Clause-Type, Force, and Normative Judgment in the Semantics of Imperatives

I argue that imperatives express contents that are both cognitively and semantically related to, but nevertheless distinct from, modal propositions. Imperatives, on this analysis, semantically encode features of planning that are modally specified. Uttering an imperative amounts to tokening this feature in discourse, and thereby proffering it for adoption by the audience. This analysis deals smoothly with the problems afflicting Portner's Dynamic Pragmatic account and Kaufmann's Modal account. It also suggests an appealing reorientation of clause-type theorizing, in which the cognitive act of updating on a typed sentence plays a central role in theorizing about both its semantics and role in discourse

The *hope-wh puzzle

Clause-embedding predicates come in three major varieties: (i) responsive predicates (e.g. know) are compatible with both declarative and interrogative complements; (ii) rogative predicates (e.g. wonder) are only compatible with interrogative complements; and (iii) anti-rogative predicates (e.g. hope) are only compatible with declarative complements. It has been suggested that these selectional properties are at least partly semantic in nature. In particular, it has been proposed that the anti-rogativity of neg-raising predicates like believe comes from the triviality in meaning that would arise with interrogative complements. This paper puts forward a similar semantic explanation for non-veridical preferential predicates such as hope, which are anti-rogative, unlike their veridical counterparts such as be happy, which are responsive

The semantics of question-embedding predicates

The complementation pattern of certain question‐embedding predicates, such as know and agree, presents a puzzle for the compositional semantics of clausal complementation, as the predicates seem to be able to combine with two distinct types of semantic objects: propositions and questions. The traditional approach to the semantics of these predicates, where embedded questions are reduced to propositions, faces two problems. First, it cannot account for the observation that know‐wh sentences require the subject not to believe any false answer to the embedded question. Second, it makes a problematic prediction concerning the interpretation of Predicates of Relevance, such as care and matter. We review three alternative approaches to the semantics of question‐embedding predicates, i.e., the proposition‐to‐question reduction, the uniform approach and the ambiguity approach, and argue that only the Proposition‐to‐Question reduction and the uniform approach can deal with the interpretation of the Predicates of Relevance. The paper concludes with a remark on how lexical denotations of question‐embedding predicates are constrained in general.NWONWO-IG.18.023Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Information structure and the referential status of linguistic expression : workshop as part of the 23th annual meetings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft in Leipzig, Leipzig, February 28 - March 2, 2001

This volume comprises papers that were given at the workshop Information Structure and the Referential Status of Linguistic Expressions, which we organized during the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) Conference in Leipzig in February 2001. At this workshop we discussed the connection between information structure and the referential interpretation of linguistic expressions, a topic mostly neglected in current linguistics research. One common aim of the papers is to find out to what extent the focus-background as well as the topic-comment structuring determine the referential interpretation of simple arguments like definite and indefinite NPs on the one hand and sentences on the other