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Abstract: Abstract There is a peculiar class of degree modifiers, represented by very in English, that can occur in definite descriptions with no apparent gradable property, such as the very man we saw yesterday. These modifiers are commonly assumed to have the same mechanism of modification as regular degree modifiers, like really and extremely. This paper argues that this assumption is fallacious. Modification by very and its kin involves a special mechanism that crucially relies on the availability of a context shift of a particular kind. This special mechanism explains the appearance of very in definite descriptions with no gradable properties and also accounts for a number of additional facts about the distribution of very. PubDate: 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09421-9
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Abstract: Abstract I investigate the semantics of conditionals with proposition-taking attitude expressions in their consequents. I defend a “face-value” interpretation of non-doxastic versions, arguing that everyone is committed to the truth of such interpretations in circumstances that would otherwise prompt theorists to interpret them in other ways. I do this by arguing from the obvious acceptability of attitude ascriptions with ‘ever’ free relatives. Doxastic conditionals require complicating my account somewhat; I show how to demarcate the class, and then argue that we aren’t committed to the truth of a face-value interpretation of such conditionals. I then provide the details of all the relevant interpretations; one main benefit of my account is that it requires little or no semantic novelty, despite the difficulty of the data I attempt to account for. PubDate: 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09417-5
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Abstract: Abstract Predicates within many conceptual classes are intuited as mutually exclusive. Based on these predicates’ interaction with logical vocabulary like and or also, however, this paper argues that they are in fact underlyingly consistent; the strong intuited meanings arise from semantic exhaustification. In addition to demonstrating that exhaustification is more widespread than previously believed, this paper also shows that this particular exhaustification effect behaves in a hitherto undescribed manner. Indeed, a predicate’s exhaustification is always computed locally at the level of the predicate, rather than the clause or sentence containing it. PubDate: 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09425-5
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Abstract: Abstract The paper formalizes a change of camera angle on the classic Stalnakerian account of assertion, foregrounding that the speaker is presenting herself as though she knows the sentence she’s uttered to be true, and deriving context update from a proposal that the context set be modified so as to become a member of the same property of epistemic states as the speaker’s. The resulting formalization is one on which often, but crucially not always, an assertion serves to propose that the context set be intersected with the denotation of the sentence that has been uttered. Rather than assigning ad hoc update effects to epistemic modals, exceptional updates for epistemic modals fall out of the interaction between the speaker-oriented epistemicity of epistemic modals and the speaker-oriented epistemicity of assertion. This circumvents arguments that disagreement over epistemic modals is fatal to a solipsistic contextualist account of their semantics. The model builds a bridge from truth-conditional semantics to expressivist update effects via a uniform conception of assertive update, and shows how relativist effects can be derived using a relativist illocutionary machinery, rather than a relativist semantic machinery. PubDate: 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09423-7
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Abstract: Abstract The dominant model of linguistic communication in current philosophy of language, semantics and formal pragmatics is centered around the idea that communication involves interlocutors coordinating with respect to a single body of information, the common ground. This body of information is understood to serve two central roles: it is the target of speech acts, and constitutes the information available to interlocutors for planning and interpreting utterances. In this paper, I provide a series of examples which show that, contra the dominant model, the information available to interlocutors cannot be modeled as common ground information. The examples involve interpreters making use of background information which cannot become common ground either because the interpreter refuses to accept it, or because the communicative situation is what Harris (2020) calls publicity averse. I consider and disarm a variety of responses that might be offered on behalf of the common ground view, including alternative construals of acceptance and of publicity. I demonstrate that a model of communication in which interlocutors maintain separate representations of their own and their interlocutors' information states easily accommodates these cases, taking as an example the model due to Heller and Brown-Schmidt (2023). I end the paper with the observation that my conclusions do not pose any threat to formal models of dynamic semantics/pragmatics, as these can be, and in some cases already are, interpreted as modelling the evolution of individual information states PubDate: 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09426-4
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Abstract: Abstract We argue that the commonly accepted existence of grammatical concepts such as Person (in the grammatical sense) or Tense poses an unrecognized challenge to the idea that human thought is independent of language. The argument is that such concepts identify aspects of linguistic expressions that also systematically define the contents and identity of the thoughts expressed in language. Since grammatical concepts are not known to have non-grammatical analogues, the thoughts in question do not appear to be non-linguistic in nature. We conclude that language is unlikely to be merely a medium in which independently constituted thoughts are expressed. PubDate: 2024-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09414-8
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Abstract: Abstract This paper explores a puzzling polarity-based asymmetry in the use of even in sentences that deny presuppositions. It argues that this asymmetry is produced by the interaction of even’s controversial additive presupposition with the alternatives that are salient in the relevant contexts and demonstrates that this proposal makes good crosslinguistic predictions. Along the way, this paper shows that presupposition denials are a fruitful testing ground for uncovering details about the behaviour of even and the role of presuppositions triggered within focus alternatives. PubDate: 2024-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-023-09402-4
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Abstract: Abstract Given any set E of expressions freely generated from a set of atoms by syntactic operations, there exist trivially compositional functions on E (to wit, the injective and the constant functions), but also plenty of non-trivially compositional functions. Here we show that within the space of non-injective functions (and so a fortiori within the space of non-injective and non-constant functions), compositional functions are not sufficiently abundant in order to generate the consequence relation of every propositional logic. Logical consequence relations thus impose substantive constraints on the existence of compositional functions when coupled with the condition of non-injectivity (though not without it). We ask how the apriori exclusion of injective functions from the search space might be justified, and we discuss the prospects of claims to the effect that any function can be “encoded” in a compositional one. PubDate: 2024-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09424-6
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Abstract: Abstract This paper addresses both semantic issues of countability in linguistics, and philosophical issues arising from the problem of the many. I argue (i) that the problem of the many is orthogonal to vagueness and we should look to the semantics of count nouns and numerals for its solution; (ii) that the problem of the many is a challenge for contemporary mereological analyses of count nouns in semantics; but (iii) that the count criterion in these theories can be weakened to avoid the problem. Specifically, weak quantization is proposed as the criterion: a sum, x, counts as n Ps if and only if x has n disjoint parts, each of which is in the extension of P, but where the sum of no two of them is also in the extension of P. I show how importing this idea into the semantics of numerals provides a semantic means of dissolving the paradox. PubDate: 2024-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-023-09405-1
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Abstract: Abstract Stalnaker (Context, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014) defends two ideas about common ground. The first is that the common ground of a conversation is definable in terms of an iterated propositional attitude of acceptance, so that p is common ground iff p is commonly accepted. The second is the idea that the “default setting" of conversational acceptance is belief, so that as a default, what is accepted in conversation coincides with what is (commonly) believed. In this paper, I argue that we should favor a pair of contrasting theses instead. First, I argue that we should identify the common ground with what is common knowledge about what is accepted, so that p is common ground iff it is common knowledge that p is accepted. Thus the attitude that is iterated in the definition of common ground is not acceptance but knowledge. Second, I argue that the “default setting" for conversational acceptance is not belief, but knowledge. PubDate: 2024-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09415-7
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Abstract: Abstract Suppose I assert “Jim is rich”. According to negotiated contextualism, my assertion should be understood as a proposal to adopt a standard of wealth such that Jim counts as “rich” by that standard. Furthermore, according to negotiated contextualism, this is so in virtue of the semantic properties of the word “rich”. Defenders of negotiated contextualism (Khoo & Knobe in Noûs 52(1):109–143, 2016; Khoo in Philos. Phenomenol. Res. 100(1):26–53, 2020) claim that this view is uniquely well-placed to account for certain disagreement data; for example, that if your standard for the application of the word “rich” is more constraining than mine, you can sensibly assert “no, Jim is not rich” without thereby making an incompatible claim. This paper outlines a simpler explanation of the data: speakers can sensibly reject a given assertion provided that they think that the asserted sentence is false in the context which they take to be relevant to that sentence’s interpretation. I argue that, combined with standard semantic tools, this explanation can account for the original data and for new empirical results. Along the way, I present new empirical data to argue against negotiated contextualism. PubDate: 2024-10-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09410-y
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Abstract: Abstract Expressions like two novels are traditionally taken to convey information about cardinality and are analyzed using a cardinality function. Salmon (Philosop Perspect 11:1–15, 1997), Liebesman (Australasian J Philos 93:21–42, 2015; Philos’ Impr 16:1–25, 2016; In D. W. Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford studies in metaphysics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, forthcoming), and Haida and Trinh (in: Dočekal, Wagiel (eds) Formal approaches to number in Slavic and beyond, Language Science Press, Berlin, 2001) argue against this traditional account, claiming that it can’t explain our use of expressions like two and a half novels. According to them, the proper analysis of such expressions requires a partiality measure, which maps entities to rational numbers such as 2.5. In this paper, we set out to defend the traditional account. To do so, we demonstrate that an analysis based on a partiality measure is inconsistent with the truth conditions of plural comparatives and equatives. We also show that such an account doesn’t provide an adequate analysis for expressions like two novels and a half, nor for their French counterparts (e.g., deux romans et demi). Critically, such expressions contain no constituent that could refer to the number 2.5. We provide an alternative analysis for all these expressions, based on cardinality and an operation of non-overlapping summation. PubDate: 2024-10-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09418-4
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Abstract: We argue that sign language requires a radical extension of formal semantics. It has long been accepted that sign language employs the same logical machinery as spoken language (occasionally making its abstract components overt), and simultaneously makes extensive use of iconicity. But the articulation between these two modules has only been discussed piecemeal. To capture it, we propose an ‘iconological semantics’ that combines standard logical semantics with a pictorial semantics in the Greenberg/Abusch tradition. We start by reanalyzing from this perspective earlier data on iconic loci, which are simultaneously variables and simplified depictions of their denotations. We then analyze new data on ASL classifier predicates, constructions that are lexically specified as being iconic. Their behavior argues for a very expressive system, possibly one in which the object language contains viewpoint variables. These can be left free or they may depend on quantifiers, and distinct viewpoint variables can co-occur in a given sentence; this gives rise to an extraordinary interaction between depictions and logical operators. We then sketch an adaptation of pictorial semantics to the dynamic 3D representations used in sign language. Finally, we suggest that iconological semantics might also illuminate the interaction between logical operators and pro-speech gestures in spoken language. In the end, the standard view of language as a discrete compositional system must be revised: it also has a tightly integrated depictive component, and ‘textbook semantics’ should be revised to capture this fact. PubDate: 2024-10-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09411-x
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Abstract: Abstract The epistemic thesis is the thesis that a ‘might’ counterfactual like (1) has the same meaning as (2). (1) If Matt had gone to the parade, David might have gone to the parade. (2) Maybe, if Matt had gone to the parade, David would have gone to the parade. In this paper, I give a compositional semantics for ‘might’ counterfactuals that predicts the epistemic thesis. I offer a new theory of the counterfactual interpretation of the modal ‘might’ — the interpretation it receives in (1) — and I show that, when coupled with a plausible semantics for ‘if’ clauses, my theory validates the epistemic thesis. PubDate: 2024-10-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09416-6
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Abstract: Abstract This paper proposes a semantics of anaphora in attitude contexts within the framework of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). The paper first focuses on intentional identity, a special kind of cross-attitudinal anaphora. Based on the DRT semantics of attitude reports summarized by Kamp et al. (in: D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (Eds.), Handbook of philosophical logic, 2011), the author proposes a semantics of intentional identity that implements the following two ideas: (1) indefinites and pronouns appearing in attitude contexts introduce metadiscourse referents, which represent one’s mental files and record appearances of discourse referents in attitude contexts; and (2) what underlies the relevant kind of anaphoric links between indefinites and pronouns across attitude contexts is the coordination relation between mental files, which is represented by using metadiscourse referents. Next, the paper expands the semantics to cover de re anaphora, in which an anaphoric pronoun in an attitude context takes as its antecedent an expression appearing outside any attitude context. PubDate: 2024-10-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09419-3
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Abstract: Abstract Fine (J Philos Logic 46(6):625–674, 2017) develops a unilateral and a bilateral truthmaker semantics for propositional logic. The unilateral approach trades off the primitive exact falsification relation of the bilateral approach for a primitive exclusion relation between states, thereby raising the question if exclusion serves any purpose other than to avoid exact falsification. We argue that exclusion is motivated independently of its use in avoiding exact falsification, namely as a foundation for the reconstruction of modal notions such as possibility and necessity. This reconstruction in turn motivates what we call emergent exclusion: an atomic state can exclude a sum of atomic states collectively without excluding any of these atomic states individually. Emergent exclusion is banned in Fine (2017a) in order to maintain exact equivalence in de Morgan’s law \(\lnot (P \wedge Q) \Leftrightarrow \lnot P \vee \lnot Q\) ; we argue that the two sides of this law are not exactly equivalent and discuss a variety of state spaces that feature emergent exclusion. This paper aims to be accessible to linguists without prior exposure to truthmaker semantics. We highlight points of contact with natural language semantics, such as event semantics and algebraic semantics of plurals and conjunction. PubDate: 2024-08-02 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-023-09407-z
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Abstract: Abstract The positive, non-exclusive inference of only has been famously elusive with respect to its projective status and its content: in some cases the positive inference behaves like a presupposition, while in others it does not; in some cases the inference is non-modal, corresponding to the prejacent of only or an existential counterpart of it, while in others it is modalized. This behavior, we argue, surfaces the exceptive nature of only (cf. von Fintel and Iatridou in Linguist Inq 38(3):445–483, 2007). More specifically, if the import of only is distributed between a minimality and a subtraction component, as has been argued for exceptives (esp. Gajewski in Nat Lang Semant 16(1):69–110, 2008), the apparently irreconcilable properties of only can be captured. PubDate: 2024-08-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09420-w
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Abstract: Abstract In this paper we articulate a pragmatic account of the projection behavior of three classes of non-anaphoric projective contents: the pre-states of change of state (CoS) predicates, the veridical entailments of factives, and the implication of satisfaction of selectional restrictions. Given evidence that the triggers of these implications are not anaphoric, hence do not impose presuppositional constraints on their local contexts, we argue that the projection behavior of these implications cannot be explained by the standard Karttunen/Heim/van der Sandt proposals. But we recognize that parallels between the projection behavior of these implications and the projection behavior of anaphorically-triggered implications must be explained. The current account offers a unified explanation of why the predicates in question give rise to projection at all; why projection of these implications is susceptible to contextual suppression; and why projection is systematically filtered in the standard Karttunen filtering environments, despite the absence of contextual constraints. We demonstrate that our account largely makes the same predictions for filtering of anaphoric and non-anaphoric presuppositions, and briefly support the claim that in the case of disjunction, filtering in the two cases is not fully parallel, as predicted by our account. We also briefly discuss how the well-documented variability in projection across predicates in the same semantic class can be understood within our approach. PubDate: 2024-08-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09413-9
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Abstract: Abstract This paper explores the distribution and semantics of the reversative affix un- and the restitutive affix re-, and overall makes a new proposal about the lexical semantics of verbs. I argue that these affixes tell a story of derivational morphology that is based not on categorization of verbs into neat aspectual and decompositional classes, but on the result of the verb’s action on the object and whether or not such a result state permits reversal and restitution. The argument structure of these affixes shows us that morphology interacts with semantics in a true compositional sense, whereby the affectedness of the object is a crucial factor in determining compatibility and composition. I propose an approach to verb meaning that encodes this important information as outcomes: the lifespan properties of the object after the action occurs on it. I propose, formulating the Verb-Root-Outcomes framework, that all verb roots come equipped with sets of outcomes. A wide array of verbs that have been classified as ‘change-of-state’ are shown to have different sub-classes based on the shape of the outcome set, and this also allows a formal definition of what ‘potential’ change could mean. The affixes un- and re- are modeled as result-state modifiers, which are sensitive to the outcomes of the action of the verb stem they attach to, and only attach when their presuppositions about the state of the object are met. Apart from directly comparing reversal and restitution with the same formal notion of equivalence, this approach also allows a transparent representation of event decomposition, whereby change in the object is able to be tracked at a granular level and its importance in determining the success of morphological derivations highlighted. This theory argues for compositional semantic interpretation at a sub-lexical level, while also showing how sentential and pragmatic factors affect verb meaning and derivational affixation . PubDate: 2024-07-18 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-024-09409-5
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Abstract: Abstract The literature in semantics and pragmatics provides extensive evidence for the strengthening of linguistic expressions, both in matrix positions and when embedded under various operators. We study the properties of such strengthening using a very simple setting. Specifically, we look at when the expression “crate with a banana” can be understood as a unique crate even though two different crates have a banana in them. By varying the scenarios in which an expression such as “Pick the crate with a banana” is evaluated, we show that the strengthening of “crate with a banana” within the scope of the definite article parallels the entailments of “crate with only a banana” (with an overt exhaustivity operator, ‘only’). We use this observation to argue that strengthening in embedded positions follows the logic of an exhaustivity operator rather than that of rational inference. We then note that a similar pattern obtains in matrix positions. PubDate: 2024-05-21 DOI: 10.1007/s10988-023-09406-0
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