The author argues that there is no such thing as a unique and general taxonomy of non-at-issue contents. Accordingly, we ought to shun large categories such as “conventional implicature”, “F-implicature”, “CI”, “Class B” or the like. As an alternative, we may, first, describe the “semantic profile” of linguistic devices as accurately as possible. Second, we may explicitly tailor our categories to particular theoretical purposes.

In this paper I focus on a recently discussed phenomenon illustrated by sentences containing predicates of taste: the phenomenon of " perspectival plurality " , whereby sentences containing two or more predicates of taste have readings according to which each predicate pertains to a different perspective. This phenomenon has been shown to be problematic for (at least certain versions of) relativism. My main aim is to further the discussion by showing that the phenomenon extends to other perspectival expressions than predicates (...) of taste and by proposing a general solution to the problem raised by it on behalf of the relativist. The core claim of the solution (" multiple indexing ") is that utterances of sentences containing perspectival expressions should be evaluated with respect to (possibly infinite) sequences of perspective parameters. (shrink)

Swear words are highly colloquial expressions that have the capacity to signal the speaker's affective states, i.e., to display the speaker's feelings with respect to a certain stimulus. For this reason, swear words are often called 'expressives'. Which linguistic mechanisms allow swear words display affective states, and, more importantly, how can such 'affective content' be characterized in a theory of meaning? Even though research on expressive meaning has produced models that integrate the affective aspects of swear words in a compositional (...) framework, there is extensive evidence that swear words cannot be assigned a single or stable affective interpretation across contexts. For example, even though expletive adjectives (e.g., 'damn'), particularistic insults (e.g., 'bastard') and slurs (e.g., 'wop') typically express (and elicit) negatively valenced affective states, they can also be interpreted positively in some contexts. Thus, inspired in recent developments in formal sociolinguistics, I propose an 'indexical' approach to affective meaning. Under this approach, an affective expression is associated with a set of affective qualities, anyone of which may emerge at a given context depending on the interpreter's prior assumptions about the speaker's affective states and/or relation with the target of the swear word. To define this set, also called 'indexical field', I will use the dimensions pleasure, arousal and dominance, standardly employed in cognitive psychology to characterize and measure affective episodes. In this dissertation, thus, the affective meaning of an expression is given by the set of affective states it typically conveys within a linguistic community, but its interpretation at a given context is established by taking into account the interpreter's prior assumptions about the speaker's affective states and/or attitudes with respect to the target of the affective expression. (shrink)

Grammatical theories of Scalar Implicatures make use of an exhaustivity operator exh, which asserts the conjunction of the prejacent with the negation of excludable alternatives. We present a new Grammatical theory of Scalar Implicatures according to which exh is replaced with pex, an operator that contributes its prejacent as asserted content, but the negation of scalar alternatives at a non-at-issue level of meaning. We show that by treating this non-at-issue level as a presupposition, this theory resolves a number of empirical (...) challenges faced by the old formulation of exh (as well as by standard neo-Gricean theories). The empirical challenges include projection of scalar implicatures from certain embedded environments (‘some under some’ sentences, some under negative factives), their restricted distribution under negation, and the existence of common ground-mismatching and oddness-inducing implicatures. We argue that these puzzles have a uniform solution given a pex-based Grammatical theory of implicatures and some independently motivated principles concerning presupposition projection, cancellation and accommodation. (shrink)

The present volume contains a collection of papers presented at the 21st annual meeting “Sinn und Bedeutung” of the Gesellschaft fur Semantik, which was held at the University of Edinburgh on September 4th–6th, 2016. The Sinn und Bedeutung conferences are one of the leading international venues for research in formal semantics.

It is widely held that all lies are assertions: the traditional definition of lying entails that, in order to lie, speakers have to assert something they believe to be false. It is also widely held that assertion contrasts with presupposition and, in particular, that one cannot assert something by presupposing it. Together, these views imply that speakers cannot lie with presuppositions—a view that Andreas Stokke has recently explicitly defended. The aim of this paper is to argue that speakers can lie (...) with presuppositions, and to discuss some of the implications this outcome has for current research on lying, assertion and presupposition. (shrink)

Epistemic contextualism in the style of Lewis (1996) maintains that ascriptions of knowledge to a subject vary in truth with the alternatives that can be eliminated by the subject’s evidence in a context. Schaffer (2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2015), Schaffer and Knobe (2012), and Schaffer and Szabo ́ (2014) hold that the question under discussion or QUD always determines these alternatives in a context. This paper shows that the QUD does not perform such a role for "know" and uses this (...) result to draw a few lessons about the metasemantics of context- sensitivity. (shrink)

This article focuses on `therefore' constructions such as ‘The switch is on, and therefore the lights are on’. We submit that the contribution of `therefore’ is to express a dependence as part of the core content of these constructions, rather than being conveyed by conventional implicature (Grice 1975, Potts 2005, Neta 2013) or a triggered presupposition (Pavese 2017, forthcoming, Stokke 2017). We argue that the standard objections to this view can be answered by relying on the general projection hypothesis defended (...) by Roberts et al. (2009) and Simons et al. (2010), leaving our view on solid ground. (shrink)

Responding to parts of Sorensen, it is argued that the connectives therefore and but do not contribute conventional implicatures, but are rather to be treated as presupposition triggers. Their special contributions are therefore not asserted, but presupposed. Hence, given the generic assumption that one lies only if one makes an assertion, one cannot lie with arguments in the way Sorensen proposes. Yet, since conventional implicatures are asserted, one can lie with conventional implicatures. Moreover, since conventional implicatures may be asserted by (...) non-declarative utterances, one can lie by uttering non-declaratives carrying conventional implicatures. (shrink)

This paper examines distinctive discourse properties of preposed negative 'yes/no' questions (NPQs), such as 'Isn’t Jane coming too?'. Unlike with other 'yes/no' questions, using an NPQ '∼p?' invariably conveys a bias toward a particular answer, where the polarity of the bias is opposite of the polarity of the question: using the negative question '∼p?' invariably expresses that the speaker previously expected the positive answer p to be correct. A prominent approach—what I call the context-management approach, developed most extensively by Romero (...) and Han (2004)—attempts to capture speaker expectation biases by treating NPQs fundamentally as epistemic questions about the proper discourse status of a proposition. I raise challenges for existing context-managing accounts to provide more adequate formalizations of the posited context-managing content, its implementation in the compositional semantics and discourse dynamics, and its role in generating the observed biases. New data regarding discourse differences between NPQs and associated epistemic modal questions are introduced. I argue that we can capture the roles of NPQs in expressing speakers’ states of mind and managing the discourse common ground without positing special context-managing operators or treating NPQs as questions directly about the context. I suggest that we treat the operator introduced with preposed negation as having an ordinary semantics of epistemic necessity, though lexically associated with a general kind of endorsing use observed with modal expressions. The expressive and context-managing roles of NPQs are explained in terms of a general kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. The distinctive expectation biases and discourse properties observed with NPQs are derived from the proposed semantics and a general principle of Discourse Relevance. (shrink)

This note presents challenge cases for prominent pragmatic responses to the proviso problem. I offer examples of uses of conditionals _if_ \(\psi,\,\phi_{P}\) that seem to commit the speaker unconditionally to the presupposition _P_ of the consequent clause _ϕ_, even though the sentence’s predicted semantic presupposition _ψ_⊃_P_ is antecedently satisfied (contrary to context-repair accounts), and independence between _ψ_ and _P_ isn’t antecedently assumed (contrary to independence-driven accounts). The examples provided avoid problems with other examples from the literature used against pragmatic accounts. (...) I leave the matter as an unresolved challenge for satisfaction theories of presupposition. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that certain sentences of natural language fail to express truth conditional contents. Standard examples include e.g. Tipper is ready and Steel is strong enough. In this paper, we provide a novel analysis of truth conditional meaning using the notion of a question under discussion. This account explains why these types of sentences are not, in fact, semantically underdetermined, provides a principled analysis of the process by which natural language sentences can come to have enriched meanings in (...) context, and shows why various alternative views, e.g. so-called Radical Contextualism, Moderate Contextualism, and Semantic Minimalism, are partially right in their respective analyses of the problem, but also all ultimately wrong. Our analysis achieves this result using a standard truth conditional and compositional semantics and without making any assumptions about enriched logical forms, i.e. logical forms containing phonologically null expressions. (shrink)

I give an account of the compositional semantics of unconditionals that explains their relationship to if -conditionals in the Lewis/Kratzer/Heim tradition. Unconditionals involve an alternative-denoting adjunct that supplies domain restrictions pointwise to a main-clause operator such as a modal. The differences from if -clauses follow from the structure of the adjuncts; both are conditionals in the Lewisian sense. In the course of treating unconditionals, I provide a concrete implementation of conditionals where conditional adjuncts in general are a species of correlative, (...) and show what detaching this hypothesis from if involves. (shrink)

The distinction between a merely ‘rigidifying’ dthat and a directly-referential take on dthat-terms is well known, and is explicitly highlighted by Kaplan in Afterthoughts, his 1989 commentary on Demonstratives. What is not equally widely recognized is that Afterthoughts also oscillates between three different directly referential proposals. This essay discusses the semantic and philosophical implications of these different directly-referential interpretations of ‘dthat’, paying particular attention to the relationships between syntactic and propositional structure, the structure and makeup of contexts in the semantics (...) of indexical languages, the significance of context shifting devices and of so-called operators on character, and the aims and scope of propositional semantics. (shrink)

One of the big questions about indefinites is why they can escape scope islands. In the recent approach of Brasoveanu and Farkas :1–55, 2011) scopal relations with syntactically dominating quantifiers are hard wired into the semantic definition of the existential quantifier, which immediately explains why the semantic scope of indefinites may exceed their syntactic scope. In this paper, I argue for the revival of an alternative approach which places the explanatory burden on the idea that indefinites are essentially referential expressions, (...) similar to definites, and not plain existential quantifiers. I propose one fully explicit variant of such theories and argue that it comes with a number of conceptual and empirical advantages over competing theories. (shrink)

Language has a rich typology of inferential types. It was recently shown that subjects are able to divide the informational content of new visual stimuli among the various slots of the inferential typology: when gestures or visual animations are used in lieu of specific words in a sentence, they can trigger the very same inferential types as language alone (Tieu et al., 2019 ). How general are the relevant triggering algorithms? We show that they extend to the auditory modality and (...) to music cognition. We tested whether pro-speech musical gestures, i.e. musical excerpts that replace words in sentences, can give rise to the same inferences. We show that it is possible to replicate the same typology of inferences using pro-speech music. Minimal and complex musical excerpts can behave just like language, gestures, and visual animations with respect to the logical behavior of their content when embedded in sentences. Specifically, we found that pro-speech music can generate scalar implicatures, presuppositions, supplements, and homogeneity inferences. (shrink)

Natural language contains many expressions with underspecified emotive content. This paper proposes a way to resolve such underspecification. Nonmonotonic inference over a knowledge base is used to derive an expected interpretation for emotive expressions in a particular context. This ‘normal’ meaning is then taken to influence the hearer’s expectations about probable interpretations, and, because of these probable interpretations, the decisions of the speaker about when use of underspecified emotive terms is appropriate.

Natural language contains many expressions with underspecified emotive content. This paper proposes a way to resolve such underspecification. Nonmonotonic inference over a knowledge base is used to derive an expected interpretation for emotive expressions in a particular context. This ‘normal’ meaning is then taken to influence the hearer’s expectations about probable interpretations, and, because of these probable interpretations, the decisions of the speaker about when use of underspecified emotive terms is appropriate.

I argue that free indirect discourse should be analyzed as a species of direct discourse rather than indirect discourse. More specifically, I argue against the emerging consensus among semanticists, who analyze it in terms of context shifting. Instead, I apply the semantic mechanisms of mixed quotation and unquotation to offer an alternative analysis where free indirect discourse is essentially a quotation of an utterance or thought, but with unquoted tenses and pronouns.

Linguistics and philosophy have provided distinct views on the nature of reference to individuals in language. In philosophy, in particular in the tradition of direct reference, the distinction is between reference and description. In linguistics, in particular in the tradition of generative grammar, the distinction is between pronouns and R-expressions. I argue for a third conception, grounded in dynamic semantics, in which the main watershed is between definites, which trigger presuppositions that want to be bound, and indefinites, which set up (...) new discourse referents. On this view, proper names, indexicals, and definite descriptions are all analyzed as presupposition triggers. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the distinction between standard and non-standard pragmatic implications, originally used to differentiate among types of conversational implicatures, applies to the family of contents—traditionally referred to as ‘presuppositions’—that exhibit projective behaviour. Following the scholars working within the Question Under Discussion model of communication, I distinguish between two types of projective implications: suppositions and presuppositions narrowly construed. Next, I identify two rules of appropriateness that govern the use of, respectively, supposition-triggering and presupposition-triggering expressions. Finally, I argue (...) that the ostentatious violation of the rules in question gives rise to non-standard projective implications, whereas their observance results in standard suppositions and presuppositions; I also use the idea of discourse coherence to develop a sketchy account of the mechanisms underlying the functioning of non-standard projective implications. (shrink)

According to moral error theory, moral discourse is error-ridden. Establishing error theory requires establishing two claims. These are that moral discourse carries a non-negotiable commitment to there being a moral reality and that there is no such reality. This paper concerns the first and so-called non-negotiable commitment claim. It starts by identifying the two existing argumentative strategies for settling that claim. The standard strategy is to argue for a relation of conceptual entailment between the moral statements that comprise moral discourse (...) and the statement that there is a moral reality. The non-standard strategy is to argue for a presupposition relation instead. Error theorists have so far failed to consider a third strategy, which uses a general entailment relation that doesn’t require intricate relations between concepts. The paper argues that both entailment claims struggle to meet a new explanatory challenge and that since the presupposition option doesn’t we have prima facie reason to prefer it over the entailment options. The paper then argues that suitably amending the entailment claims enables them to meet this challenge. With all three options back on the table the paper closes by arguing that error theorists should consider developing the currently unrecognised, non-conceptual entailment claim. (shrink)

Doubling unconditionals are exemplified by the Spanish example Venga quien venga, estaré contento ‘Whoever comes, I’ll be happy’. This curious and little studied construction is attested in various forms in a number of Romance and Slavic languages. In this paper, I provide a basic description of these constructions, focusing especially on Spanish, Czech, and Slovenian, and argue that they can be brought in line with analyses of run-of-the-mill unconditionals if one recognizes that the wh-structure within the unconditional antecedent is a (...) free relative and that the free relative is focused. The focused free relative introduces alternatives and thus gives rise to the denotation proposed by Rawlins :111–178, 2013) for English unconditionals. In the last part of the paper, I hypothesize that at least some non-doubling unconditionals could in fact have a doubling underlying structure, which is disguised by relative sluicing—clausal ellipsis with a relative pronoun remnant. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between dynamic and truth conditional semantics for epistemic modals. It provides a generalization of a standard dynamic update semantics for modals. This new semantics derives a Kripke semantics for modals and a standard dynamic semantics for modals as special cases. The semantics allows for new characterizations of a variety of principles in modal logic, including the inconsistency of ‘p and might not p’. Finally, the semantics provides a construction procedure for transforming any truth conditional semantics (...) for modals into a dynamic semantics for modals with similar properties. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a new account of linguistic presuppositions, on which they are ancillary speech acts defined by constitutive norms. After providing an initial intuitive characterization of the phenomenon, I present a normative speech act account of presupposition in parallel with Williamson’s analogous account of assertion. I explain how it deals well with the problem of informative presuppositions, and how it relates to accounts for the Triggering and Projection Problems for presuppositions. I conclude with a brief discussion of (...) the consequences of the proposal for the adequacy of Williamson’s account of assertion. (shrink)

Two theories of implicit domain restriction have gained considerable prominence over the last two decades. According to von Fintel (Restrictions on quantifier domaines, Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1994), quantifiers come with covert restrictors and, as a result of this, induce domain restriction; according to Stanley [in Gerhard and Peter (eds) Logical form and language, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2002; Stanley and Szabó (Mind Lang 15(2–3):2192–2161, 2000)], by contrast, nouns, as opposed to quantifiers, come with covert restrictors. In this (...) article, I do three things. First, I assess the arguments that have been given for and against these two accounts and show that none of them is conclusive. Second, I advance a novel empirical argument based on the observed pragmatic behaviour of bare nouns, an argument that falsifies Stanley’s theory while providing clear evidence in support of von Fintel’s (1994). Finally, I discuss the relevance of the bare noun data in the context of another important debate—namely, whether domain restriction is a local mechanism only, or whether it can also be achieved by global means. (shrink)

This paper is about some of the ways in which people sometimes speak while be- ing indifferent toward what they say. We argue that what Harry Frankfurt called ‘bullshitting’ is a mode of speech marked by indifference toward inquiry, the coop- erative project of reaching truth in discourse. On this view bullshitting is character- ized by indifference toward the project of advancing inquiry by making progress on specific subinquiries, represented by so-called questions under discussion. This ac- count preserves the central (...) insight of Frankfurt’s influential analysis of bullshitting in seeing the characteristic of bullshitting as indifference toward truth and falsity. Yet we show that speaking with indifference toward truth is a wider phenomenon than the one Frankfurt identified. The account offered in this paper thereby agrees with various critics of Frankfurt who argue that bullshitting is compatible with not being indifferent toward the truth-value of one’s assertions. Further, we argue that, while bullshitting and lying are not mutually exclusive, most lies are not instances of bullshitting. The account thereby avoids the problem that Frankfurt’s view ulti- mately is insufficient to adequately distinguish bullshitting and lying. (shrink)

Utterances of natural language sentences can be used to communicate not just contents, but also forces. This paper examines this topic from a cross-linguistic perspective on sentential mood. Recent work in this area focuses on conversational dynamics: the three sentence types can be associated with distinctive kinds of conversational effects called sentential forces, modeled as three kinds of updates to the discourse context. This paper has two main goals. First, it provides two arguments, on empirical and methodological grounds, for treating (...) sentential force as part of a compositional dynamic semantics, rather than a dynamic pragmatics. Second, it formulates a minimal dynamic semantic analysis that covers the data at the heart of these arguments, incorporating existing analyses of the three major moods, evidentials and conjunction. A further aim of the paper is to sharpen the distinction between sentential force and utterance force, and discuss its implications. (shrink)

This paper is an investigation of the general logic of "identifications", claims such as 'To be a vixen is to be a female fox', 'To be human is to be a rational animal', and 'To be just is to help one's friends and harm one's enemies', many of which are of great importance to philosophers. I advocate understanding such claims as expressing higher-order identity, and discuss a variety of different general laws which they might be thought to obey. [New version: (...) Nov. 4th, 2016]. (shrink)

Despite increased focus on emotional language, research lacks for the most emotional language: Swearing. We used event-related potentials to investigate whether swear words have content dist...

Deictic (or pointing) gestures are traditionally known to have a simple function: to supply something as the referent of a demonstrative linguistic expression. I argue that deixis can have a more complex function. A deictic gesture can be used to _say something_ in conversation and can thereby become a full discourse move in its own right. To capture this phenomenon, which I call _rich demonstration_, I present an update semantics on which deictic gestures can indicate situations from a conversation’s context (...) and those situations coherently connect to prior discourse to generate information. (shrink)

Presuppositions are capable of projecting from under the scope of operators such as negation, but do not obligatorily do so. This creates a potential difficulty for the hearer of presupposition-bearing utterances, especially given the fact that speaker can use presupposition to convey entirely new information. In this paper, I discuss the potential role of context in resolving this tension, and in particular, I argue that the inferences that are drawn about the current discourse purpose may be materially relevant to the (...) interpretation of potential presuppositions. I also consider some of the implications of this for recent experimental work on presupposition and projection. (shrink)

Cornell realists maintain that irreducible moral properties have earned a place in our ontology in virtue of the indispensable role they play in a variety of explanations. These explanations can be divided into two groups: those that employ thin ethical concepts and those that employ thick ethical concepts. Recent work on thick concepts suggests that they are not inherently evaluative in their meaning. If correct, this creates problems for the moral explanations of Cornell realists, since the most persuasive moral explanations (...) are those that employ thick concepts. If thick concepts are not inherently evaluative, then the most plausible explanations on offer cannot support Cornell realism. Moral explanations employing thin concepts, however, are too flimsy to support the view. Unless proponents can develop a compelling story about thick concepts or thin explanations, Cornell realism is in trouble. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors present a presuppositional account for a class of evaluative terms that encode both a descriptive and an evaluative component: slurs and thick terms. The authors discuss several issues related to the hybrid nature of these terms, such as their projective behavior, the ways in which one may reject their evaluative content, and the ways in which evaluative content is entailed or implicated (as the case may be) by the use of such terms.

We present two experimental studies on the Italian expressive ‘stronzo’. The first study tests whether, and to which extent, the acceptability of using an expressive is sensitive to the information available in the context. The study looks both at referential uses of expressives and predicative uses of expressives. The results show that expressives are sensitive to contextual information to a much higher degree than the non-expressive control items in their referential use, but also, albeit to a lesser degree, in their (...) predicative use. The second study tests whether the lower acceptability of expressives in their predicative use may be simply due to saying something negative about someone. A comparison between expressives, such as ‘jerk’, and non-expressive negative terms, such as ‘nasty’ or ‘unbearable’, suggests that it is the expressive nature of these terms, rather than the mere negative valence, that affects acceptability. Our studies present a major challenge to the existing accounts of expressives, and raise several theoretical issues that still call for an answer. (shrink)

Slurs have become a big topic of discussion both in philosophy and in linguistics. Slurs are usually characterised as pejorative terms, co-extensional with other, neutral, terms referring to ethnic or social groups. However, slurs are not the only ethnic/social words with pejorative senses. Our aim in this paper is to introduce a different kind of pejoratives, which we will call “ethnic/social terms used as insults”, as exemplified in Spanish, though present in many other languages and mostly absent in English. These (...) are ethnic terms like gitano, ‘Romani’, which can have an extensional and neutral use, but also a pejorative meaning building on a negative stereotypical representation of the Romani community. (shrink)

In this paper we argue for a unified semantics for hypothetical conditionals, hc s, e.g. _if it rains, we’ll cancel the picnic_, and biscuit conditionals, bc s, e.g., _if you are hungry, there are biscuits on the sideboard_. We side with recent literature in proposing that differences in the interpretation are related to (in)dependence between antecedent and consequent, but we move beyond current accounts in spelling out a characterization of independence that is actually predictive. We further establish a systematic link (...) between _if_-constructions and discourse structure, providing a dynamic update model that integrates the QUD, and thus the intentional discourse-structure. We argue that in bc s the antecedent sets up the question that is addressed by the consequent, and show that rescuing (Gricean) relevance in face of independence gives rise to implicatures corresponding to the different flavors associated with bc s. Crucially, we argue, this is the same mechanism responsible for our understanding that in the hc above, for example, it is the rain that will cause the cancellation of the picnic. Along the way we notice how the phenomena observed in _if_-constructions are also replicated in other quantificational structures. Ultimately, there is not much that is biscuit-specific. Their interpretation is the result of a conspiracy among semantics, dynamic update and intentional discourse-structure. (shrink)

One of the characteristics of what has been called “dogwhistle politics” is the presence of a rhetoric that targets minority groups implicitly. For example, terms like ‘illegals’ and ‘illegal immigrants’, used to target Latin-Americans, have come to permeate the American political discourse as well as everyday conversations. Here I focus on how such expressions, which I call illegality frame code words (IFCW, for short), can be countered by recalcitrant hearers. I begin with the assumption that IFCWs are racial code words, (...) conversational devices that convey implicit racial appeals while allowing for deniability. I then discuss how the existence of an Illegality Frame in the American Immigration debate supports their deniability. Lastly, I discuss how recalcitrant hearers can counter utterances that contain them. In particular, I propose reframing as an adequate strategy. In reframing, agents take control of the goals or the QUD (question under discussion) of the conversation to exclude certain topics from the common ground and include others. The idea is to “change the conversation” to neutralize problematic moves. This maneuver is advantageous not only because it helps to hinder veiled discriminatory practices, but also because it affords control over “the terms of the conversation”. (shrink)

This paper brings a developmental perspective to the discussion of a longstanding issue surrounding the proper characterization of presuppositions. On an influential view (Stalnaker in Synthese 22(1–2):272–289, 1970; Stalnaker, in Milton, Unger (eds) Semantics and philosophy, New York University Press, New York, 1974; Karttunen in Theor Linguist 1:181–194, 1974), formal presuppositions reflect admittance conditions: an utterance of a sentence which presupposes _p_ is admitted by a conversational context _c_ only if _p_ is common ground in _c_. The theory distinguishes two (...) modes of satisfying this formal requirement: (i) presuppositions may have common ground status prior to utterance, or (ii) they may achieve common ground status post hoc, via accommodation, an adjustment of the common ground by cooperative listeners so as to meet the requirements of an uttered sentence. While intuitive and general, the theory has been criticized (among other things) on methodological grounds (see e.g. Gazdar in Pragmatics: implicature, presupposition and logical form, Academic Press, New York, 1979): the availability of accommodation makes it difficult to empirically examine the notion of presupposition as admittance conditions because a central tenet—pragmatic infelicity results whenever _c_ does not entail _p_—may be masked due to the pragmatic sophistication of language users. In this paper, we argue that child language presents an opportunity to avoid this intrinsic difficulty. In a series of behavioral experiments, we show that young children generate a default expectation that the presuppositions of an asserted sentence have common ground status prior to utterance. Furthermore and more tellingly, we also find that even when accommodation is the preferred option for adults, children fail to accommodate presuppositions in an adult-like manner. This pattern of behavior, we argue, is expected under the admittance theory: in a population where the interference from accommodation is reduced, the impact of failing to satisfy the formal admittance conditions becomes directly observable. (shrink)

Crosslinguistically, questions frequently make crucial use of morphosyntactic elements which also occur outside of questions. Chief among these are focus, disjunctions, and wh-words with indefinite semantics. This paper provides a compositional account of the semantics of wh-, alternative, and polar questions in Yucatec Maya (YM), which are composed primarily of these elements. Key to the account is a theory of disjunctions and indefinites (extending work by others) which recognizes the inherently inquisitive nature of these elements. While disjunctions and indefinites are (...) inquisitive, they differ from questions since they are also truth-conditionally informative. Compositionally, then, the role of focus in YM questions is to presuppose the informative component of an indefinite wh-word or disjunction, rendering the inquisitive component the question’s only new contribution to the discourse. In addition to deriving question denotations compositionally, the account also captures a potentially surprising fact: focused disjunctions in YM can function as either questions or assertions, depending solely on the discourse context. (shrink)

Moderate pragmatic invariantism (MPI) is a proposal to explain why our intuitions about the truth-value of knowledge claims vary with stakes and salient error-possibilities. The basic idea is that this variation is due to a variation not in the propositions expressed (as epistemic contextualists would have it) but in the propositions conversationally implicated. I will argue that MPI is mistaken: I will distinguish two kinds of implicature, namely, additive and substitutional implicatures. I will then argue, first, that the proponent of (...) MPI cannot appeal to additive implicatures because they don’t affect truth-value intuitions in the required way. Second, I will argue that the proponent of MPI cannot appeal to substitutional implicatures either because, even though they may have the required effects on truth-value intuitions, they don’t feature in the relevant cases. It follows that MPI is mistaken because whether the proponent of MPI appeals to additive or substitutional implicatures, at least one of the claims that make up her view is false. Along the way, I will suggest principles about implicatures that should be relevant not only to MPI, but to pragmatic accounts of seemingly semantic intuitions in general. (shrink)

The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of information that we would not pay attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay attention (...) to, be it by default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed by soft triggers. This paper attempts to predict what information in the sentence is likely to end up being the main point (i.e. what we pay attention to) and what information is independent from this, and therefore likely presupposed. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on that of Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (In: Holdobler S (ed) Intellectics and computational logic: papers in honor of Wolfgang Bibel, 2000). (shrink)

Say that an audience understands a given utterance perfectly only if she correctly identifies which proposition (or propositions) that utterance expresses. In ideal circumstances, the participants in a conversation will understand each other’s utterances perfectly; however, even if they do not, they may still understand each other’s utterances at least in part. Although it is plausible to think that the phenomenon of partial understanding is very common, there is currently no philosophical account of it. This paper offers such an account. (...) Along the way, I argue against two seemingly plausible accounts which use Stalnaker’s notion of common ground and Lewisian subject matters, respectively. (shrink)

Some presuppositions are easier to cancel than others in embedded contexts. This contrast has been used as evidence for distinguishing two fundamentally different kinds of presuppositions, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. ‘Soft’ presuppositions are usually assumed to arise in a pragmatic way, while ‘hard’ presuppositions are thought to be genuine semantic presuppositions. This paper argues against such a distinction and proposes to derive the difference in cancellation from inherent differences in how presupposition triggers interact with the context: their focus sensitivity, anaphoricity, and (...) question–answer congruence properties. The paper also aims to derive the presuppositions of additive particles such as too, also, again, and of it-clefts. (shrink)

Within the relevant semantics and pragmatics literature the terms “presupposition” and “conventional implicature” are used in a variety of different, but frequently overlapping, ways. The overlaps are perhaps not surprising, given that the two categories of conveyed meaning share the property of remaining constant in the scope of other operators—the property usefully characterize as projectivity. One of my purposes in this paper will be to try to clarify these different usages. In addition to that we will explore two additional properties (...) which are shared by some of these projective contents—strong contextual felicity, and neutralizability. The idea is to try to explain all three properties by taking into account information packaging. (shrink)

Explicatures are not cancellable. Theoretical considerations.

According to Millian Descriptivism, while the semantic content of a linguistically simple proper name is just its referent, we often use sentences containing such expressions “to make assertions…that are, in part, descriptive” (Soames 2008). Against this view, I show, following Ted Sider and David Braun (2006), that simple sentences containing names are never used to assert descriptively enriched propositions. In addition, I offer a diagnosis as to where the argument for Millian Descriptivism goes wrong. Once we appreciate the distinctive way (...) in which this account fails, we can better appreciate the very modest role that associated descriptive information plays in the pragmatics of proper names. (shrink)