Deriving the evidence asymmetry in positive polar questions

This paper explores a famous puzzle about English positive polar questions introduced by Buring and Gunlogson 2000: while in many contexts they seem to indicate nothing whatsoever about what the speaker takes for granted or thinks likely, in contexts that provide evidence against the content proposition of the question, they are infelicitous. This pattern, which I term the "evidence asymmetry", has been particularly troubling for standard accounts of polar questions that treat the positive and negative answers on par with each other. However, given that polar questions are felicitous in neutral contexts, it doesn\u27t have an easy solution: polar questions in general don\u27t seem to place constraints on evidence or context. I propose that polar questions have a fairly weak presupposition requiring just the content alternative to be possible (but say nothing about its negation), and (building on Trinh 2014) that this together with Maximize Presupposition-based reasoning about competitor questions (specifically"or not" alternative questions) can derive the evidence asymmetry. This account does not require the covert evidential marker of Trinh 2014, and essentially proposes that the evidence asymmetry follows from norms for English polar questions

Anaphoric variability in Kannada bare nominals

Though Kannada bare nominals are commonly used in contexts where they behave like definite descriptions, the definite reading of the bare noun is unavailable (or highly dispreferred) in certain anaphoric environments despite the presence of a suitable antecedent. In this paper, we observe that these are usually contexts where it is unclear whether the sentence topic contains the intended referent. We formalize this characterization within a situational-uniqueness based account for definiteness, and explain the limited uses of anaphoric bare definites as an interaction between this view of definiteness and an ambiguity analysis of the Kannada bare noun wherein they are capable of denoting kinds/indefinite entities as well, in addition to definites

Two types of pluractionality within Kannada verbal reduplication

Motivated by certain distributional and interpretive contrasts between Kannada reduplicated verbs carrying perfective vs. imperfective aspect-marking, here we pursue a view of these two constructions as instantiating two types of cross-linguistically attested pluractionalities — namely, event-external and event-internal pluractionality respectively. Such a characterization of Kannada reduplicated verbs allows us to borrow into their analysis several aspects of existing proposals for event-external and event-internal pluractionality, which in turn enables natural explanations for (many of) their distributional idiosyncracies

Perspectival biscuits

This paper describes a novel class of biscuit conditional, the \u27perspectival biscuit\u27, which arises when an if-clause containing a generic pronoun (e.g., generic you) is used to shift perspective for the interpretation of a perspective-sensitive item in the consequent: e.g., fixing the directionality of behind in "If you\u27re at the door, the cat is behind the desk." This sentence is like a biscuit conditional in that it entails a fully-specified, propositionally stable consequent describing the spatial configuration of cat and desk, but this reading vanishes in favor of a conditional dependence reading when the antecedent contains any non-generic DP, a prediction that is not straightforwardly accounted for by existing theories of biscuit conditionals. An analysis is given demonstrating that biscuithood for perspectival biscuits arises due to generic quantification exclusively over individuals, not worlds

Attitudes in discourse: Italian polar questions and the particle mica

This paper explores ways in which discourse participants convey an attitude about another discourse participant's conversational move. We examine the semantics/pragmatics of Italian positive and negative polar questions (building on the literature on biased questions) and propose the first fully compositional analysis of the Italian particle 'mica', appearing in negative polar questions and negative assertions. The core is that 'mica' is member of a family of presuppositional, epistemic 'common ground management' operators, leading to a new account of epistemic inferences in biased polar questions that relies on the presuppositional nature of these operators. We argue that 'mica' is a high-left-periphery particle that indicates a presupposed bias against a proposition being added to the common ground, anchored uniformly to the speaker and therefore not showing 'interrogative flip'. The paper develops connections between common-ground management operators and evidentials, arguing that interrogative flip (and lack thereof) is a phenomenon that should be studied for a wide variety of discourse particles. EARLY ACCES

An Experimental Investigation of the Role of Uniqueness and Familiarity in Interpreting Definite Descriptions

In this study, we follow a long line of researchers in asking about the precise role of uniqueness and familiarity in the semantics of the English definite article the. We attempt to answer this question experimentally, by observing how definite descriptions behave in contexts where a speaker potentially uses an incorrect description, as in Donnellan’s classic martini scenario, where a speaker incorrectly believes there is a unique referent for their chosen description. In particular, we investigate how hearers interpret definite descriptions in contexts that are systematically manipulated to vary in whether they do or don\u27t contain a unique referent satisfying the description, and whether the referent has or has not been made familiar via previous linguistic mention. Our experimental results reveal that both uniqueness (construed as uniqueness with respect to the common ground between the interlocutors) and familiarity (construed as strong familiarity or anaphoricity) can act as helpful cues to the hearer during the interpretation of a definite description. However, their effects are graded, with the presence of uniqueness leading to greater referential success than the presence of familiarity. We discuss the implications of these results on several existing standard theories of definiteness, and implement a version of the Rational Speech Acts model to help explain the ways in which the observed behavioral data cannot be fully explained on these theories

Conversational backoff

I explore and analyze a phenomenon ("conversational backoff") where, instead of accepting an assertion in the normal way, a speaker challenges its exhaustiveness, but not its content. The result is that speakers publicly back off of the exhaustivity of the claim. These challenges are typically triggered by special questions of a conditional type, and I focus in particular on the case of "what if" questions, developing a detailed analysis of their semantics and dynamics

About about

I provide a compositional account of about-PPs in combination with attitude predicates, content nouns, and as a predicate. The account requires that attitude predicates are properties of content-bearing eventualities, rather than relations that take propositions (or other clause denotations) as arguments. I argue further that the relevant notion of 'content' must be extremely general, allowing for question-like, proposition-like, and hybrid meanings

Asymmetries between uniqueness and familiarity in the semantics of definite descriptions

In over a century of research into the English definite article "the", two main theoretical factors have been identified as relevant to its meaning: namely, (i) uniqueness and (ii) familiarity. The identification of these factors has led to an extensive debate in semantics about which of them is more fundamental to the meaning of "the". In this paper, we contribute to this debate by introducing novel data obtained through two controlled psycholinguistic experiments. We manipulated uniqueness and familiarity of potential referents, examining how these factors affect the comprehension and production of English definite descriptions. The behavioral results reveal an asymmetry between these two factors, with familiarity being a weaker cue than uniqueness – a pattern that is unexpected under any existing theory of definiteness. We close with a discussion of possible extensions to existing theories in light of this result, as well as avenues for future work