligatory. This does not follow from the meaning commonly ascribed to them. I argue that the text without the additive is incoherent because the context contradicts a contrast implicature stemming from the additive's associate, and that the text with the additive is coherent because the presupposed alternative is added to the associate, so that the implicature does not concern that alternative. I show that this analysis is better than the account offered by Krifka (1999, Proceedings of SALT 8) and that, contra Zeevat (2003, Optimality Theory and Pragmatics, 91–111), the notion of a presupposition is essential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]