Strong and Weak Novelty and Familiarity

No abstract

A Uniform Analysis of 'Before' and 'After'

No abstract

Endorsement of inconsistent imperatives

There is an ongoing debate regarding how imperatives convey speaker endorsement. One line of approach builds it into the imperative meaning. Another posits weaker meanings. Indifference uses, like 'Go right! Go left! I don't care!', pose a challenge to the endorsement account. We reconcile the endorsement approach with such uses and argue that they can reduce to the speaker endorsing disjunctive prejacents, which results from one imperative operator taking a list of prejacents under its scope. This analysis predicts that intonational patterns that signal lists will facilitate disjunctive interpretations. We test and confirm this prediction in an experimental study

The Factuality Status of Chinese Necessity Modals. Exploring the Distribution Via Corpus-Based Approach

This paper is intended to test the deontic vs anankastic hypothesis outlined by Sparvoli 2012. The stipulation is that, in past contexts, deontic modals trigger a counterfactual inference, while anankastic modals (here called ‘goal-oriented modals’) either trigger an actuality entailment effects (‘only possibility’ modals) or a generic non-factual reading (‘mere necessity’ modals). The result of this corpus-based study conducted in a Chinese-English parallel corpus confirms the crucial role played by the deontic vs goal oriented contrast in the marking of factuality in Chinese and shows that the factuality value decreases across a cline from goal-oriented to deontic modals