Works by Beaver, David (exact spelling)

13 found
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  1.  8
    What Comes First in Dynamic Semantics: A Critical Review of Linguistic Theories of Presupposition and a Dynamic Alternative.David Beaver - 2001 - Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications.
    Russell and Strawson sparked a well known debate on the subject of Linguistic Presupposition inspiring many linguists and philosophers to follow suit, including Frege, whose work initiated the modern study in this area. Beaver begins with the most comprehensive overview and critical discussion of this burgeoning field published to date. He then goes on to motivate and develop his own account based on a Dynamic Semantics. This account is a recent line of theoretical work in which the Tarskian emphasis on (...)
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  2. What projects and why.Mandy Simons, David Beaver, Judith Tonhauser & Craige Roberts - 2010 - Semantics and Linguistic Theory 20:309-327.
    The empirical phenomenon at the center of this paper is projection, which we define (uncontroversially) as follows: (1) Definition of projection An implication projects if and only if it survives as an utterance implication when the expression that triggers the implication occurs under the syntactic scope of an entailment-cancelling operator. Projection is observed, for example, with utterances containing aspectual verbs like stop, as shown in (2) and (3) with examples from English and Paraguayan Guaraní (Paraguay, Tupí-Guaraní).1 The Guaraní example in (...)
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  3.  83
    Toward a Taxonomy of Projective Content.Judith Tonhauser, David Beaver, Craige Roberts & Mandy Simons - 2013 - Language 89 (1):66-109.
    Projective contents, which include presuppositional inferences and Potts's conventional implicatures, are contents that may project when a construction is embedded, as standardly identified by the FAMILY-OF-SENTENCES diagnostic. This article establishes distinctions among projective contents on the basis of a series of diagnostics, including a variant of the family-of-sentences diagnostic, that can be applied with linguistically untrained consultants in the field and the laboratory. These diagnostics are intended to serve as part of a toolkit for exploring projective contents across languages, thus (...)
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  4. Toward a Non-Ideal Philosophy of Language.David Beaver & Jason Stanley - 2019 - Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 39 (2):503-547.
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  5. A partial account of presupposition projection.David Beaver & Emiel Krahmer - 2001 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 10 (2):147-182.
    In this paper it is shown how a partial semantics for presuppositions can be given which is empirically more satisfactory than its predecessors, and how this semantics can be integrated with a technically sound, compositional grammar in the Montagovian fashion. Additionally, it is argued that the classical objection to partial accounts of presupposition projection, namely that they lack “flexibility,” is based on a misconception. Partial logics can give rise to flexible predictions without postulating any ad hoc ambiguities. Finally, it is (...)
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  6.  42
    The Politics of Language.David Beaver & Jason Stanley - 2023 - Princeton University Press.
    A provocative case for the inherently political nature of language In The Politics of Language, David Beaver and Jason Stanley present a radical new approach to the theory of meaning, offering an account of communication in which political and social identity, affect, and shared practices play as important a role as information. This new view of language, they argue, has dramatic consequences for free speech, democracy, and a range of other areas in which speech plays a central role. Drawing on (...)
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  7. Definiteness and determinacy.Elizabeth Coppock & David Beaver - 2015 - Linguistics and Philosophy 38 (5):377-435.
    This paper distinguishes between definiteness and determinacy. Definiteness is seen as a morphological category which, in English, marks a uniqueness presupposition, while determinacy consists in denoting an individual. Definite descriptions are argued to be fundamentally predicative, presupposing uniqueness but not existence, and to acquire existential import through general type-shifting operations that apply not only to definites, but also indefinites and possessives. Through these shifts, argumental definite descriptions may become either determinate or indeterminate. The latter option is observed in examples like (...)
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  8. Neutrality.David Beaver & Jason Stanley - 2021 - Philosophical Topics 49 (1):165-185.
    Neutrality functions as an ideal in deliberation—we are supposed to have a neutral standpoint in debate, speak without bias or taking sides. We argue against the ideal of neutrality. We sketch how a theory of meaning could avoid commitment even to the coherence of a neutral space of discourse for exchanging reasons. In a model that accepts the ideal of neutrality, what makes propaganda exceptional is its non-neutrality. However, a critique of propaganda cannot take the form of “clearing out” the (...)
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  9.  46
    A Partial Account of Presupposition Projection.David Beaver & Emiel Krahmer - 2001 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 10 (2):147-182.
    In this paper it is shown how a partial semantics for presuppositions can be given which is empirically more satisfactory than its predecessors, and how this semantics can be integrated with a technically sound, compositional grammar in the Montagovian fashion. Additionally, it is argued that the classical objection to partial accounts of presupposition projection, namely that they lack “flexibility,” is based on a misconception. Partial logics can give rise to flexible predictions without postulating any ad hoc ambiguities. Finally, it is (...)
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  10. On the logic of verbal modification.David Beaver & Cleo Condoravdi - 2007 - In Dekker Aloni (ed.), Proceedings of the Sixteenth Amsterdam Colloquium.
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  11. Semantics.David Beaver & Joey Frazee - forthcoming - The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics 2nd Edition.
    Formal semantics is the study of linguistic meaning using precise mathematical characterizations; this chapter introduces formal semantics to scholars and students of natural-language processing. We give simple logical representations of English sentences, and show how meanings are composed in a grammar. We then consider two more advanced issues that arise in processing texts, anaphora and temporality, using Discourse Representation Theory. Finally we discuss the relationship between deep logic-based methods for semantic analysis and shallower distributional methods that have been used in (...)
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  12.  27
    The communicative significance of primary and secondary accents.David Beaver & Dan Velleman - 2011 - Lingua.
    Many formal linguists hold that English pitch accent has a single function: marking focus. On the other hand, there is evidence from corpus work and from psycholinguistics that pitch accent is attracted to expressions which are unpredictable. We present a two-factor pragmatic account in which both focus and predictability contribute to the placement of accent in an English intonational phrase. On examples of so-called “second occurrence focus” and related phenomena, our account gives superior results to the one-factor accounts of Rooth (...)
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  13. Always and Only: Why Not All Focus-Sensitive Operators Are Alike. [REVIEW]David Beaver & Brady Clark - 2003 - Natural Language Semantics 11 (4):323-362.
    We discuss focus sensitivity in English, the phenomenon whereby interpretation of some expressions is affected by placement of intonational focus. We concentrate in particular on the interpretation of always and only, both of which are interpreted as universal quantifiers, and both of which are focus sensitive. Using both naturally occurring and constructed data we explore the interaction of these operators with negative polarity items, with presupposition, with prosodically reduced elements, and with syntactic extraction. On the basis of this data we (...)
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