How do proper names refer? This question about reference is critical for philosophers studying language, linguists investigating meaning and reference, and psycholinguists interested in how children acquire names. Over the past century, philosophers have put forward two classical theories to explain the link between a name and the entity it refers to, i.e., the descriptivist theory proposed by Frege (1892/1948), Russell (1905) and Searle (1958) among others, and the causal-historical view most notably advocated by Kripke (1980). On the former account, a name gets its referent through associated definite descriptions. Thus, when a speaker uses a name, they typically refer to whoever best fits the descriptive content attached to that name. For instance, the name “Kamala Harris” refers to the lady Kamala Harris because she is the sole individual who could uniquely satisfy the descriptive content “the first female vice president of the United States” that is commonly associated with the name nowadays. In contrast, according to the Kripkean causal-historical view, a name refers to a person via a link that is originated in the initial naming ceremony and then gets passed down through a community of speakers. Kripke contends that proper names are rigid designators and they continue to refer to the individuals who were initially given the name, even when they turn out to have none of the properties that speakers associate with this name (1980). That means, on the causal-historical picture, the name “Kamala Harris” would still refer to the person Kamala Harris even if she had not been elected the vice president of the United States. In the philosophical literature, the received wisdom is that Kripke supported his causalhistorical view of reference with the famous “Gödel” thought experiment. Suppose the only thing most people have heard about the mathematician Kurt Gödel is that he is the person who proved the incompleteness of arithmetic, which thus is the only possible definite description these people could associate with Gödel. And now imagine that the person who bears this name (Kurt Gödel) didn’t actually prove the theorem, but instead stole it from a fellow named Schmidt who did all the work. In this case, the descriptivist theory predicts that the name “Gödel” would refer to Schmidt, because Schmidt is the person best fitting
{"title":"The Origin of Cross-Cultural Differences in Referential Intuitions: Perspective Taking in the Gödel Case","authors":"Jincai Li","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffab010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffab010","url":null,"abstract":"How do proper names refer? This question about reference is critical for philosophers studying language, linguists investigating meaning and reference, and psycholinguists interested in how children acquire names. Over the past century, philosophers have put forward two classical theories to explain the link between a name and the entity it refers to, i.e., the descriptivist theory proposed by Frege (1892/1948), Russell (1905) and Searle (1958) among others, and the causal-historical view most notably advocated by Kripke (1980). On the former account, a name gets its referent through associated definite descriptions. Thus, when a speaker uses a name, they typically refer to whoever best fits the descriptive content attached to that name. For instance, the name “Kamala Harris” refers to the lady Kamala Harris because she is the sole individual who could uniquely satisfy the descriptive content “the first female vice president of the United States” that is commonly associated with the name nowadays. In contrast, according to the Kripkean causal-historical view, a name refers to a person via a link that is originated in the initial naming ceremony and then gets passed down through a community of speakers. Kripke contends that proper names are rigid designators and they continue to refer to the individuals who were initially given the name, even when they turn out to have none of the properties that speakers associate with this name (1980). That means, on the causal-historical picture, the name “Kamala Harris” would still refer to the person Kamala Harris even if she had not been elected the vice president of the United States. In the philosophical literature, the received wisdom is that Kripke supported his causalhistorical view of reference with the famous “Gödel” thought experiment. Suppose the only thing most people have heard about the mathematician Kurt Gödel is that he is the person who proved the incompleteness of arithmetic, which thus is the only possible definite description these people could associate with Gödel. And now imagine that the person who bears this name (Kurt Gödel) didn’t actually prove the theorem, but instead stole it from a fellow named Schmidt who did all the work. In this case, the descriptivist theory predicts that the name “Gödel” would refer to Schmidt, because Schmidt is the person best fitting","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"64 1","pages":"415-440"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2021-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74534964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Formal theories of scalar implicature appeal crucially to a set of alternatives. These are the alternative statements that a speaker could have made but chose not to in pragmatic accounts, and the alternative statements that figure in the computation of exhaustivity operators in grammatical approaches. I show that the three sufficiently explicit theories of alternatives in the literature generate sets of alternatives that grow at least exponentially as a function of the input, and that these theories generate very large sets even for relatively small inputs. For pragmatic accounts of scalar implicature, I argue these results are hard or impossible to square with what we know independently about manipulating alternatives from the psychology of human reasoning. I propose that they pose a weaker but more general challenge for grammatical approaches, since alternatives as required by exhaustivity operators occur elsewhere in grammar, for example as part of the semantics of operators like “only” and “even.”
{"title":"A Note on the Cardinalities of Sets of Scalar Alternatives","authors":"S. Mascarenhas","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffab011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffab011","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Formal theories of scalar implicature appeal crucially to a set of alternatives. These are the alternative statements that a speaker could have made but chose not to in pragmatic accounts, and the alternative statements that figure in the computation of exhaustivity operators in grammatical approaches. I show that the three sufficiently explicit theories of alternatives in the literature generate sets of alternatives that grow at least exponentially as a function of the input, and that these theories generate very large sets even for relatively small inputs. For pragmatic accounts of scalar implicature, I argue these results are hard or impossible to square with what we know independently about manipulating alternatives from the psychology of human reasoning. I propose that they pose a weaker but more general challenge for grammatical approaches, since alternatives as required by exhaustivity operators occur elsewhere in grammar, for example as part of the semantics of operators like “only” and “even.”","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"73 1","pages":"473-482"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2021-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86077672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The symbolic gesture MAT (mano a tulipano) used by native speakers of Italian characterizes non-canonical wh questions when used both as a co-speech and pro-speech gesture. MAT can be executed with either a fast tempo contour or a slow tempo contour. Tempo is semantically significant: descriptively, a fast tempo characterizes a biased but information-seeking non-canonical question; a slow tempo characterizes a rhetorical non-canonical question. I argue that the fast contour is the default tempo of MAT and that it brings about a biased interpretation. Slowing down the movement occurs when the feature [slow] is added: the semantic contribution of this feature is to add the presupposition that the question is resolved in the conversational context, resulting in the rhetorical interpretation of the question.
意大利语母语者使用的象征性手势MAT (mano a tulipano)在作为共同言语和支持言语的手势使用时具有非规范的wh问题特征。MAT可以用快节奏轮廓或慢节奏轮廓来执行。语速在语义上是重要的:在描述上，快的语速是一个有偏见但寻求信息的非规范问题的特征;慢节奏是修辞性非规范问题的特点。我认为快速轮廓是MAT的默认节奏，它带来了有偏见的解释。当添加[slow]特征时，动作会减慢:该特征的语义贡献是添加了问题在会话上下文中得到解决的前提，从而导致对问题的修辞解释。
{"title":"The Contribution of Gestures to the Semantics of Non-Canonical Questions","authors":"Michela Ippolito","doi":"10.1093/JOS/FFAB007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOS/FFAB007","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The symbolic gesture MAT (mano a tulipano) used by native speakers of Italian characterizes non-canonical wh questions when used both as a co-speech and pro-speech gesture. MAT can be executed with either a fast tempo contour or a slow tempo contour. Tempo is semantically significant: descriptively, a fast tempo characterizes a biased but information-seeking non-canonical question; a slow tempo characterizes a rhetorical non-canonical question. I argue that the fast contour is the default tempo of MAT and that it brings about a biased interpretation. Slowing down the movement occurs when the feature [slow] is added: the semantic contribution of this feature is to add the presupposition that the question is resolved in the conversational context, resulting in the rhetorical interpretation of the question.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"13 1","pages":"363-392"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2021-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84995235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
One of the central topics in semantic theory over the last few decades concerns the nature of local contexts. Recently, theorists have tried to develop general, non-stipulative accounts of local contexts (Ingason, 2016; Mandelkern & Romoli, 2017a; Schlenker, 2009). In this paper, we contribute to this literature by drawing attention to the local contexts of subclausal expressions. More specifically, we focus on the local contexts of quantificational determiners, e.g. ‘all’, ‘both’, etc. Our central tool for probing the local contexts of subclausal elements is the principle Maximize Presupposition! (Percus, 2006; Singh, 2011). The empirical basis of our investigation concerns some data discussed by Anvari (2018b), e.g. the fact that sentences such as ‘All of the two presidential candidates are crooked’ are unacceptable. In order to explain this, we suggest that the local context of determiners needs to contain the information carried by their restrictor. However, no existing non-stipulative account predicts this. Consequently, we think that the local contexts of subclausal expressions will likely have to be stipulated. This result has important consequences for debates in semantics and pragmatics, e.g. those around the so-called “explanatory problem” for dynamic semantics (Heim, 1990; Schlenker, 2009; Soames, 1982).
{"title":"Subclausal Local Contexts","authors":"A. Anvari, Kyle Blumberg","doi":"10.1093/JOS/FFAB004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOS/FFAB004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 One of the central topics in semantic theory over the last few decades concerns the nature of local contexts. Recently, theorists have tried to develop general, non-stipulative accounts of local contexts (Ingason, 2016; Mandelkern & Romoli, 2017a; Schlenker, 2009). In this paper, we contribute to this literature by drawing attention to the local contexts of subclausal expressions. More specifically, we focus on the local contexts of quantificational determiners, e.g. ‘all’, ‘both’, etc. Our central tool for probing the local contexts of subclausal elements is the principle Maximize Presupposition! (Percus, 2006; Singh, 2011). The empirical basis of our investigation concerns some data discussed by Anvari (2018b), e.g. the fact that sentences such as ‘All of the two presidential candidates are crooked’ are unacceptable. In order to explain this, we suggest that the local context of determiners needs to contain the information carried by their restrictor. However, no existing non-stipulative account predicts this. Consequently, we think that the local contexts of subclausal expressions will likely have to be stipulated. This result has important consequences for debates in semantics and pragmatics, e.g. those around the so-called “explanatory problem” for dynamic semantics (Heim, 1990; Schlenker, 2009; Soames, 1982).","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"174 1","pages":"393-414"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2021-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78542982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-23DOI: 10.1186/s13326-021-00240-6
Emma Norris, Janna Hastings, Marta M Marques, Ailbhe N Finnerty Mutlu, Silje Zink, Susan Michie
Background: Incorporating the feedback of expert stakeholders in ontology development is important to ensure content is appropriate, comprehensive, meets community needs and is interoperable with other ontologies and classification systems. However, domain experts are often not formally engaged in ontology development, and there is little available guidance on how this involvement should best be conducted and managed. Social and behavioural science studies often involve expert feedback in the development of tools and classification systems but have had little engagement with ontology development. This paper aims to (i) demonstrate how expert feedback can enhance ontology development, and (ii) provide practical recommendations on how to conduct expert feedback in ontology development using methodologies from the social and behavioural sciences.
Main body: Considerations for selecting methods for engaging stakeholders are presented. Mailing lists and issue trackers as existing methods used frequently in ontology development are discussed. Advisory boards and working groups, feedback tasks, consensus exercises, discussions and workshops are presented as potential methods from social and behavioural sciences to incorporate in ontology development.
Conclusions: A variety of methods from the social and behavioural sciences exist to enable feedback from expert stakeholders in ontology development. Engaging domain experts in ontology development enables depth and clarity in ontology development, whilst also establishing advocates for an ontology upon its completion.
{"title":"Why and how to engage expert stakeholders in ontology development: insights from social and behavioural sciences.","authors":"Emma Norris, Janna Hastings, Marta M Marques, Ailbhe N Finnerty Mutlu, Silje Zink, Susan Michie","doi":"10.1186/s13326-021-00240-6","DOIUrl":"10.1186/s13326-021-00240-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>Incorporating the feedback of expert stakeholders in ontology development is important to ensure content is appropriate, comprehensive, meets community needs and is interoperable with other ontologies and classification systems. However, domain experts are often not formally engaged in ontology development, and there is little available guidance on how this involvement should best be conducted and managed. Social and behavioural science studies often involve expert feedback in the development of tools and classification systems but have had little engagement with ontology development. This paper aims to (i) demonstrate how expert feedback can enhance ontology development, and (ii) provide practical recommendations on how to conduct expert feedback in ontology development using methodologies from the social and behavioural sciences.</p><p><strong>Main body: </strong>Considerations for selecting methods for engaging stakeholders are presented. Mailing lists and issue trackers as existing methods used frequently in ontology development are discussed. Advisory boards and working groups, feedback tasks, consensus exercises, discussions and workshops are presented as potential methods from social and behavioural sciences to incorporate in ontology development.</p><p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>A variety of methods from the social and behavioural sciences exist to enable feedback from expert stakeholders in ontology development. Engaging domain experts in ontology development enables depth and clarity in ontology development, whilst also establishing advocates for an ontology upon its completion.</p>","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"12 1","pages":"4"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2021-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7985588/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10339022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this paper, we argue that proper names have deferred uses. Following Geoffrey Nunberg, we describe the deferred reference mechanism by which a linguistic expression refers to something in the world by exploiting a contextually salient relation between an index and the referent in question. Nunberg offered a thorough analysis of deferred uses of indexicals but claimed that proper names do not permit such uses. We, however, offer a number of examples of uses of proper names which pass grammatical tests for deferred usage, as put forward by Nunberg.
{"title":"Deferred Reference of Proper Names","authors":"Katarzyna Kijania-Placek, P. Banás","doi":"10.1093/JOS/FFAB001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOS/FFAB001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this paper, we argue that proper names have deferred uses. Following Geoffrey Nunberg, we describe the deferred reference mechanism by which a linguistic expression refers to something in the world by exploiting a contextually salient relation between an index and the referent in question. Nunberg offered a thorough analysis of deferred uses of indexicals but claimed that proper names do not permit such uses. We, however, offer a number of examples of uses of proper names which pass grammatical tests for deferred usage, as put forward by Nunberg.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"11 1","pages":"195-219"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2021-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83490162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This squib reports experimental findings from a study investigating the interpretation of simple disjunction in negative contexts in four languages: Italian, French, English, Romanian. We provide evidence that casts doubt on the robustness of the distinction between PPI disjunction languages and non-PPI disjunction languages. The difference turns out to be less clear-cut than assumed in the theoretical (e.g., Szabolcsi 2002, Spector 2014, Nicolae 2017) or experimental literature (e.g., Crain 2012, Guasti et al. 2017). The results reported here inform current accounts of positive polarity and flesh out some methodological issues raised by the various tasks used in experimental investigations of the polarity sensitivity of disjunction.
本文报道了一项研究的实验结果，该研究调查了四种语言(意大利语、法语、英语、罗马尼亚语)在否定语境中对简单分离的解释。我们提供的证据对PPI分离语言和非PPI分离语言之间区别的鲁棒性产生了怀疑。事实证明，这种差异并不像理论(例如，Szabolcsi 2002, Spector 2014, Nicolae 2017)或实验文献(例如，Crain 2012, Guasti et al. 2017)中假设的那样明确。这里报告的结果为目前关于正极性的描述提供了信息，并充实了在分离极性敏感性的实验研究中使用的各种任务所提出的一些方法问题。
{"title":"Disjunction in Negative Contexts: A Cross-Linguistic Experimental Study","authors":"Oana Lungu, Anamaria Fălăuș, F. Panzeri","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffab002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffab002","url":null,"abstract":"This squib reports experimental findings from a study investigating the interpretation of simple disjunction in negative contexts in four languages: Italian, French, English, Romanian. We provide evidence that casts doubt on the robustness of the distinction between PPI disjunction languages and non-PPI disjunction languages. The difference turns out to be less clear-cut than assumed in the theoretical (e.g., Szabolcsi 2002, Spector 2014, Nicolae 2017) or experimental literature (e.g., Crain 2012, Guasti et al. 2017). The results reported here inform current accounts of positive polarity and flesh out some methodological issues raised by the various tasks used in experimental investigations of the polarity sensitivity of disjunction.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"27 1 1","pages":"221-247"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82705749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I coin the term ‘emotive markers’ to describe words like fortunately and alas which encode not-at-issue information about the speaker’s emotive attitude towards the content of the utterances they occur in. I argue that there are important differences emotive markers and other encoders of not-at-issue content, in particular utterance modifiers like frankly or evidential adverbs like apparently. In contrast to these, emotive markers can result in Moore’s Paradox and always range over their local argument. I conclude that the contribution of emotive markers should be treated as ‘illocutionary content’, on par with the speaker’s other Discourse Commitments (Gunlogson, 2001), and I model this analysis in the dynamic sub-sentential update framework in Farkas and Bruce (2010).
{"title":"The Semantics of Emotive Markers and Other Illocutionary Content","authors":"J. Rett","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffab005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffab005","url":null,"abstract":"I coin the term ‘emotive markers’ to describe words like fortunately and alas which encode not-at-issue information about the speaker’s emotive attitude towards the content of the utterances they occur in. I argue that there are important differences emotive markers and other encoders of not-at-issue content, in particular utterance modifiers like frankly or evidential adverbs like apparently. In contrast to these, emotive markers can result in Moore’s Paradox and always range over their local argument. I conclude that the contribution of emotive markers should be treated as ‘illocutionary content’, on par with the speaker’s other Discourse Commitments (Gunlogson, 2001), and I model this analysis in the dynamic sub-sentential update framework in Farkas and Bruce (2010).","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"18 1","pages":"305-340"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89414645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
1 Degree semantics has been developed to study how the meanings of 2 measurement and comparison are encoded in natural language. Within degree 3 semantics, this paper proposes a difference-based (or subtraction-based) approach 4 to analyze the semantics of comparatives. The motivation is the measurability and 5 comparability of differences involved in comparatives. The main claim is that 6 comparatives encode a subtraction equation among three scalar values: two 7 measurements along an interval scale and the difference between them. We 8 contribute two innovations: (i) using interval arithmetic to implement subtraction, 9 and (ii) analyzing comparative morpheme -er/more as an additive particle, denoting 10 the default, most general, positive difference. Our analysis inherits existing insights 11 in the literature. Moreover, the innovations bring new conceptual and empirical 12 advantages. In particular, we address the interpretation of comparatives containing 13 than-clause-internal quantifiers and various kinds of numerical differentials. We also 14 account for three puzzles with regard to the scope island issue, the monotonicity of 15 than-clauses, and the discourse status of the standard in comparison. 16
{"title":"The Semantics of Comparatives: A Difference-Based Approach","authors":"Linmin Zhang, Jia Ling","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffab003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffab003","url":null,"abstract":"1 Degree semantics has been developed to study how the meanings of 2 measurement and comparison are encoded in natural language. Within degree 3 semantics, this paper proposes a difference-based (or subtraction-based) approach 4 to analyze the semantics of comparatives. The motivation is the measurability and 5 comparability of differences involved in comparatives. The main claim is that 6 comparatives encode a subtraction equation among three scalar values: two 7 measurements along an interval scale and the difference between them. We 8 contribute two innovations: (i) using interval arithmetic to implement subtraction, 9 and (ii) analyzing comparative morpheme -er/more as an additive particle, denoting 10 the default, most general, positive difference. Our analysis inherits existing insights 11 in the literature. Moreover, the innovations bring new conceptual and empirical 12 advantages. In particular, we address the interpretation of comparatives containing 13 than-clause-internal quantifiers and various kinds of numerical differentials. We also 14 account for three puzzles with regard to the scope island issue, the monotonicity of 15 than-clauses, and the discourse status of the standard in comparison. 16","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"35 1","pages":"249-303"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89547589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Accounting for the behavior of conjoined and disjoined if-clauses is not easy for standard theories of conditionals that treat if as either an operator or restrictor. In this paper, I discuss four observations about coordinated if-clauses, and motivate a semantics for conditionals that reorients the compositional structure of the restrictor theory. On my proposal, if-clauses provide restrictions on modal domains, but they do so by way of a higher type intermediary—a set of propositions—that is collapsed by the modal. I argue that combining this view with an independently plausible type-shifting operation applied to or and and predicts the range of data we find for conditionals with coordinated if-clauses.
{"title":"Coordinating Ifs","authors":"Justin Khoo","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffab006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffab006","url":null,"abstract":"Accounting for the behavior of conjoined and disjoined if-clauses is not easy for standard theories of conditionals that treat if as either an operator or restrictor. In this paper, I discuss four observations about coordinated if-clauses, and motivate a semantics for conditionals that reorients the compositional structure of the restrictor theory. On my proposal, if-clauses provide restrictions on modal domains, but they do so by way of a higher type intermediary—a set of propositions—that is collapsed by the modal. I argue that combining this view with an independently plausible type-shifting operation applied to or and and predicts the range of data we find for conditionals with coordinated if-clauses.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"25 1","pages":"341-361"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81054393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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