An analysis of the functioning of the Dutch monarchy in the 20th century is hardly possible by lack of documents. For the study of the contacts between the Head of State and the Cabinet-ministers a scholar needs the documents from the Cabinet of the Queen and from the Royal Archives. The archives of the Cabinet of the Queen are now accessible up to the Second World War, but the Royal Archives are closed from 1898.Tbe Dutch people bas a sympathy for (...) the dynasty and by that a deduced sympathy for the monarchy.Tbere was no real criticism on the functioning of the following queens Wilhelmina, Juliana and Beatrix. Tbe Heads of State accomodated themselves to the political and social developments. By that the monarchy lengthened its life.The formation of a new Cabinet is an essential task of the Queen. Wilhelmina did not hide her personal views but respected carefully the constitutional framework and already in the beginning of this century she asked the consulted political leaders to confirm their advices by letter. The possibility to play a role seems to be more limited since 1945. (shrink)

The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of scope posed by natural language indefinites that captures both the difference in scopal freedom between indefinites and bona fide quantifiers and the syntactic sensitivity that the scope of indefinites does nevertheless exhibit. Following the main insight of choice functional approaches, we connect the special scopal properties of indefinites to the fact that their semantics can be stated in terms of choosing a suitable witness. This is in contrast to bona fide (...) quantifiers, the semantics of which crucially involves relations between sets of entities. We provide empirical arguments that this insight should not be captured by adding choice/Skolem functions to classical first-order logic, but in a semantics that follows Independence-Friendly Logic, in which scopal relations involving existentials are part of the recursive definition of truth and satisfaction. These scopal relations are resolved automatically as part of the interpretation of existentials. Additional support for this approach is provided by dependent indefinites, a cross-linguistically common class of special indefinites that can be straightforwardly analyzed in our semantic framework. (shrink)

Tailoring climate change messages to a particular spatial scale (e.g. a specific country or region) is often seen as an effective way to frame communication about climate change. Yet the empirical evidence for the effectiveness of this strategy is scarce, and little is known about how recipients react to spatially-framed climate change messages. To learn more about the effects and usefulness of different spatial frames as a communication and engagement tool, we conducted a study in which we presented members of (...) the general public with either a national or a global framing of climate change. In contrast to previous spatial-framing studies, the present research used semi-structured interviews - rather than survey questions - to obtain rich, in-depth information about participants' views of climate change. Irrespective of the framing, participants revealed associations that were located at various spatial scales. Moreover, when participants talked about climate change, they repeatedly switched between different spatial scales, revealing patterns that were consistent with seeking to preserve existing beliefs and preferences. These findings improve our understanding of how the public represents climate change, and provide a novel explanation as to why simple spatial framing often fails to achieve the anticipated effects. (shrink)

In this paper, we study the parameters that come into play when assessing the truth conditions of say reports and contrast them with belief attributions. We argue that these conditions are sensitive in intricate ways to the connection between the interpretation of the complement of say and the properties of the reported speech act. There are three general areas this exercise is relevant to, besides the immediate issue of understanding the meaning of say: (i) the discussion shows the need to (...) go beyond the simplest view of propositional attitudes, which treats them as restricted quantifiers over worlds; (ii) the complex connections that must exist between the say report and its source speech act show that one has to be able to differentiate between various layers of meaning for the antecedent sentences; (iii) finally, this paper is a small step towards a typology of propositional attitudes that allows us to uncover the complex web of relationships that grammatical mood is sensitive to. (shrink)

The paper proposes a novel account to the problem of exceptional scope (ES) of (in)definites, e.g. the widest and intermediate scope readings of the sentence Every student of mine read every poem that a famous Romanian poet wrote before World War II. We propose that ES readings are available when the sentence is interpreted as anaphoric to quantificational domains and quantificational dependencies introduced in the previous discourse. For example, the two every quantifiers and the indefinite elaborate on the sets of (...) individuals and the correlations between them introduced by a previous sentence like Every student chose a poet and read every poem written by him (for the intermediate scope reading) or a sentence like Every student chose a poet - the same poet - and read every poem written by him (for the widest scope reading). Our account, formulated within a compositional dynamic system couched in classical type logic, relies on two independently motivated assumptions: (a) the discourse context stores not only (sets of) individuals, but also quantificational dependencies between them, and (b) quantifier domains are always contextually restricted. Under this analysis, (in)definites are unambiguous and we do not resort to movement or special storage mechanisms, nor do weposit special choice-functional variables. (shrink)

I Introduction: Philosophy and Social Science Men "know," but they no longer are so certain that their knowledge will not be rearranged. ...

and Data The essence of scope in natural language semantics can be characterized as follows: an expression e1 takes scope over an expression e2 iff the interpretation of the former affects the interpretation of the latter. Consider, for example, the sentence in (1) below, which is typical of the cases discussed in this paper in that it involves an indefinite and a universal (or, more generally, a non-existential) quantifier. (1) Everyx student in my class read ay paper about scope. How (...) can we tell whether the indefinite in (1) is in the scope of the universal or not? We can answer this question in two ways. From a dependence-based perspective, Q y is in the scope of Qx if the values of the variable y (possibly) covary with the values of x. From an independence-based perspective, Q y is outside the scope of Qx if y’s value is fixed relative to the values of x. This brings us to the first of our two central questions: should the scopal properties of ordinary, ‘unmarked’ indefinites be characterized in terms of dependence or in terms of independence? The difference between these two conceptualizations is that a dependence-based approach establishes which quantifier(s) Q y is dependent on, while an independence-based approach establishes which quantifier(s) Q y is independent of. Logical semantics has taken both paths to the notion of scope: compare the standard, dependence-based semantics of first-order logic (FOL) – or the dependence-driven Skolemization procedure – with the independence-based semantics of Independence-Friendly Logic (IFL, Hintikka 1973, Sandu 1993, Hodges 1997, Väänänen 2007 among others). Natural language semantics has only taken the dependence-based path. (shrink)