Mildly positive adjectives (henceforth, MPAs)—e.g., decent, acceptable, adequate—are typically used to express a moderately favorable evaluation of an object. In this manuscript, I present an investigation of the semantics and pragmatics of this class of expressions. I outline a proposal of MPAs as predicates whose positive form relies on particular type of functional standard...
First and last have been variously described as ordinals, superlatives, or both. These descriptions are generally not accompanied by extensive argumentation, and those who label first and last as superlatives do not present and argue for a particular decomposition. Thus, first and last’s status as ordinals vs. superlatives and their internal composition remain open issues. In...
Plain disjunctive sentences, such as The mystery box contains a blue ball or a yellow ball, typically imply that the speaker does not know which of the two disjuncts is true. This is known as an ignorance inference. We can distinguish between two aspects of this inference: the negated universal upper bound part (i.e., the speaker is uncertain about each disjunct), which we call...
This paper delves into the temporal interpretation of fronting constructions in English, a topic that has received limited attention in the literature on tense semantics. It presents new empirical findings revealing that specific fronting configurations, involving present tense morphology in a complement CP under a matrix past tense, can yield a theoretically unexpected...
In this paper, we show that native speakers spontaneously divide the complex meaning of a new word into a presuppositional component and an assertive component. These results argue for the existence of a productive triggering algorithm for presuppositions, one that is not based on alternative lexical items nor on contextual salience. On a methodological level, the proposed...
Persian possesses a number of stative complex predicates with dâshtan ‘to have’ that express certain kinds of mental state. I propose that these possessive experiencer complex predicates be given a formal semantic treatment involving possession of a portion of an abstract quality by an individual, as in the analysis of property concept lexemes due to Francez and Koontz-Garboden...
How do modal expressions determine which possibilities they range over? According to the Modal Anchor Hypothesis (Kratzer in The language-cognition interface: Actes du 19e congrès international des linguistes, Libraire Droz, Genève, 179–199, 2013), modal expressions determine their domain of quantification from particulars (events, situations, or individuals). This paper presents...
This paper discusses the discourse contrasts that arise in connection to direct evidentiality in Southern Aymara (henceforth, Aymara), an understudied Andean language. Aymara has two direct evidentials, the enclitic =wa and the covert morpheme -∅, which are used whenever the speaker has the best possible grounds for some proposition. I make the novel observation that a sentence...
The type of mood or tense marking that causes counterfactuality inferences—as figuring prominently, but far from exclusively, in counterfactual conditionals—has not yet received a comprehensive and compositional analysis. Focusing on four languages, the paper presents under-appreciated facts and a novel theory where the mood serves to activate alternatives to modal operators...
The standard contemporary semantics for ‘every’ predict the truth of occurrences of sentences with restrictors that denote the empty set, such as ‘Every American king lives in New York’. The literature on empty restrictors has been concerned with explaining a particular violation of this prediction: many assessors consider empty-restrictor sentences to be odd rather than valued...
This paper provides a systematic description and analysis of the non-predictive use of the Italian future. Several authors claim that, on this use, the Italian future is an evidential (Squartini 2001, Mari 2010, Eckardt and Beltrama 2019, Frana and Menéndez-Benito 2019). Others argue that the non-predictive future does not directly contribute an evidential signal (e.g...
Quantifier Raising usually exhibits finite-clause boundedness due to the syntactic and semantic constraints it is subject to (Fox 1995, 2000, Cecchetto 2004, a.o.). In this paper, I argue that QR out of a Mandarin prenominal pre-determiner RC is not only properly licensed, obeying both syntactic and semantic constraints, but also needed to account for the exceptional-scope...
I show that speaker bias in polarity focus questions (PFQs) is context sensitive, while speaker bias in high negation questions (HNQs) is context insensitive. This leads me to develop separate accounts of speaker bias in each of these kinds of polar questions. I argue that PFQ bias derives from the fact that they are frequently used in conversational contexts in which an answer...
This article describes a novel pattern of interpretations associated with universal determiners like ‘each’ and ‘every’. It is demonstrated that these canonically distributive quantifiers can give rise to surprising collective readings when they quantify into sub-clausal constituents, especially other Determiner Phrases. For instance, ‘two cards from each player’ can be...
This note presents challenge cases for prominent pragmatic responses to the proviso problem. I offer examples of uses of conditionals if $\psi,\,\phi_{P}$ that seem to commit the speaker unconditionally to the presupposition P of the consequent clause ϕ, even though the sentence’s predicted semantic presupposition ψ⊃P is antecedently satisfied (contrary to context-repair accounts...
In this paper I demonstrate that there is an explanation of the number marking we see on nouns when they combine with the numeral zero which combines Martí’s (Semant. Pragmat., 2020a, https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.13.3 ) account of the morphosyntax and semantics of the numeral-noun construction with Bylinina and Nouwen’s (Glossa 3(1):98, 2018) semantics for zero and which does not...
In this paper, we aim to account for the distribution and interpretation of a novel class of free choice items in Romanian, which we refer to as additive free choice items (ADD-FCIs). We show that the internal composition of ADD-FCIs, as well as their distribution, differs from that attested for other free choice paradigms discussed in the literature. Morphologically, ADD-FCIs...
This paper argues that verb phrase ellipsis requires contrast. The central observation is that ellipsis is ungrammatical in tautologous conditionals; e.g., *If John wins, then he does. Ellipsis is correctly ruled out by a focus-based theory of ellipsis (Rooth 1992a,b), but one that crucially imports focus’s requirement for contrast: an elliptical constituent must have an...
In this paper we focus on the logicality of language, i.e. the idea that the language system contains a deductive device to exclude analytic constructions. Puzzling evidence for the logicality of language comes from acceptable contradictions and tautologies. The standard response in the literature involves assuming that the language system only accesses analyticities that are due...
The English pronoun it can anaphorically take on the meaning of a salient generalized quantifier when it occurs in subject position followed by an elided Verb Phrase and (optionally) a VP-level operator. The extent to which theories of pronoun interpretation will have to be altered to take account of this finding will depend on whether the phenomenon is unique to English or part...
Maximize Presupposition! (MP), as originally proposed in Heim (Semantik: Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung, pp. 487–535, 1991) and developed in subsequent works, offers an account of the otherwise mysterious unassertability of a variety of sentences. At the core of MP is the idea that speakers are urged to use a sentence ψ over a sentence ϕ if ψ...
We evaluate the richness of the child’s input in semantics and its relation to the hypothesis space available to the child. Our case study is the acquisition of the universal quantifier every. We report two main findings regarding the acquisition of every on the basis of a corpus study of child-directed and child-ambient speech. Our first finding is that the input in semantics...
In English and many other languages, the interpretation of the plural is associated with an ‘exclusive’ reading in positive sentences and an ‘inclusive’ reading in negative ones. For example, the plural noun tulips in a sentence such as Chicken planted tulips suggests that Chicken planted more than one tulip (i.e., a reading which ‘excludes’ atomic individual tulips). At the same...