Anti-uniqueness without articles

We report on the expression of singular nominals in Burmese, an articleless language, from original elicitation work. Bare nouns are interpreted as singular definites, to which the numeral tiq 'one' is added to form indefinites. We propose that tiq 'one' restricts the domain of the nominal to a singleton, and that its addition is subject to a Non-Vacuity constraint; this is the source of the anti-uniqueness inference of indefinites. We furthermore investigate the availability of tiq 'one' in anaphoric definites. Such behavior forms an argument that the compositional semantics of anaphoric definites does not involve contextual restriction via a situation variable, unlike unique definites.

The Interaction of ‘If’ and ‘Would’

The chapter argues that ‘would’ is associated with a suppositional heuristic analogous to that for ‘if’ but sensitive to the contextual restriction on ‘would’. This heuristic has structurally analogous consequences to those for ‘would’; in particular, it generates the appearance that ‘would’ commutes with negation, and correspondingly that counterfactuals obey the principles of Conditional Excluded Middle (CEM) and Conditional Non-Contradiction (CNC). However, to play its central cognitive role properly, ‘would’ must be able to generalize over more than one world at a time, thereby invalidating CEM, which is thus an artefact of the heuristics (as is CNC). Connections between ‘would’, ‘will’, ‘might’, and ‘not’ are explored. In particular, the relation between ‘will’ and ‘would’ corresponds to the relation between online prediction and offline imagination.

The Interaction of ‘If’ and ‘Would’: Semantics and Logic

This chapter argues that the difference between indicative and counterfactual conditionals traces to the overt difference in verb forms and not to any alleged covert ambiguity or context-dependence in ‘if’. ‘Would’ has a life beyond conditionals; the best hypothesis is that it is a necessity modal restricted to contextually relevant worlds. In standard counterfactual conditionals, ‘would’ scopes over ‘if’; given the invariant truth-functional semantics of ‘if’, the compositional semantics then makes counterfactual conditionals contextually restricted strict conditionals. The chapter explores the consequences of this for the logic of counterfactuals: principles such as transitivity, contraposition, and strengthening the antecedent hold, with appearances to the contrary being explained by context-shifting caused by the application of the suppositional heuristic. However, modus ponens fails because the contextual restriction may exclude the actual world.

Scope and partitivity of plural indefinite noun phrases in Spanish

It has been argued that European Spanish plural indefinite noun phrases including algunos convey a partitive effect because the restrictor alg- provides additional properties. The reason that algunos implicates a “non-all-things” effect is because it refers only to an indeterminate part of the whole. The scope of bare plurals and unos, in contrast, does not exhibit this characteristic. This article argues that, contrarily to this claim, the scope of bare plurals and unos also induces partitivity because occurrences of these words include unarticulated constituents. Therefore, European Spanish indefinite noun phrases pragmatically presuppose the relevant part of what the speaker intends to refer, which is also shared by the audience since it is part of the common ground both occupy. Hence, bare plurals and unos are always contextually restricted, since a covert (optional) variable present in the logical form cannot capture this contextual restriction.

(Inter)subjectification and Korean honorifics

The traditional diachronic treatment of the Korean honorific marker LsupL is that LsupL was originally used as a referent honorific marker from the subject’s point of view. It then underwent changes to become a speaker-addressee-oriented (S-A) marker. Diverging from this traditional approach, I claim, based on a large-scale corpus-based study, that LsupL was used as a speaker-oriented marker as early as the fifteenth century. To account for Lsup-’s function change, I posit three stages for the evolution of the modern usage of LsupL. In Stage I (fifteenth century), LsupL was used to establish an honorific relation between a speaker and a referent. In a later transition stage (Stage II, sixteenth century), LsupL began to be used with the contextual restriction that the referent be the same as the addressee. Due to its high frequency, this use of speaker-addressee honorification was coded as a new standard (Stage III). This paper shows that the pragmatic function change of the Korean honorific marker is adequately accounted for by Traugott’s (2003, 2007) (inter)subjectification theory.

When the donkey lost its fleas: persistence, contxtual restriction, and minimal situations

This paper revisits the question of whether propositions in situation semantics must be persistent (Kratzer (1989)). It shows that ignoring persistence causes empirical problems to theories which use quantification over minimal situations as a solution for donkey anaphora (Elbourne (2005)), while at the same time modifying these theories to incorporate persistence makes them incompatible with the use of situations for contextual restriction (Kratzer (2004)).

Contextual Restriction and Quantification in Basque

This paper proposes, in line with Giannakidou (2004), a novel compositional analysis of Basque strong quantifiers and provides further support for the conclusion that the standard analysis of Generalized Quantifiers need not be revised (pace Matthewson 2001). The Basque quantificational data offered provides clear evidence for the need for both quantificational (Westerståhl 1985, von Fintel 1994, Martí 2003) and nominal domain restriction (Stanley 2002, Stanley & Szabó 2000). Crucially, in Basque, the D domain restrictor only appears with strong quantifiers; it is excluded with weak quantifiers. This is taken to support the fact that these elements are not quantifiers and are not contextually restricted (cf. the standard position defended by Milsark 1979, Partee 1988, Diesing 1992, Cooper 1996, von Fintel 1998). Instead, it is argued that weak quantifiers are base-generated at the predicative type (Van Geenhoven 1998, Landman 2002).