Formal Semantics and the Grammar of Predication

Linguistic

Mass Nouns, Vagueness and Semantic Variation

The mass/count distinction attracts a lot of attention among cognitive scientists, possibly because it involves in fundamental ways the relation between language (i.e. grammar), thought (i.e. extralinguistic conceptual systems) and reality (i.e. the physical world). In the present paper, I explore the view that the mass/count distinction is a matter of vagueness. While every noun/concept may in a sense be vague, mass nouns/concepts are vague in a way that systematically impairs their use in counting. This idea has never been systematically pursued, to the best of my knowledge. I make it precise relying on supervaluations (more specifically, ‘data semantics’) to model it. I identify a number of universals pertaining to how the mass/count contrast is encoded in the languages of the world, along with some of the major dimensions along which languages may vary on this score. I argue that the vagueness based model developed here provides a useful perspective on both. The outcome (besides shedding light on semantic variation) seems to suggest that vagueness is not just an interface phenomenon that arises in the interaction of Universal Grammar (UG) with the Conceptual/Intentional System (to adopt Chomsky’s terminology), but it is actually part of the architecture of UG.Linguistic

Broaden Your Views. Implications of Domain Widening and the "Logicality" of Language

Linguistic

Kinds, properties and atelicity

Since at least Vendler 1967, one of the most widely discussed data points, often viewed as the ultimate test for (a)telicity, is the behavior of durative modifiers with respect to different VP types as in John killed mosquitos/*a mosquito for an hour. In the present paper, I explore a new blend of the two most widespread approaches to this issue, namely (i) the view of durative modifiers as universal quantifiers (e.g., Dowty 1979, a.o.) and (ii) their view as aspect sensitive measure adverbials (e.g., Krifka 1998, a.o.).  The blend explored here is based on an economy constraint specific to the scope of adverbial quantification (‘do not weaken’ cf. Bassa Vanrell 2017) combined with the identification of the special role that kinds and properties may play as direct bearers of thematic relations in an event-based semantics

Identifying (In)Definiteness in Vietnamese Noun Phrase

This paper aims to settle the issue of whether những, các, một are articles in Vietnamese as argued by Nguyen T. C. (1975), Nguyen H. T. (2004), a.o. First, we adopt Dayal (in prep.)’s cross-linguistic questionnaire of (in)definiteness since this questionnaire offers us a set of useful tests to diagnose definiteness and indefiniteness from a crosslinguistic perspective. Second, we broaden up the empirical landscape by contrasting the interpretation of nominal constructions which have the so-called overt (in)definite markers (các-CLF-N, những-CLF-N, and một CLF N) with that of nominal constructions without them (including bare N and CLF-N, numeral(>1)-CLF-N), in order to see if the (in)definiteness effect truly comes from the presence or absence of these three markers, or from something else. We then conclude that (i) những and các are plural markers, (ii) only một seems to be a likely candidate for an indefinite article, and (iii) bare nouns and numerals are not genuine indefinites: the former denotes kinds, while the latter can be interpreted as definite, which sets Vietnamese apart cross-linguistically

Partitives, Reference to Kinds and Semantic Variation

No abstract