SEMANTICS & PRAGMATICS:
a revised version of this ms. will appear in Journal of
Semantics.
The
paper provides a compositional account of cumulative readings with
non-increasing modified numerals (a.k.a. van Benthem’s puzzle), e.g., Exactly 3 boys saw exactly 5 movies.
The main proposal is that modified numerals make two kinds of semantic
contributions. Their asserted / at-issue contribution is a maximization
operator that introduces the maximal set of entities that satisfies
their restrictor and nuclear scope. The second contribution is a
post-supposition, i.e., a cardinality constraint that needs to be
satisfied relative to the context that results after the at-issue
meaning is evaluated. Thus, the interpretation process ends up giving a
kind of pseudowide scope to the post-suppositions contributed by modified numerals.
presented at Sinn und Bedeutung 16; also presented at UCLA (Linguistics Dpt. Colloq., fall 2011), UCB (S-circle, winter 2012), The Proper Use of Quantification in Ordinary Language workshop ( ESSLLI 2011), MIT Syntax-Square, May 9 2011 and CUSP
3, Stanford, Oct. 15-16 2010.
Most investigations of quantifier scope are
concerned with the range of possible scopes for sentences with multiple
quantifiers. Instead, this study examines the actual scopes (i.e., the
pragmatics of quantifier scope disambiguation) in a naturally
quantifier-rich corpus: LSAT Logic Puzzles. The three main findings of
our investigation are as follows. First, we confirmed findings in
previous literature that linear order and grammatical function have an
effect on scope-taking preferences. Second, we discovered that lexical
effects on scoping preferences are at least as important as linear
order or grammatical function. Third, the relational aspect of these
lexical effects, i.e., the lexical realizations of the other
quantifiers in the sentence, is also important. The present
investigation opens the way towards a broader research program of
identifying scoping-behavior patterns that should ultimately enable us
to group quantifiers into classes depending on the type of scopal
behavior they exhibit. These classes could provide an empirical basis
for semantic theories that assign different kinds of semantic
representations to different classes and / or for psycholinguistic
theories that hypothesize different processing strategies for different
classes.
presented at Sinn und Bedeutung 16.
Sentences involving n-words, like "None of
the men stepped forward", have been treated either as involving an
indefinite expression within the scope of sentential negation (the NI
approach), or as involving negative quantifiers occurring in otherwise
positive sentences (the NQ approach). This paper provides novel
experimental evidence for the NI approach based on data involving
polarity particles in English, and thereby offers a new tool for
diagnosing sentence level negation.
a revised version of this ms. appeared in Language and Linguistics Compass.
The paper reviews the semantics and pragmatics of correlatives across
various ontological domains (temporal, modal, individual and degree
domains), focusing mostly on Indo-European languages. Taking
correlatives in the individual domain as a case study, the paper then
argues that their interpretation, in particular the variability of the
uniqueness effects exhibited by correlatives, is due to their mixed
referential and quantificational nature. The account involves an
articulated notion of quantification consisting of both (discourse)
referential components and non-referential/quantificational components –
thus bringing together previous analyses that took either the
referential or the quantificational route. The variable uniqueness
effects emerge out of the interaction between (i) the semantics of wh-indefinites, singular anaphors and habitual morphology and (ii)
the pragmatics of quantification, which allows for the selection of
different levels of ‘zoom-in’ on the quantified-over objects.
The
paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of scope posed by
natural language indefinites that captures both the difference in
scopal freedom between indefinites and bona fide
quantifiers and the syntactic sensitivity that the scope of indefinites
does nevertheless exhibit. Following the main insight of choice
functional approaches, we connect the special scopal properties of
indefinites to the fact that their semantics can be stated in terms of
choosing a suitable witness. This is in contrast to bona fide
quantifiers, the semantics of which crucially involves relations
between sets of entities. We provide empirical arguments that this
insight should not be captured by adding choice/Skolem functions to
classical first-order logic, but in a semantics that follows
Independence-Friendly Logic, in which scopal relations involving
existentials are part of the recursive definition of truth and
satisfaction. These scopal relations are resolved automatically as part
of the interpretation of existentials. Additional support for this
approach is provided by dependent indefinites, a cross-linguistically
common class ofspecial indefinites that can be straightforwardly analyzed in our semantic framework.
The
paper proposes the first unified account of deictic / sentence-external
and sentence-internal readings of singular different.
The empirical motivation for such an account is provided by a
cross-linguistic survey and an analysis of the differences in
distribution and interpretation between the English singular different, plural different and same
(be it singular or plural). The main proposal is that distributive
quantification temporarily makes available two discourse referents
within its nuclear scope, the values of which are required by
sentence-internal uses of singular different
to be distinct, much as its deictic uses require the values of two
discourse referents to be distinct. The contrast between singular different, plural different and same
is explained in terms of several kinds of quantificational distributors
that license their internal readings. The analysis is executed in a
stack-based dynamic system couched
in classical type logic, so we get compositionality in the usual
Montagovian way; quantificational subordination and dependent
indefinites in various languages provide additional motivation for the
account. Investigating the connections between items with
sentence-internal readings and the quantificational licensors of these
readings opens up a larger project of formally investigating
thetypology of quantificational distributors and
distributivity-dependent items and the fine-grained contexts of
evaluation needed to capture this typological variation.
ms. that
significantly revises and expands the WCCFL 27 and ESSLLI 2008 papers (accepted with major revisions in Synthese).
Providing
a compositional interpretation procedure for discourses in which
descriptions of complex dependencies between interrelated objects are
incrementally built is a key challenge for formal theories of natural
language interpretation. This paper examines several phenomena and
argues that we need richly structured contexts of interpretation that
are passed on between different parts of the same sentence and also
across sentential boundaries to account for these phenomena. The main
contribution of the paper is showing how we can add structure to
contexts in an incremental way, starting with the basic notion of
context in classical first-orderlogic, i.e., interpretation contexts formalized as single total variable assignments.
- 2011. Sentence-internal Different as Quantifier-internal Anaphora ++ handout
colloquium talk, Rutgers University, Mar. 4 2011.
a
revised version appeared in the Handbook
of Logic and Language,
2nd edition, Johan van Benthem
and Alice ter Meulen
(eds.), Eline van der Ploeg and Jakub Szymanik (ed. assistants).
Providing
a compositional interpretation procedure for discourses in which
descriptions of complex dependencies between interrelated objects are
incrementally built is a key challenge for natural language semantics.
This paper focuses on the interactions between the entailment particle therefore,
modalized conditionals and modal subordination and shows that the
dependencies between individuals and possibilities that emerge out of
such interactions can receive a unified compositional account in a
system couched in classical type logic that integrates and simplifies
van den Berg’s Dynamic Plural Logic and the classical Lewis-Kratzer
analysis of modal quantification. The main proposal is that modal
quantification is a composite notion, to be decomposed / analyzed in
terms of discourse reference to quantificational dependencies that is
multiply constrained by the various components that make up a modal
quantifier. The system captures the truth-conditional and anaphoric
components of modal quantification in an even-handed way and, unlike
previous accounts, makes the propositional contents contributedby modal
constructions available for subsequent discourse reference.
This
paper’s goal is to provide systematic evidence from anaphora,
presupposition and ellipsis that appositive meaning, e.g. as
contributed by the relative appositive in (1) below, and at-issue
meaning, contributed by the main clause in (1), have to be integrated
into a single, incrementally evolving semantic representation. While
previous literature has provided partial arguments to this effect
(Nouwen 2007 for anaphora, Amaral et al 2007 for both anaphora and
presupposition), the systematic nature of this evidence – in
particular, the evidence from ellipsis we will introduce – has been
previously unnoticed.
(1) John, who nearly killed a woman with his car,
visited HER in the hospital.
We propose an analysis of these phenomena
that integrates the
dynamic account of anaphora and ellipsis as discourse reference to
individuals and properties (respectively) with an account of at-issue
meaning as a proposal to update the input Context Set (CS, see
Stalnaker 1978)and of appositive meaning as an actual update of the CS
that is not up for negotiation.
We
argue
that modal concord is best understood as modal modification by the
adverb in question. Modal concord in deontic environments arises
because the deontic adverb is a modifier that makes its own ancillary
modal claim. Modal flavor consonance is analyzed as a grammatically
determined phenomenon, while agreement in modal force is taken to
be a pragmatically mediated phenomenon. The paper concludes with the
outline of a broader
(corpus-driven) investigation of the lexical semantics of modal adverbs
and their meaning-based classification and distribution
and argues that the investigation of the standard cases of modal
concord should be analyzed as part of this broader project.
The
goal of
this paper is to provide a compositional account of cumulative readings
with non-increasing modified numerals (aka van Benthem’s puzzle) –
e.g., Exactly three boys saw exactly
five movies
– in terms of cardinality post-suppositions. The reading of this
sentence that we want to capture is the cumulative one, namely:
consider the maximal number of boys that saw a movie and the maximal
number of movies seen by a boy; there are three such boys and five such
movies. Importantly, this reading is different from: the maximal number
of boys that saw exactly five movies is three. The main proposal is
that modified numerals make two kinds of contributions to the meaning
of sentences like the one above. Their asserted / at-issue contribution
is a maximization operator that introduces the maximal set of entities
that satisfies their restrictor and nuclear scope. The second
contribution is a post-supposition, i.e., a cardinality constraint
(e.g., exactly three) that needs to be satisfied relative to the
context that results after the at-issue meaning is evaluated. For our
current purposes, contexts are sets of variable assignments relative to
which quantificational expressions are interpreted – and which are
updated as a result of the interpretation of such expressions. The main
difference between the present account and Krifka (1999) is conceptual:
we take modified numerals to constrain quantificational – and not focus
– alternatives, where a quantificational alternative is one of the
sets of assignments satisfying a quantificational expression.
The
main goal of the paper is to argue that
distributive
quantificational dependencies in natural language can be established in
two different ways: (i)
by encapsulating quantification into functions storing quantificational
dependencies as a whole, needed to account for one by one-based
distributive sentences like The
boys recited ‘The Raven’ one by one -- and (ii) by
decomposing quantification in such a way that each n-tuple
of quantificationally dependent entities is individually stored in a
variable assignment and quantifiers are interpreted relative to the
entire set of variables assignments that stores quantificational
dependencies in this pointwise, assignment-wise manner – needed
toaccount for each-based
distributive sentences like The
boys each recited a different poem.
The
paper
proposes a novel solution to the problem of scope posed by natural
language indefinites that captures both the difference in scopal
freedom between indefinites and quantifiers -- indefinites have free
upwards scope, disregarding not only clausal but also island boundaries
-- and the fact that the scopal freedom of indefinites is nonetheless
syntactically constrained. Following the main insight of
independence-friendly logic, the special scopal properties of
indefinites are attributed to the fact that their semantics can be
stated in terms of choosing a suitable witness. This is in contrast to
"bona fide" quantifiers, the semantics of which crucially involves
relations between sets of entities. The syntactic constraints on the
interpretation of indefinites follow from the fact that witness choice
arises as a natural consequence of the process of (syntax-based)
compositional interpretation of sentences and it is not encapsulated
into the lexical meaning of indefinites, as choice / Skolem function
approaches to exceptional scope would have it. An analysis of
dependent indefinites is provided using the same framework and formal
ingredients.
The
paper proposes a novel analysis of quantificational subordination, e.g.
Harvey courts a
woman at every convention. {She is very pretty. vs. She always comes to
the banquet with him.}
(Karttunen 1976), in particular of the fact that the indefinite in the
initial sentence can have wide or narrow scope, but the first discourse
as a whole allows only for the wide scope reading, while the second
discourse allows for both readings. The cross-sentential interaction
between scope and anaphora is captured in terms of structured anaphora
to quantifier domains, formalized in a new dynamic system couched in
classical type logic; given the underlying type logic, Montague-style
compositionality at sub-clausal level follows automatically. Modal
subordination (Roberts 1987) is analyzed in a parallel way, thereby
capturing the parallels between the individual and modal domains argued
for in Stone (1999). Several other phenomena are analyzed in terms of
structured anaphora: exceptional wide scope, weak / strong donkey
readings, anaphoric / uniqueness-implying definite descriptions and
interactions between same
/ different
and quantifier scope.
The
paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of exceptional scope
(ES) of (in)definites, exemplified by the widest and intermediate scope
readings of the sentence Every
student of mine read every poem that a famous Romanian poet wrote.
We propose that there are two sources for ES readings: (i)
discourse anaphora to particular sets of entities and quantificational
dependencies between these entities that restrict the domain of
quantification of the two universal determiners and the indefinite
article; (ii)
non-local
introduction of the discourse referent that restricts the
quantificational domain of the indefinite article. Our account,
formulated within a compositional dynamic system couched in classical
type logic, relies on two independently motivated assumptions: (a) the discourse
context stores not only (sets of) individuals, but also
quantificational dependencies between them, and (b)
quantifier domains are always contextually restricted. Under this
analysis, (in)definites are unambiguous and there is no need for
special choice-functional variables to derive exceptional
scope readings.
The
paper argues that two distinct and independent notions of plurality are
involved in natural language anaphora and quantification: plural reference
(the usual non-atomic individuals) and plural discourse reference,
i.e., reference to a quantificational dependency between sets of
objects (e.g., atomic/non-atomic individuals) that is established and
subsequently elaborated upon in discourse. Following van den Berg
(1996), plural discourse reference is modeled as plural information
states (i.e., as sets of variable assignments) in a new dynamic system
couched in classical type logic that extends Compositional DRT (Muskens
1996). Given the underlying type logic, compositionality at sub-clausal
level follows automatically and standard techniques from Montague
semantics become available. The idea that plural info states are
semantically necessary (in addition to non-atomic individuals) is
motivated by relative-clause donkey sentences with multiple instances
of singular donkey anaphora that have mixed (weak and strong) readings.
At the same time, allowing for non-atomic individuals in addition to
plural info states enables us to capture the intuitive parallels
between singular and plural (donkey) anaphora, while deriving the
incompatibility between singular (donkey) anaphora and collective
predicates. The system also accounts for empirically unrelated
phenomena, e.g., the uniqueness effects associated with singular
(donkey) anaphora discussed in Kadmon (1990) and Heim (1990) among
others.
Here are several kinds of (relative-clause) donkey
sentences that are analyzed in the
paper:
1. Everyu
person who buys au'
book on amazon.com and has au''
credit card uses itu''
to pay for itu'.
(mixed weak &
strong donkey sentences)
2. #Everyu
farmer who owns au'donkey
gathers itu'
around the fire at night. (singular
donkey anaphora and collective predicates)
3. Everyu
parent who gives au'
balloon to twou''
boys expects themu''
to end up fighting (each other) for itu'.
(multiple singular and
plural donkey anaphora and collective predicates)
4. Everybodyu
who bought twou'
sage plants here bought sevenu''
others along with themu'.
(plural sage plant
examples)
5. Mostu
house-elves who fall in love with au'
witch buy heru'
anu''
alligator purse. (proportions)
6. Everyu
man
who has au'
son wills himu'
all his money. (uniqueness
effects and donkey anaphora)
7. Nou
man who had au'
credit card failed to use itu'.
(strong donkey readings
with no)
8. Everyu
person who had au'
dime in his pocket refused to put itu'
in the meter. (strong
readings for "dime" examples with nuclear scope negation)
9. Everyu
company that hired au'
Moldavian man, but nou''
company that hired au'
Transylvanian man promoted himu'
within two weeks of hiring. (mixed
weak & strong donkey sentences with a single donkey pronoun)
10. Everyu'''
man who introduced au
friend to meu'
thought weu+u'u''
had something in common. (plural
donkey anaphora with split antecedents)
11. Everyu
linguist who works on au'
difficult problem is interested to read mostu''
papers that were written about itu'.
(donkey anaphora and 'exceptional
wide scope')
The
empirical goal of the paper is to establish that there are comparative
correlatives that are not comparative conditionals, against what much
of the previous literature assumes. This is shown by the Romanian
comparative correlative in (1) and is further supported by the equative
correlative in (2). No conditional paraphrase is possible for (1) or
(2) – as, for example, Beck (1997) ("On the Semantics of
Comparative Conditionals")
would have it – since they are statements about what is
actually the case. In contrast, the comparative correlative in (3) can
be paraphrased by a conditional, e.g. (on one of its readings): if a
lawyer x
is more aggressive than a lawyer y
by a certain amount, then x
is more efficient than y
by a corresponding amount. The main proposal is that a unified
analysis should be given for such non-conditional, differential-based
comparative (and equative) correlatives and the more familiar,
conditional-like comparative correlatives in terms of a relation
(possibly the identity relation) between differentials. In paraticular,
the Romanian atīt
(that much) is anaphoric to differential intervals, i.e., atīt is a proform
in the degree domain – and the wh-differential cīt (how
much) is an indefinite introducing a non-empty interval,
anaphorically retrieved by atīt.
1. Cu
cīt
e mai
īnalt
frate-le
decīt
sora, cu
atīt
e
mai īnalt tată-l
decīt mama.
With how much
is more tall
brother-the than sister.the, with that much is more tall
father-the than mother.the
The brother is
taller than the sister by a certain amount and the father is taller
than the mother by the same amount.
2. Pe cīt
e Irina de frumoasă,
pe
atīt
e de deşteaptă.
PE how much is Irina DE beautiful,
PE that much is DE smart
Irina is beautiful
to a certain, significant extent and she is smart to the same, equally
significant extent.
3. Cu cīt
e un avocat mai
agresiv, cu
atīt
e
mai eficient.
With how much is a lawyer
more aggressive, with that much is more efficient
The more
aggressive a lawyer is, the more efficient s/he is.
The
paper proposes the first unified account of deictic and
sentence-internal readings of same/different
(a cross-linguistic survey provides motivation for such an account).
The main proposal is that distributive quantification temporarily makes
available two discourse referents within its nuclear scope, the values
of which are required by sentence-internal uses of same/differentto
be identical/distinct – much as their deictic uses require the
values of two discourse referents to be identical/distinct. The
analysis is executed in a stack-based dynamic system and it is fully
compositional because the system is couched in classical type logic.
The formal account is independently motivated by quantificational
subordination, the availability of both dependent and independent
readings for anaphora in the scope of each
and, finally, dependent indefinites in various languages. All these
phenomena provide support for the idea that natural language
quantification is a composite notion, to be decomposed/analyzed in
terms of discourse reference to dependencies that is multiply
constrained by the various components that make up a quantifier.
This paper focuses on the empirical aspects of the problem. The
complete formal account is provided in
Deictic and Sentence-Internal
Readings of Same
/ Different
as Anaphora: A Unified Compositional Account,
to appear in the Proceedings of What Syntax Feeds Semantics?
(ESSLLI 2008 Workshop)
The
paper proposes the first unified account of deictic and
sentence-internal readings of same/different.
The analysis is executed in a stack-based dynamic system and it is
fully compositional because the system is couched in classical type
logic. The main proposal is
that distributive quantification temporarily makes available two
discourse referents within its nuclear scope, the values of which are
required by sentence-internal uses of same/different
to be identical/distinct – much as their deictic uses require the
values of two discourse referents to be identical/distinct. The system
is independently motivated by quantificational subordination, the
availability of both dependent and independent readings for anaphora in
the scope of each
and, finally, dependent indefinites in various
languages. Thus, same
and different
provide further support for the idea that natural language
quantification is a composite notion, to be analyzed in terms of
discourse reference to dependencies that is multiply constrained by the
various components that make up a quantifier.
This paper focuses on the formal aspects of the problem. For a
cross-linguistic survey and more discussion of the empirical issues, see
Sentence-Internal Readings of Same / Different as
Quantifier-Internal Anaphora,
to appear in the Proceedings of the 27th
West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
The two goals of this paper are: (i)
to argue that, syntactically, the measure noun is the head of the
extended projection in Romanian pseudopartitive constructions like (1)
– much
like the leftmost noun is the head of true partitive constructions like
(2) (in Romanian, the preposition de
appears only with
pseudopartitives, while the preposition din/dintre appears only
with
true
partitives); (ii)
to propose a suitable semantics for
pseudopartitives that accommodates this syntactic generalization.
(1) zece grame de
brīnză
(de
capră)
(2)
zece grame din
această brīnză (de
capră)
ten
grams of cheese (of
goat)
ten
grams of
this cheese
(of goat)
ten grams of (goat)
cheese
ten grams of this (goat)
cheese
(3) #zece grame din
brīnză
(de
capră)
(4)
#zece grame de
această brīnză (de
capră)
One of the two main contributions is
arguing that measure nouns are polysemous, i.e. they have two distinct,
but
closely related senses: (i)
a
degree-based one, present in comparatives like Linus is two pounds heavier than
Gabby or (arguably) nominal
compounds like two
pound stone, and (ii)
an individual-based sense, present in pseudopartitives like ten grams of cheese
or true partitives
like ten grams of this
cheese and their
Romanian counterparts in (1) and (2) above. Secondly, the polysemy
proposal enables us to derive the observation
in Schwarzschild (2006) ("The Role of Dimensions in the Syntax of Noun
Phrases", Syntax
9.1) that measure expressions are
monotonic in pseudopartitives (I use (non-)monotonic in
the sense of Schwarzschild 2006). Syntactically and
semantically, the measure expression is the head of the pseudopartitive
while
the other nominal expression is the non-head, in contrast to
Schwarzschild (2006), where the head/non-head
categorization is reversed.
in the Proceedings
of Sinn und Bedeutung 12 (Oslo, 2007).
The
paper argues that the variability of the uniqueness effects exhibited
by Hindi and Romanian correlatives is due to their mixed referential
and quantificational nature. The account involves an articulated notion
of quantification, independently motivated by donkey anaphora and
quantificational subordination and consisting of both (discourse)
referential components and non-referential components (dynamic
operators over plural info states). The variable uniqueness effects
emerge out of the interaction between: (i) the semantics of
wh-indefinites, singular anaphors and habitual morphology and (ii)
the pragmatics of quantification, which allows for the selection of
different levels of 'zoom-in' on the quantified-over objects.
- 2007.
Structured Contexts for Natural Language Interpretation. Part 1:
Contextually Encoded Quantificational Dependencies, joint
talk (Part 2 was given by Sam Cumming) at the Fall 2007 Semantics Workshop,
Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University ++ handout, paper
(August 2007)
The
two goals of this presentation are: (i)
to argue that quantificational subordination
and exceptional
wide scope are just two aspects of the same phenomenon, namely anaphora
to quantificational dependencies, and (ii)
to provide a novel, unified account of the two phenomena in a
compositional dynamic system that makes crucial use of plural
information states (modeled as sets of variable assignments) to
incrementally encode information about quantificational dependencies
and pass it on across sentential boundaries.
in Pitar Mos: A
Building with a View. Papers in Honour of Alexandra Cornilescu,
G. Alboiu, A. Avram, L. Avram & D. Isac
(eds.), Bucharest: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti.
In
this paper, we study the parameters that come into play when assessing
the truth conditions of say
reports and contrast them with belief attributions. We argue that these
conditions are sensitive in intricate ways to the connection between
the interpretation of the complement of say
and the properties of the reported speech act. There are three general
areas this exercise is relevant to, besides the immediate issue of
understanding the meaning of say:
(i)
the discussion shows the need to go beyond the simplest view of
propositional attitudes, which treats them as restricted quantifiers
over worlds; (ii)
the complex
connections that must exist between the say report and its source
speech act show that one has to be able to differentiate between
various layers of meaning for the antecedent sentences; (iii)
finally, this paper is a small step towards a typology of propositional
attitudes that allows us to uncover the complex web of relationships
that grammatical mood is sensitive to.
The
paper proposes an account of the contrast (noticed in Karttunen 1976)
between the interpretations of the following two discourses: Harvey courts a girl at every
convention. {She is very pretty. vs. She always comes to the banquet
with him.}.
The initial sentence is ambiguous between two quantifier scopings, but
the first discourse as a whole allows only for the wide-scope
indefinite reading, while the second allows for both. This
cross-sentential interaction between quantifier scope and anaphora is
captured by means of a new dynamic system couched in classical type
logic, which extends Compositional DRT (Muskens 1996) with plural
information states (modeled, following van den Berg 1996, as sets of
variable assignments). Given the underlying type logic,
compositionality at sub-clausal level follows automatically and
standard techniques from Montague semantics become available. The paper
also shows that modal subordination (A
wolf might come in. It would
eat Harvey first)
can be analyzed in a parallel way, i.e. the system captures the
anaphoric and quantificational parallels between the individual and
modal domains argued for in Stone (1999) (among others). In the
process, we see that modal / individual-level quantifiers
enter
anaphoric connections as a matter of course, usually functioning
simultaneously as both indefinites and pronouns.
in the Proceedings of Sinn und
Bedeutung 11,
Barcelona; also presented at the Dynamic
Semantics Workshop,
Institutt for filosofi, ide- og
kunsthistorie og klassiske (IFIKK), University of Oslo and in the
Linguistics Colloquium Series of the Linguistics Department, University
of Maryland (a new, visually enhanced version of the slides is
available here).
The
paper argues that two distinct and
independent notions of plurality are involved in natural language
anaphora and
quantification: plural reference,
i.e. the usual non-atomic individuals, e.g. the non-atomic individual megan+gaby that is the
sum of the two atoms megan
and gaby
and that the
sentence Megan and Gaby
are deskmates
is about, and plural discourse reference,
i.e. reference to a quantificational dependency between sets of objects
(atomic
/ non-atomic individuals) that is established and subsequently
elaborated upon
in discourse, e.g. the dependency between gifts and girls introduced in
the
first conjunct and elaborated upon in the second conjunct of sentence
(1)
below.
However, morphologically plural anaphora of the
kind instantiated in (1) does not provide a clear-cut argument for
distinguishing plural reference and plural discourse reference: both
notions /
either notion could be involved in the interpretation of (1).
Therefore, I use sentences with multiple instances of singular donkey
anaphora like (2) and (3)
below to provide independent semantic motivation for plural discourse
reference
over and above plural reference. The final dynamic system (couched in
classical
type logic) will also be able to capture the intuitive parallels
between
singular and plural (donkey) anaphora, e.g. the parallel between the
interpretations of (3) and (4) below, as well as the incompatibility
between singular
donkey anaphora and collective predicates exemplified in (5).
(1) John
bought au
gift for everyu'
girl in his class and asked theiru'
deskmates to wrap themu.
(2) Everyu
person who buys au'
book
on amazon.com and has au''
credit card uses itu''
to
pay for itu' .
(3) Everyu boy
who bought au' Christmas
gift for au'' girl
in his class asked heru''
deskmate to wrap itu'.
(4) Everyu parent
who gives au'
balloon
/ threeu'
balloons
to twou''
boys expects
themu''
to end up fighting
(each other) for itu'
/
themu'.
(based on an example due to Maria Bittner, p.c.)
(5) #Everyu
farmer who owns au'
donkey
gathers itu'
around
the fire at night. (based on an example in Kanazawa 2001)
The
paper
investigates the interpretation of the Romanian subjunctive B (subjB)
mood when it is embedded under the propositional attitude verb crede
(believe). SubjB is analyzed as a single package of three distinct
presuppositions: temporal de
se, dissociation and propositional de
se. I show that subjB is the temporal analogue of
null PRO in
the individual domain: it allows only for a de se reading.
Dissociation
enables us to show that subjB always takes scope over a negation
embedded in a belief report. Propositional de se derives this
empirical
generalization. The introduction of centered propositions
(generalizing centered worlds), together with propositional de se,
dissociation and the belief 'introspection' principles, derives the
fact that subjB belief reports (unlike their indicative counterparts)
are infelicitous with embedded probabil.
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