Abstract not found

Languages that have determiners often have a rich inventory of them. In English, indefinite determiners include a(n), some, a certain, this, one, another, cardinals, partitives, the zero determiner of bare plurals (in some analyses), and, according to Horn 1999 and Giannakidou 2001, any. Despite the attention indefinites have

According to alternative semantics, focus has the weak semantics of introducing alternatives. But in some association with focus constructions, assuming a semantics of existential presupposition would give us an independently motivated account of the semantic focus effect. I review two such cases. I then give arguments against an existential-presupposition semantics for focus based on flexibility in the licensing of focus. Architecture for focus interpretation I will assume the architecture for focus interpretation discussed in Rooth (1992). In the example below, [ NP John] is marked with a focus feature, and this focus is interpreted at the S level by a focus interpretation operator ¸. (1) [ S [ S John F solved problem three] ¸ C] The focus interpretation operator adds a constraint on a free variable C. In this case, the constraint is that C is a set of propositions of the form `x solved problem three' containing `John solved problem three' and some other proposition. We think of t...

This paper is concerned with the contrast between two kinds of sentences involving definite descriptions. When people are asked to assign truth-values, they feel "squeamish" about The King of France is bald, while they confidently and without hesitation judge My friend went for a drive with the King of France last week to be false. This contrast has often been taken to show that the first sentence has no truth-value because its presupposition (that there is a King of France) is not satisfied, while the second sentence has no presupposition of existence (of a King of France) and is thus simply false. I will

The term ‘conventional implicature ’ was introduced by Grice (1967/1975), though the notion had been foreshadowed as early as Grice (1961). In the central passages, he says (1967/1989:24-26): I wish to introduce, as terms of art, the verb implicate and the related nouns implicature (cf. implying) and implicatum (cf. what is implied). … In some cases the conventional meaning of the words used will determine what is implicated, besides helping to determine what is said. If I say (smugly), He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave, I have certainly committed myself, by virtue of the meaning of my words, to its being the case that his being brave is a consequence of (follows from) his being an Englishman. But while I have said that he is an Englishman, and said that he is brave, I do not want to say that I have said (in the favored sense) that it follows from his being an Englishman that he is brave, though I have certainly indicated, and so implicated, that this is so. I do not want to say that my utterance of this sentence would be, strictly speaking, false should the consequence in question fail to hold. So some implicatures are conventional... The only other English expression that Grice identified as triggering a conventional implicature was but. The term has been used in various ways by different authors. For example, Karttunen & Peters (1979) used it to describe conventionally triggered presuppositions. Bach (1999) argued that Grice was wrong about but and therefore, calling into question the existence of conventional implicatures as a class. But Chris Potts puts quite a different complexion on the matter in the

this paper. Although I am unsure about some details, Iatridou's topic sphere (1996) can probably be identified with my D(w)

I propose a new theory of scalar implicatures: the speaker should be in the same epistemic status with respect to alternatives obtained via similar transformations (e.g., replacements of a scalar items with various stronger items). This theory extends naturally to explain presupposition projection. Cases where scalar items and presupposition triggers co-occur are also accounted for. The main focus is the unification between various phenomena: scalar implicatures, free choice effects and presupposition projection. Yet, the system can be split

Introduction: The Common Ground Theory of Presuppositions Here is a stylized version of the picture of information-gathering discourse developed by Stalnaker. The common ground of a conversation at a particular time is the set of propositions that the participants in that conversation at that time mutually assume to be taken for granted and not subject to (further) discussion. The common ground describes a set of worlds, the context set, which are those worlds in which all of the propositions in the common ground are true. The context set is the set of worlds that for all that is currently assumed to be taken for granted, could be the actual world. Stalnaker (1972, 1973, 1974, 1978, 1988, 1998). Other important work in this tradition includes Karttunen (1974), Lewis (1979), Heim (1982, 1983, 1992), and Thomason (1990). When uttered assertively, sentences are meant to update the common ground. If the sentence is accepted by the participants, the proposition it expresses is added to

Starting from the assumption that NPs of all kinds can be anaphoric on antecedents in the linguistic context, we work towards a general theory of context-dependent NP meaning. Two complicating factors are that the relation between anaphors and antecedents is by no means unrestricted and that often there is a partial match between anaphor and antecedent We argue that the presuppositions-as-anaphors approach of van der Sandt provides a natural starting point for our enterprise. Unfortunately, this theory has a number of deficiencies for our purposes, in particular where the treatment of partial matches is concerned. We propose a number of modifications of van der Sandt's formal theory and apply the modified algorithm first to definite NPs and later to NPs of all kinds. The resulting modified version of the presuppositions-as-anaphors theory is argued to be more general, formally more precise, and empirically more adequate than its predecessor. 1

According to the received view in semantics, so-called unbound pronouns- pronouns not bound by a quantifier Q inside the smallest clause containing Q-should either be treated as abbreviations for the antecedent clause, or as variables