Linguistics and Philosophy最新文献

This paper examines two approaches to presuppositions: one viewing them as inferences projecting from sentences under negation and other logical operators, and another defining them as admittance conditions of utterances. Neither approach fully accounts for the "proviso problem", which arises when a sentence's presuppositional inferences are logically stronger than its necessary admittance conditions. To address this challenge, we propose a calculus of a trivalent logic that formally distinguishes between admittance and projection, extending Karttunen's dynamic, logical form-based analysis. The resulting framework enables a simple pragmatic strategy: presuppositional conclusions are accommodated unless overridden by a contextually likelier admittance condition. We provide evidence that this approach is empirically superior to methods that address the proviso problem using pragmatic strengthening.

This article argues for a logophoric analysis of Free Indirect Discourse (FID). FID is descriptively a hybrid between Direct Discourse (DD) and Indirect Discourse (ID). Recent studies largely agree on a DD-based analysis of FID by relying on bicontextual dependency (Schlenker in Mind Lang 19:279-304, 2004, Eckardt, The semantics of free indirect discourse: How texts allow us to mind-read and eavesdrop, Brill, Wiley, Leiden, 2014, i.a.) or mixed quotation (Maier in Mind Lang 30:345-373, 2015, i.a.). Instead, the article defends an ID-based, logophoric analysis of FID on the basis of overlooked properties of FID such as (anti)licensing of (anti)logophoric elements and recursive embedding of FID, which strengthen some previously discussed arguments such as de se and de te readings or sequence of tense phenomena (see Sharvit in Linguist Philos 31:353-395, 2008); the new observation that time and location adverbials are in fact not systematically indexicals anchored to the protagonist (but can be anaphoric or anchored to the speaker) further supports ID-based against DD-based analyses. The hypothesis that FID is outscoped by a logophoric operator not only derives the mixed properties of FID, but also treats FID as a case of an independently motivated linguistic class-the class of logophoric contexts.

This study investigates the meanings of the Japanese low-degree modifiers kasukani ‘faintly’ and honokani ‘approx. faintly’ and the English low-degree modifier faintly. I argue that, unlike typical low-degree modifiers such as sukoshi ‘a bit’ in Japanese and a bit in English, they are sense-based in that they not only semantically denote a small degree but also convey that the judge (typically the speaker) measures the degree of predicates based on their own sense (the senses of sight, smell, taste, etc.) at the level of conventional implicature (CI) (e.g., Grice (in: Cole, Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics iii: speech acts, Academic Press, New York, 1975), Potts (The logic of conventional implicatures, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005), McCready (Semant Pragmat 3:1–57, 2010. https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.3.8, Sawada (Pragmatic aspects of scalar modifiers. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2010), Gutzmann (Empir Issues Syntax Semant 8:123–141, 2011)). I will also show that there are variations among the sense-based low-degree modifiers with regard to (i) the kind of sense, (ii) the presence/absence of positive evaluativity, and (iii) the possibility of direct measurement of emotion and will explain the variations in relation to the CI component. A unique feature of sense-based low-degree modifiers is that they can indirectly measure the degree of non-sense-based predicates (e.g., emotion) through sense (e.g., perception). I show that the proposed analysis can also explain the indirect measurement in a unified way. This paper shows that like predicates of personal taste such as tasty (e.g., Pearson (J Semant 30(1):103–154, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffs001), Ninan (Proc Semant Linguist Theory, 24:290–304, 2014. https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v24i0.2413), Willer & Kennedy (Inquiry, 1–37, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1850338)), sense-based low-degree modifiers trigger acquaintance inference. The difference between them is that, unlike predicates of personal taste, sense-based low-degree modifiers co-occur with gradable predicates and their experiential components signal the manner/way in which the degree of the predicate in question is measured.

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.

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.

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.

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 .

We propose an account of interpretive effects involving same and different, relying on two claims: the first is that same and different are able to take scope, and the second is that they are presuppositional. On this account, same and different are decomposed into two parts: an additive operator TOO and a (non-)identity predicate. We argue that this account provides a more parsimonious account of well-known properties of same and different, such as the distinction between internal and external readings, as well as the parallelism effects discovered by Hardt and Mikkelsen (Linguist Philos 38:289–314, 2015). We also present a solution to a previously unexplained puzzle involving comparatives.

When do two sentences say the same thing, that is, express the same content? We defend two-component (2C) semantics: the view that propositional contents comprise (at least) two irreducibly distinct constituents: (1) truth-conditions and (2) subject-matter. We contrast 2C with one-component (1C) semantics, focusing on the view that subject-matter is reducible to truth-conditions. We identify exponents of this view and argue in favor of 2C. An appendix proposes a general formal template for propositional 2C semantics.

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.