{"title":"That-clauses in attitude predicates: Giving syntax its due","authors":"R. J. Matthews","doi":"10.1515/tl-2020-0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2020-0016","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46148,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Linguistics","volume":"46 1","pages":"289 - 295"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/tl-2020-0016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42756973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Friederike Moltmann’s target paper on object-based truthmaker semantics (in the following TSNL) offers a concise and well-written summary of the framework’s main ideas and merits specifically for the analysis of natural language modality and attitude ascriptions. In the following, I focus on select aspects of her proposal for deontic and teleological modality as well as imperative clauses, taking into account also their behavior under disjunctions. By introducing special modal and attitudinal objects, the framework closes a gap in standard models for natural language, which are hard-pressed to come up with suitable meanings for intuitively ‘modal’ nouns like obligation, permission, need, belief, report and the like. Notably, providing interpretations for nouns of this sort, taking into account speaker intuitions, philosophical insights, and the nouns’ semantic and syntactic relations to other expressions of the language, leads to new semantic accounts for better studied expressions like modal verbs, illocutionary predicates, or imperative clauses. In some sense, the approach could be seen as a more radical push in the direction of where Kratzer’s standard work on modals has taken us. While accessibility relations and valuation (i.e., what is true at individual worlds) are independent in classical modal logic, for Kratzer, accessibility is derived from non-modal properties of the individual worlds (the actual content of some relevant body of beliefs, laws, rules, desires, etc.). For Moltmann, modal meanings are grounded in the existence of suitable, largely abstract objects. The ontology is enriched with objects corresponding to illocutionary acts, illocutionary products, cognitive acts, cognitive products, modal states and modal products. The resulting inventory can be used to address various problems associated with modality and attitude expressions, for instance the distinction between weak and strong (or ‘heavy’ and ‘light’) permission, a longstanding issue for classical deontic logic. Classical deontic logic and the standard Kratzerian treatment that builds on it, analyze deontic possibility as compatibility with the deontically optimal worlds (among the ones verifying the relevant circumstances). This falls short of capturing the inuitive difference between (1a), which can indeed convey the notion of compatibility, and (1b), which ascribes to Mary something more like a right or an entitlement, which, for instance, the relevant authority has to revoke explicitly and cannot simply overwrite by imposing a conflicting obligation.
{"title":"On the performance of modal objects","authors":"Magdalena Kaufmann","doi":"10.1515/tl-2020-0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2020-0014","url":null,"abstract":"Friederike Moltmann’s target paper on object-based truthmaker semantics (in the following TSNL) offers a concise and well-written summary of the framework’s main ideas and merits specifically for the analysis of natural language modality and attitude ascriptions. In the following, I focus on select aspects of her proposal for deontic and teleological modality as well as imperative clauses, taking into account also their behavior under disjunctions. By introducing special modal and attitudinal objects, the framework closes a gap in standard models for natural language, which are hard-pressed to come up with suitable meanings for intuitively ‘modal’ nouns like obligation, permission, need, belief, report and the like. Notably, providing interpretations for nouns of this sort, taking into account speaker intuitions, philosophical insights, and the nouns’ semantic and syntactic relations to other expressions of the language, leads to new semantic accounts for better studied expressions like modal verbs, illocutionary predicates, or imperative clauses. In some sense, the approach could be seen as a more radical push in the direction of where Kratzer’s standard work on modals has taken us. While accessibility relations and valuation (i.e., what is true at individual worlds) are independent in classical modal logic, for Kratzer, accessibility is derived from non-modal properties of the individual worlds (the actual content of some relevant body of beliefs, laws, rules, desires, etc.). For Moltmann, modal meanings are grounded in the existence of suitable, largely abstract objects. The ontology is enriched with objects corresponding to illocutionary acts, illocutionary products, cognitive acts, cognitive products, modal states and modal products. The resulting inventory can be used to address various problems associated with modality and attitude expressions, for instance the distinction between weak and strong (or ‘heavy’ and ‘light’) permission, a longstanding issue for classical deontic logic. Classical deontic logic and the standard Kratzerian treatment that builds on it, analyze deontic possibility as compatibility with the deontically optimal worlds (among the ones verifying the relevant circumstances). This falls short of capturing the inuitive difference between (1a), which can indeed convey the notion of compatibility, and (1b), which ascribes to Mary something more like a right or an entitlement, which, for instance, the relevant authority has to revoke explicitly and cannot simply overwrite by imposing a conflicting obligation.","PeriodicalId":46148,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Linguistics","volume":"46 1","pages":"253 - 266"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/tl-2020-0014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43747777","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Attitudinal and modal objects: A view from the syntax-semantics interface","authors":"K. Moulton","doi":"10.1515/tl-2020-0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2020-0017","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46148,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Linguistics","volume":"46 1","pages":"297 - 306"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/tl-2020-0017","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46943736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The target paper by Beste Kamali and Manfred Krifka, “Focus and contrastive topic in questions and answers, with particular reference to Turkish”, draws a fundamental distinction between focus and contrastive topic: Whereas focus introduces disjunctive alternatives as a restriction on the input context, contrastive topic introduces conjunctive alternatives as a restriction on the input context. For instance, a polar question with focus like (1a) presupposes the disjoined question in (1b). In Commitment Space Semantics, the disjoined polar question is equivalent to a constituent question whose wh-constituent triggers disjunctive alternatives.
{"title":"Strategies of inquiry: Focus and contrastive topic in polar questions","authors":"Shumian Ye","doi":"10.1515/tl-2020-0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2020-0008","url":null,"abstract":"The target paper by Beste Kamali and Manfred Krifka, “Focus and contrastive topic in questions and answers, with particular reference to Turkish”, draws a fundamental distinction between focus and contrastive topic: Whereas focus introduces disjunctive alternatives as a restriction on the input context, contrastive topic introduces conjunctive alternatives as a restriction on the input context. For instance, a polar question with focus like (1a) presupposes the disjoined question in (1b). In Commitment Space Semantics, the disjoined polar question is equivalent to a constituent question whose wh-constituent triggers disjunctive alternatives.","PeriodicalId":46148,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Linguistics","volume":"46 1","pages":"133 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/tl-2020-0008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45749109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The target article by Kamali and Krifka proposes a novel theory of focus and contrastive topic within the framework of Commitment Space Semantics. The key intuitions are similar to some prominent ideas discussed in the literature. Focus in an utterance> signals that the discourse state it updates involves an open question that is congruent to >, as chiefly advocated in Roberts (1996) and Beaver and Clark (2008). Contrastive topic signals that there are additional open questions of a certain type in discourse, as suggested, e. g. in Büring (2003). However, the theory is ontologically more appealing than its competitors because it does not require complicated structures built from questions to explicate notions of information structure such as sets of questions and entire trees of questions; entities whose ontological and logical properties are little understood. Moreover, the way the compositional system is set up is such that all important aspects of the Turkish data (which widely transpose to other discourse-configurational languages such as Hungarian) appear to fall in place very naturally and elegantly. Given my record on information structure, e. g. Velleman et al. (2012) or Onea (2016), I have no choice but to applaud the main ideas of the paper. In fact, this would be an ideal point at which I could stop this comment, as I have nothing of substance to add to the applause. Instead, I ended up intrigued by the properties of the theoretical framework the authors outline in the target article. In the continuation of this paper, I present the insights that I gathered. In particular, in Section 1, I suggest a simpler notation for Commitment Space Semantics that I dub Alternative Commitment Space Semantics (not because it is another theory, but because we need a name for the notational variant). The point of this exercise is to allow simpler comparison to other, more familiar frameworks. In Section 2, I briefly compare Commitment Space Semantics to a particular implementation of Inquisitive Semantics as a framework to represent discourse updates, questions and focus as suggested in Onea (2016). Finally, in Section 3, I make a small observation about the way focus-congruence works in commitment space semantics as compared to Alternative Semantics (Hamblin 1973; Rooth 1992) and question based discourse models following Roberts (1996).
Kamali和Krifka的目标文章在承诺空间语义框架下提出了一种新的焦点和对比话题理论。关键的直觉与文献中讨论的一些重要思想相似。话语>中的焦点表明，它更新的话语状态涉及一个与>一致的开放问题，罗伯茨(1996)和比弗和克拉克(2008)主要主张这一点。对比主题表明话语中存在某种类型的额外开放问题，如b ring(2003)所建议的那样。然而，该理论在本体论上比其竞争对手更具吸引力，因为它不需要从问题构建复杂的结构来解释信息结构的概念，如问题集和整个问题树;本体和逻辑属性很少被理解的实体。此外，构建组合系统的方式是这样的，土耳其语数据的所有重要方面(这些数据被广泛地转置到其他话语配置语言，如匈牙利语)似乎非常自然而优雅地落在了适当的位置。鉴于我在信息结构方面的记录，例如Velleman et al.(2012)或Onea(2016)，我别无选择，只能为本文的主要思想鼓掌。事实上，这将是一个理想的点，我可以停止这个评论，因为我没有实质内容来补充掌声。相反，我最终被作者在目标文章中概述的理论框架的特性所吸引。在本文的后续部分，我将介绍我收集到的见解。特别是，在第1节中，我为承诺空间语义提出了一种更简单的表示法，我称之为替代承诺空间语义(不是因为它是另一种理论，而是因为我们需要一个表示法变体的名称)。这个练习的重点是允许与其他更熟悉的框架进行更简单的比较。在第2节中，我简要地比较了承诺空间语义与好奇语义的特定实现，作为一个框架来表示Onea(2016)中建议的话语更新、问题和焦点。最后，在第3节中，我对焦点同余在承诺空间语义中的工作方式与替代语义(Hamblin 1973;Rooth(1992)和Roberts(1996)之后的基于问题的话语模型。
{"title":"An inquisitive stroll in commitment spaces","authors":"Edgar Onea","doi":"10.1515/tl-2020-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2020-0005","url":null,"abstract":"The target article by Kamali and Krifka proposes a novel theory of focus and contrastive topic within the framework of Commitment Space Semantics. The key intuitions are similar to some prominent ideas discussed in the literature. Focus in an utterance> signals that the discourse state it updates involves an open question that is congruent to >, as chiefly advocated in Roberts (1996) and Beaver and Clark (2008). Contrastive topic signals that there are additional open questions of a certain type in discourse, as suggested, e. g. in Büring (2003). However, the theory is ontologically more appealing than its competitors because it does not require complicated structures built from questions to explicate notions of information structure such as sets of questions and entire trees of questions; entities whose ontological and logical properties are little understood. Moreover, the way the compositional system is set up is such that all important aspects of the Turkish data (which widely transpose to other discourse-configurational languages such as Hungarian) appear to fall in place very naturally and elegantly. Given my record on information structure, e. g. Velleman et al. (2012) or Onea (2016), I have no choice but to applaud the main ideas of the paper. In fact, this would be an ideal point at which I could stop this comment, as I have nothing of substance to add to the applause. Instead, I ended up intrigued by the properties of the theoretical framework the authors outline in the target article. In the continuation of this paper, I present the insights that I gathered. In particular, in Section 1, I suggest a simpler notation for Commitment Space Semantics that I dub Alternative Commitment Space Semantics (not because it is another theory, but because we need a name for the notational variant). The point of this exercise is to allow simpler comparison to other, more familiar frameworks. In Section 2, I briefly compare Commitment Space Semantics to a particular implementation of Inquisitive Semantics as a framework to represent discourse updates, questions and focus as suggested in Onea (2016). Finally, in Section 3, I make a small observation about the way focus-congruence works in commitment space semantics as compared to Alternative Semantics (Hamblin 1973; Rooth 1992) and question based discourse models following Roberts (1996).","PeriodicalId":46148,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Linguistics","volume":"46 1","pages":"103 - 111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/tl-2020-0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43126418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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