Semantics and Pragmatics

The semantics and probabilistic pragmatics of deadjectival intensifiers

Rick Nouwen — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Intensifiers (e.g. horribly in horribly warm) are usually deadjectival adverbs. I show that the lexical content of the adjectival base, and in particular its evaluative meaning, is directly relevant for the degree intensifying function of these adverbs. In particular, I highlight two generalisations that have remained unaccounted for so far. First, evaluative adjectives with a negative evaluative meaning tend to turn into deadjectival intensifiers expressing high degree, while adjectives with a positive meaning make intensifiers of medium degree. Second, negative modal adjectives can form deadjectival intensifiers, but positive ones cannot. I will argue that a relatively simple intersective semantics for evaluative and modal adverbs accounts for these observations, but that we can only show this if we supplement that semantic analysis with a probabilistic pragmatic component.

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Free choice and presuppositional exhaustification

Guillermo Del Pinal, Itai Bassi, Uli Sauerland — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Sentences such as Olivia can take Logic or Algebra (‘♢∨-sentences’) are typically interpreted as entailing that Olivia can take Logic and can take Algebra. Given a standard semantics for modals and disjunction, those ‘Free choice’ (FC) readings are not predicted from the surface form of ♢∨-sentences. Yet the standard semantics is appropriate for the ‘double prohibition’ reading typically assigned to ¬♢∨-sentences like Olivia can’t take Logic or Algebra. Several extant approaches to FC can account for those two cases, but face challenges when ♢∨, ¬♢∨ and related sentences appear embedded in certain environments. In this paper, we present a novel account of FC that builds on a ‘grammatical’ theory of scalar implicatures — proposed by Bassi et al. (2021) and Del Pinal (2021) — according to which covert exhaustification is a presupposition trigger such that the prejacent forms the assertive content while any excludable or includable alternatives are incorporated at the non-at issue, presuppositional level. Applied to ♢∨, ¬♢∨, and similar sentences, ‘presuppositional exhaustification’ predicts that their default interpretations have an assertive component (roughly, the classical interpretation of the prejacent) and a homogeneity presupposition which projects in standard ways. Those predictions, we then show, support a uniform account of the puzzling behavior of ♢∨, ¬♢∨, and related sentences when embedded under (negative) factives (Marty & Romoli 2020), disjunctions (Romoli & Santorio 2019), and in the scope of universal, existential (Bar-Lev & Fox 2020) and non-monotonic quantifiers (Gotzner et al. 2020).

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Formalizing spatial-causal polysemy of Agent prepositions

Camil Staps, Johan Rooryck — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Current formal approaches to by-phrases in passives analyze the Agent preposition by as semantically vacuous: the denotation of by is merely such that its argument fulfills the same function as the external argument in the corresponding active sentence. This leads to a view of agentive by as essentially homonymous with spatial and temporal by. We argue, on the basis of work in the cognitive linguistic tradition and a new analysis of the French Agent prepositions par and de, that Agent markers do have non-trivial semantic content, and are polysemous rather than homonymous with their spatial counterparts. To formalize this we propose to model these prepositions with general schematic denotations of a polymorphic type ⟨η,⟨θ,t⟩⟩, which can be instantiated with a concrete type in a specific syntactic and semantic context, such as ⟨e,⟨e,t⟩⟩ for the spatial meaning of by. The use as an Agent preposition is simply one of these instantiations, with type ⟨e,⟨s,t⟩⟩, where s stands for events). The concrete meaning in context depends on both the general, polymorphically typed denotation and the specific type in the given context. In this way our proposal integrates a useful insight from cognitive linguistics in a semantic formalization of the passive, and opens up possibilities for similar accounts of other highly grammaticalized prepositions.

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Limitations of a modal analysis of before and after

Toshiyuki Ogihara, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0800

This article takes a critical view of Beaver & Condoravdi’s (2003) modal analysis of before and after. According to their proposal, the clause headed by before or after denotes the earliest possible time at which it is true. We first show that the original proposal presented by Beaver & Condoravdi (2003) faces difficulty with anti-veridical before-clause cases. We then incorporate eventualities (events and states) into a revamped proposal in which the existence of an eventuality that could lead to a before-clause eventuality and that parallels a very similar eventuality in the actual world is used as a criterion for selecting the set of alternative worlds. This allows the alternative worlds to differ from the actual one at a time earlier than the matrix clause predication time. However, this revision still suffers from counterexamples that involve before clauses that refer back to a time before the matrix clause eventuality. This discussion leaves room for the possibility that an extensional account might offer a better analysis.

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