Linguistics

This paper proposes a universal account of counting constructions. The observable variation in such constructions can be categorized into four possible systems resulting from parametric variation of two linguistic properties - NP[+/- pred] (whether the NP starts out as a predicate or a kind term) and Card/CL (whether cardinal and classifier heads are fused). The four systems show different patterns vis-à-vis overt occurrence of number-marking plurals (of the English type) and numeral classifiers - they are either obligatorily complementary, or obligatorily absent, or they obligatorily co-occur. The first two systems have been extensively studied, and the third has been argued to be impossib..

This paper analyzes complex attitude predicates such as make the claim that S. The proposal is couched in the the idea that propositional attitudes are built from content-bearing individuals (e.g. Moulton 2009; Moltmann 2020). I argue that the singular definite in this construction refers to a definite kind in the sense of Dayal 2004, specifying the type of result rather than the result itself. This immediately explains a range of phenomena including non-anaphoricity, no instantiation in negative contexts, and apparent non-uniqueness in quantified contexts. A compositional analysis is developed, building up from the individual parts, in which this constructions takes a definite kind argument..

Hualapai is a Yuman language with a verbal morphological system, seen in various languages of the region, which poses difficulties for a compositional analysis. In particular, Hualapai verb morphology exhibits incrementality (see Baerman 2016, 2019, 2024), where there is no one-to-one mapping between forms and meanings. Instead, forms are ordered on a scale tracking morphological complexity, and more complex morphological forms are mapped, all things being equal, to meanings that are higher on some semantic scale. In the case of Hualapai, the incremental system concerns a plurality, which in this case conflates plural argument marking and plural event marking, also known as pluractionality. ..

There are at least two semantic distinctions made in the literature: the (not-)at-issue distinction, and the distinction between descriptive and illocutionary or use-conditional content (Kaplan 1997; Horn 2013; Rett 2021b). Two phenomena that have traditionally been characterized as illocutionary are illocutionary mood and illocutionary modifiers (e.g. frankly). Most treatments of not-at-issue content don’t differentiate between illocutionary content and descriptive not-at-issue content, like that encoded in appositives or conventional implicature. Those that do can’t model both illocutionary mood and illocutionary modifiers, or require additional formal apparatuses to do so. The goal of..

We investigate number agreement in coordinated subjects, including disjunctions and conjunctions of singular universal quantifier. Experimental data from German reveals that they often allow for singular agreement. We argue that there is a competition between semantic and syntactic agreement, and that the latter is a generalization of the former.

This paper examines a surprising counterexample to the Spector & Egré’s (2015) generalization that interrogative and declarative complements of responsive verbs match in veridicality: Javanese predicates ngêrti ‘know’ and kèlingan ‘remember’ are veridical with respect to the interrogative CPs, but not with respect to declaratives. I propose that this pattern is problematic for P-to-Q and Uniformity approaches that bake in the answerhood operator (ANS) into the meaning of the embedding verb, and propose an account that derives the Javanese pattern by maintaining the uniformity of semantic types, yet mimicking the Q-to-P reduction.

This paper argues that negated clefts, as well as other types of embedded clefts, trigger a previously undescribed inference, which I term potential exhaustivity. Although negated clefts do not trigger an actual exhaustivity inference, they imply that the rejected alternative was under consideration as a potential exhaustive answer to the question under discussion addressed by the cleft. Therefore, negated clefts are infelicitous when the common ground already entails that the rejected alternative cannot serve as an exhaustive answer. This finding challenges the prevailing assumption that cleft exhaustivity does not project, thereby providing compelling evidence that exhaustivity is a presup..

In some languages, indexicals (e.g. I, you, today) can shift in attitude reporting clauses to be interpreted with respect to the attitude context rather than the utterance context (Schlenker 1999; Anand & Nevins 2004; Anand 2006; Deal 2020, i.a.). This paper demonstrates that Marathi is a language with shiftable indexicals, but one which exhibits non-canonical properties. First, Marathi indexical shift enables the first person inclusive pronoun, rather than the first person singular pronoun, to refer to the attitude holder. Second, the shifted reading of the first person inclusive pronoun is available in mental attitude reports but not typical speech reports, in apparent violation of Dea..

We propose a compositional analysis of an apparent linguistic illusion that productively arises with sentences like The importance of this position cannot be underestimated, featuring the prefix under- and a negated possibility modal. On what we term the ‘intended’ interpretation, the sentence means that the position’s importance is very high, while on what we call the ‘pedantic’ interpretation, the sentence means that the position’s importance is very low. Although the intended reading has been claimed to be illusory, we demonstrate that it arises from an inter- action between the scope of the negated modal, the monotonicity of the underlying degree set, and maximal informativit..

The present paper provides a uniform treatment of mood morphology across constructions in Spanish, including: (a) mood selection in complement clauses of attitude verbs and in matrix clauses, (b) mood alternation in relative clauses and, tentatively, (c) mood alternation in conditional clauses. We argue for the following combination of ingredients from different approaches: (i) mood tracks the modal architecture of the embedding verb, not the local context set; (ii) mood introduces a world pronoun, not world quantification; and (iii) indicative mood is presuppositionally heavier than subjunctive mood.

The paper addresses the question which entailments of complex expressions are more likely to become presupposed meaning (the ‘triggering problem’) by discussing new experimental evidence. Exploiting a word learning paradigm based on visual animations (Bade, Schlenker & Chemla to appear), the experiment discussed tests the predictions of different theories for change of state verbs. The findings suggest that initial states are more likely to be presupposed, whereas result states are spontaneously construed as asserted meaning. Results also show that the change of state itself can be more or less at-issue, depending on whether the result or initial state is salient.

This paper investigates the correspondence between the semantics of a finite complement clause and its scope islandhood. Via comparison of the semantics of canonical attitude verbs, e.g. believe and claim, with that of clause-embedding verbs like ensure and prove, whose complement clauses are not scope islands (Farkas and Giannakidou 1996, Barker 2022, Palucci 2024, a.o.), this paper argues for two claims. First, while complement clauses of attitude verbs have been argued to denote predicates of individuals with propositional content (Kratzer 2006, Moulton 2009, 2015, Elliott 2020, a.o.), those of ensure-type verbs denote predicates of events (without propositional content). Second, finite c..

Sentences where a definite DP is modified by a relative clause containing a universal quantifier (relative clause DPs), like the supervisor that each volunteer reported to, license readings which carry separate presuppositions of uniqueness and existence for each volunteer—henceforth, ‘varying definite readings’ (VDRs). Barker 2022 argues that these readings involve the universal DP scoping out of the relative clause and above the definite and proposes to analyze them using a non-local scope shifting mechanism, like quantifier raising (QR). In this paper, we argue that this is a case of pseudo-scope. Instead, we argue for a functional interpretation of the DP and propose that VDRs resu..

This paper explores a phenomenon, metalepsis, that hasn’t been discussed in linguistics until only recently, but is important because it sheds new light on the semantics of fiction and paradoxical statements. We focus on a particular instance of metalepsis, namely the following sentence from Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval: ‘While the coach is making its way up to the hills, let us piece together the memories of the days when I often visited these parts.’ This sentence exemplifies a temporal paradox since the narrator asks the narratee to join him in doing something that had already happened. Previous analyses of metalepsis have focused on third-person examples, leading to incorrect predic..

We present a novel analysis of indirect Q-NP-questions in Akan (Kwa, Niger Congo), which come in the form of relativized NPs without wh-syntax. We propose a unified analysis of Akan Q-NPs (Zimmermann 2018) and their English wh-counterparts on which a covert Q-operator abstracts over a variable expressed by a REL- or a wh-pronoun, respectively. Akan Q-NPs are licit because the language has cross-categorical operators (Det, Q), which can attach to NP- and clausal constituents alike. The analysis accounts for the varying EXH-strength of such Q-NPs in Akan, and it is extendable to other non Indoeuropean languages with Q-NPs. More generally, there seem to be two subtypes of NP/DP-based embedded q..

This paper explores the temporal interpretation of attitude reports (AttR)in the Asante (Twi) dialect of Akan (Kwa, Niger Congo), with a focus on derivingthe (past) simultaneous (SIM) reading in X-under-Past embeddings. We note thatSIM in Asante arises when X represents: (i) the bare form, (ii) the distal deictictense ná or (marginally) (iii) the perfective past LEN - with a decreasing preferencein that order from (i) to (iii). Based on our empirical findings, accounts postulatingdeletion or binding of the embedded tense are ruled out for (ii) and (iii). Therefore,we propose that, while the bare form is associated with a de Se binding construal,both ná and LEN involve only a de Re construa..

Cross-linguistically, exclusive particles ‘only’ may be doubled with a single focus association, giving rise to an apparent form-meaning mismatch. Focusing on an understudied case of doubling of exclusive adverbial particle zinghai and sentence-final particle (SFP) zaa3 in Cantonese, this study refines the operator-particle approach (e.g., Quek & Hirsch 2017) and argues for a novel view where exclusive doubling instantiates a scalar focus structure. I demonstrate that both particles have focus-sensitive contributions: zinghai encodes at-issue exclusivity and zaa3 encodes not-at-issue scalar meaning. I further propose that zaa3 is semantically dependent on zinghai, and acquires access..

This study investigates Mandarin speakers’ acceptability of telic descriptions for incomplete situations, focusing on the role of pragmatic accommodation. Previ- ous research (Xu & Schmitt to appear a, to appear b) has shown that in judging event culmination, when two out three objects were fully consumed or created and the third object was partially affected (e.g., a girl eating two cookies and taking a bite from the third one), participants were able to restrict the domain of the definite/demonstrative DP (but not the noun phrases with the numeral three) to refer only to the fully consumed or created objects and, we argued, because of that, tended to accept the description as matchin..

Longstanding tradition in the literature uses a [HON] feature to analyze tiered honorification systems of Indo-Aryan. This work presents a stark opposition to that tradition, using Wang’s (2023) framework based on a pragmatic calculus, which crucially does not make use of [HON]. I adapt such a framework to show how it can explain both the diachronic and synchronic properties of tiered systems.

Both individuals and predicates can be referred to in different ways which carry different senses or connotations. Despite this being discussed since at least Frege, it poses a deep problem to standard extensional semantics. For example, as discussed by Jennifer Saul, “Clark Kent went into the phone booth and Superman came out” simply means something different from “Superman went into the phone booth and Clark Kent came out”. I introduce a novel way of modelling these kinds of semantic phenomena using Sampling Propensity (Icard, 2016). The core idea is that the basic atoms of semantic calculus are generated from a set of potential candidates via a generative cognitive procedure. In o..

Rudin (2018) and Rudin & Rudin (2022) make a typological generalization that languages in which rising declaratives comprise non-canonical yes/no questions (YNQs), like English and Bulgarian, also allow for rising imperatives, used as tentative, but invested requests or disinterested suggestions, but languages in which rising declaratives comprise canonical YNQs, like Macedonian, don't allow for such rising imperatives. I look at another Slavic language, Russian, further expanding and fine-tuning the typology of how different languages realize various meaning components of different types of speech acts. While, like in Macedonian, Russian canonical YNQs are formed via an "intonation-only..

This paper argues that indirect discourse is a form of mixed quotation. It further posits that self-pointing gestures in indirect discourse, when aligned with a third-person pronoun co-referent with the matrix subject, constitute a character viewpoint gesture quoted from the matrix subject (cf. Ebert & Hinterwimmer 2022). To formally model this, Davidson’s (2015) demonstrational account of quotation is combined with Ebert & Ebert’s (2014) approach to gesture semantics. This analysis also readily explains observations that certain indexicals can shift in indirect discourse (Plank 1986; Anderson 2019), by reinterpreting them as quotations from the matrix subject.

The similarity approach to conditionals (Stalnaker 1968; Lewis 1973) predicts Reciprocity to be valid: whenever A > B, B > A and A > C are true, B > C is true too (where A > B denotes if A would B). We ran an experiment to test the validity of this rule. Strikingly, half of our participants judged the rule invalid, i.e. judged in at least one scenario that it does not preserve truth. Our data also challenge Kratzer’s (2012) and Fine’s (2012) semantics of conditionals, but we show that McHugh’s (2022; 2023) aboutness approach can account for our data.

Kratzer’s (1981a) classic quantificational account of natural language modality relies on premise sets (ordering sources) to derive the preorder on the domain of quantification required to get the truth conditions right. On the basis of novel data from Italian documenting a particular type of epistemic modal statements that come with an “antievidential” character, this paper advances a new argument for employing premise sets as opposed to taking orders as a primitive (Lewis 1981).

If a quantificational determiner denotes a relation between the restrictor and the scope, then in order to handle donkey anaphora, the transmission of anaphoric information from the restrictor to the scope must be baked into the lexical semantics of the determiner. By analyzing quantification as unary, rather than relational, I show that donkey anaphora can be accounted for without defining determiners which explicitly manage the flow of anaphoric information.

This paper is an experimental investigation of embedded scalar implicatures in the context of scalar diversity. We test whether a sentence such as Every student read some of the books leads to the implicature that No student read all of the books, and similarly whether Every soup was warm leads to the implicature that No soup was hot—across 42 different lexical scales. We find 1) that embedded implicatures arise; 2) that there is across-scale variation in embedded implicatures, paralleling scalar diversity among global implicatures; and 3) that properties of alternatives (namely, semantic distance and boundedness) that predict global scalar diversity predict variation at the embedded level..

In most of the literature of degree semantics, whether gradable adjectives receive context-independent or -dependent denotations has been a correlate of whether a language is analyzed as having degrees as semantic primitives (Cresswell 1976; von Stechow 1984; Kennedy 1999) or not (Klein 1980, 1982, 1991). A third logical possibility is to postulate context-dependent yet degree-based denotations of gradable adjectives (Beck, Oda & Sugisaki 2004, Oda 2008 on Japanese; Breakstone 2012, Cariani, Santorio & Wellwood 2023b on English; see also Cariani, Santorio & Wellwood 2023a and Wellwood 2024). I argue that this third option predicts (i) availability of readings of implicit comparis..

Disjunction, expressed by or in English, is a primary connective available in natural language. It was traditionally analyzed as the counterparts of the Boolean connectives ∨ (e.g., Montague 1973), but subsequent studies revealed a number of inadequacies in this approach, which led to the ‘dynamic turn’ in natural language semantics (Karttunen 1974; Heim 1982; et seq). However, the empirical base of the literature almost exclusively comprises examples of English. The cross-linguistic (in)adequacy of the theory has yet to be investigated. This paper addresses this research gap by inspecting disjunction in Japanese. More specifically, this paper examines the (non-)replicability of the ob..

The goal of this study is to experimentally evaluate contrasting claims in the theoretical literature on the acceptability of Mandarin demonstratives and definite bare nouns in anaphoric contexts. Jenks (2018) argues that Mandarin differentiates between uniqueness-based (weak) and anaphoric (strong) definites through bare nouns and demonstratives, respectively. In contrast, Dayal & Jiang (2022), Bremmers, Liu, van der Klis & Le Bruyn (2022), and Simpson & Wu (2022) claim that both bare nouns and demonstratives can be used in anaphoric contexts in Mandarin, proposing slightly differing explanations with regards to their felicity, tied to factors such as discourse coherence between..

Future-Less-Vivid conditionals (FLVs) are conditionals that display the typical morphological marking of counterfactuals, but whose antecedent has future reference time. An example is in (i):(i) If Ada took semantics next term, she would take logic next year. The literature has coalesced on a near-consensus that FLVs cannot be contrary-to-fact. In this paper, I argue that the near-consensus is wrong. FLVs can be genuinely counterfactual: in particular, FLVs are counterfactuals about the future, i.e. can involve suppositions that contradict settled future facts. This has an interesting theoretical upshot. The behavior of FLVs is challenging for all theories on which tenses affect root modals ..