Linguistics

In this paper, we investigate disjunctions that combine an assertion with a question. We will explore a number of puzzles arising from such construction and propose an account which construes speech act disjunction as a device to introduce alternative discourse strategies.

Agreement morphology is often assumed to realize φ-features unin- terpreted at LF. We provide experimental evidence from French relative clauses showing that agreement can in fact have an interpretative effect, adding to the range of ‘semantic agreement’ effects (e.g. Charnavel & Sportiche 2025). The choice of variable person agreement turns out to be sensitive to the placement of focus. We provide an analysis that relies on the interaction between focus, binding and the distribution of focus-sensitive operators.

This paper discusses two naturally occurring temporal paradoxes, temporal metalepsis and time travel discourse, and argues that they can be predicted by the following hypothesis: events are not restricted to a single temporal location, and can be felicitously asserted to occur at different times. I further show that this hypothesis is independently motivated by the grammar, and claim that it is a natural extension of fundamental principles of event semantics: the treatment of events as paralleling prototypically spatial individuals.

Attitude verbs like know, believe, surprise, fear differ in their combinatorial restrictions, e.g. "Jo knows that/whether we won" vs. "Jo believes that/*whether we won". Previous work attributes such differences to semantic properties associated with these verbs. Results from emotive nominalizations present a challenge for such meaning-based explanations, and show that the combinatorial restrictions of attitude predicates arise in a complex interplay of semantic and morpho-syntactic factors.

We describe a novel interpretive difference between x wonders hopefully ?p and x wonders fearfully ?p, where the former is only compatible with x hoping p, but the latter, with x either fearing p or not p. Extending a goal-based analysis of root polar questions by Tabatowski (2022) to embedding under inquisitive predicates, we argue that this difference arises due to hopefully imposing general constraints on an agent’s goals, in particular on their attitudes in entertaining questions, that fearfully does not.

The propositional attitude verb forget has received relatively little attention in the formal linguistics literature, though its properties present interesting problems for formal semantics. White (2014) argues that a uniform account of forget as a factive verb is possible. On this view, forget presupposes the truth of its clausal argument (See also Kiparsky & Kiparsky (1970)). But in order to do so, he claims that a covert modal operator is obligatorily present in non-finite complements of forget, deriving modalized factive presuppositions. In this paper, I present data showing that the distribution of this covert modal operator is even more restricted. I argue that modalization of the ..

Most literature on too has focused on its "regular" uses, where, as a first approximation, too triggers a presupposition that one of the focus alternatives to its prejacent, distinct from the prejacent itself, is true (e.g., Axel likes cats. BROOK likes cats, too.). There has also been some discussion of "refutational too", used in positive polarity responses that refute the antecedent utterance (e.g., A: You didn't do your homework. B: I did too!). Recently, Thomas (2023) proposed that refutational too is a response particle, akin to yes and no—or even more pertinently, to French si and German doch. In this paper, I present novel data on what I will call "confirmatory too", which is used ..

A longstanding debate about conjunction concerns so-called ‘asymmetric’ interpretations with additional causal or temporal inferences. Some theories posit a semantic component of conjunction as part of their explanation (e.g. Gómez Txurruka 2003). In this paper, we explore an unstated prediction of such accounts: that the specific semantics of conjunction might vary (i) across languages, and (ii) across conjunction strategies within a language. Drawing on data from A’ingae (an indigenous language of Ecuador) and Gizey (an indigenous language of Cameroon and Chad) respectively, we show that both predictions are met, arguing that such semantic variation is constrained in ways anticipate..

Conditional perfection (CP) is often analyzed as a quantity implicature that arises when “if p, q” is strengthened by excluding relevant alternatives to p. If this analysis is correct, CP should not arise in contexts that do not license exhaustification, such as when the Question Under Discussion (QUD) does not make alternative antecedents salient, or when the speaker cannot be assumed to know them. To date, experimental studies on CP have revealed limited or inconclusive evidence in support of these typical signatures of quantity implicatures. In two experiments, we demonstrate robust support for both signatures: Experiment 1 found that CP arose only when the conditional answered an ant..

In this paper, I present a probabilistic reconstruction of Križ’s (2015, 2016) account of non-maximal interpretation. The proposal addresses a general problem noted by Križ’s (2015: 85-6), which is shared by other QUD-based approaches to non-maximality (e.g. Bar-Lev 2021; Križ and Spector 2021): for these accounts to work, one needs to posit a fundamental disconnect between the question that is asked and the QUD that is addressed. This is problematic, especially in the absence of a non-stipulative method for identifying the QUD that is being addressed in a given context. In the proposed framework, the overt question alone determines the relevant QUD, allowing non-maximal interpretatio..

The Japanese classifier tsu is used for counting separable inanimate entities, and when combined with the numeral hito ‘one’, as in hito-tsu, it indicates that the number of entities is one. However, hitotsu can also function as a scalar particle, where hitotsu itself is interpreted as ‘even’. In this paper, I analyze the meaning and use of hitotsu as a scalar particle by comparing it with ordinary scalar particles, such as sae ‘even’, and show that the scalar particle hitotsu imposes a semantic restriction that the noun it attaches to must be non-specific and interpreted as the theme of an event. I argue that the scalar particle hitotsu is sensitive to event kinds and creates co..

Sentences with accomplishments in before-clauses are prima facie ambiguous between a strong reading and a weak reading, and two types of theories of these sentences have been proposed. Under-specification theories posit that the before-clauses in question are not actually ambiguous: their only LF corresponds to the weak reading, with the strong reading falling out as a subcase. Rett’s (2020) ambiguity theory, by contrast, claims that the strong reading surfaces by default, with the weak reading only arising if we coerce the embedded accomplishment into an achievement. Under standard psycholinguistic assumptions, coercion incurs a processing cost, and hence, I argue, Rett’s (2020) theory ..

Mandarin polarity-sensitive item rènhé, just like English any, is ungrammatical under a necessity modal; nevertheless, this may be ameliorated by the presence of the quantificational adverb dou, with the rènhé-DP carrying a universal construal. Crucially, the presence of dou alone is not sufficient to render rènhé grammatical. We suggest that the distribution of Mandarin rènhé in a modal environment is best captured by the two-layered approach by Crniˇc (2019a,b, 2022), according to which i) the license of any is subject to Strawson downward entailment, and ii) exhaustification merely plays a supplementary role by creating an environment hospitable to any. Along with these lines, we..

There are several ways of overtly marking distributivity across languages. In this paper, we focus on three distributive constructions in Highland Mayan Sign Language (HMSL): ONE-smooth-arc, ONE-punctuated-arc, and ONE-alt. We show that HMSL patterns with other sign languages in making use of reduplication and space to mark distributivity in these constructions. However, we also observe micro-variation in the way these constructions are interpreted. Accordingly, we propose that the strategies observed thus far can be decomposed and that HMSL’s three distributive constructions are the result of the pluralizing of an allocation construction (‘x-FOR-i’) at different nodes. Our data furthe..

This paper analyzes accusative clitic doubling in Rioplatense Spanish as an anaphoric device: the clitic presupposes a uniquely identifiable discourse set, and the doubled DP refers to or quantifies over it, rendering clitic doubling truth-conditionally superfluous. A DRT implementation models clitic doubling as a redundant update step and derives the attested distribution: licensing with regular definites (including kind- and collective-denoting nominals), exclusion with narrow-scope nominals, and clitic doubling of indefinites only under wide scope or proportional readings. Number and gender mismatches between the clitic and the doubled DP further indicate that clitics function as anaphori..

Mandarin Chinese is characterized as a pro-drop language (Huang 1984), whereby overt pronouns can be omitted without rendering the sentences ungrammatical. While the syntactic category of a missing subject argument in Mandarin has generally been considered as a pro/PRO (Huang 1984; inter alia), its semantics has rarely been examined. Taking steps in filling this gap, this paper motivates a new generalization: the presence of Mandarin null pronouns requires the coherence relation NARRATION to be established. I derive this generalization based on an independently motivated assumption in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher & Lascarides 2003) and on how topic chains are formed i..