Specificity distinction

This paper is concerned with semantic noun phrase typology, focusing on the question of how to draw fine-grained distinctions necessary for an accurate account of natural language phenomena. In the extensive literature on this topic, the most commonly encountered parameters of classification concern the semantic type of the denotation of the noun phrase, the familiarity or novelty of its referent, the quantificational/nonquantificational distinction (connected to the weak/strong dichotomy), as well as, more recently, the question of whether the noun phrase is choice-functional or not (see Reinhart 1997, Winter 1997, Kratzer 1998, Matthewson 1999). In the discussion that follows I will attempt to make the following general points: (i) phenomena involving the behavior of noun phrases both within and across languages point to the need of establishing further distinctions that are too fine-grained to be caught in the net of these typologies; (ii) some of the relevant distinctions can be captured in terms of conditions on assignment functions; (iii) distribution and scopal peculiarities of noun phrases may result from constraints they impose on the way variables they introduce are to be assigned values. Section 2 reviews the typology of definite noun phrases introduced in Farkas 2000 and the way it provides support for the general points above. Section 3 examines some of the problems raised by recognizing the rich variety of 'indefinite' noun phrases found in natural language and by attempting to capture their distribution and interpretation. Common to the typologies discussed in the two sections is the issue of marking different types of variation in the interpretation of a noun phrase. In the light of this discussion, specificity turns out to be an epiphenomenon connected to a family of distinctions that are marked differently in different languages

Epistemic stance without epistemic modals: the case of the presumptive future

This paper deals with the non-temporal use of the future in Italian known as "epistemic" or "presumptive" (PF) in declaratives and interrogatives. We first distinguish PF from epistemic necessity and possibility, as well as from weak necessity modals, providing in the process the main empirical challenges PF raises. We then propose and justify a semantic account that treats PF as a special normality modal that involves a subjective likelihood component. Since in our account the prejacent (the proposition in the scope of the modal) is at issue, the use of PF triggers the implicature that the speaker is not in a position to appeal to what she knows in order to support her commitment to the prejacent. This, we claim, is the source of the intuition that PF is often used to offer a “guess” relative to the question under discussion (QUD)

Incorporation, Plurality, and the Incorporation of Plurals : a Dynamic Approach

This paper deals with the semantic properties of incorporated nominals that are present at clausal syntax. Such nominals exhibit a complex cluster of semantic properties, ranging from argument structure, scope, and number to discourse transparency. We develop an analysis of incorporation in the framework of Discourse Representation Theory, a dynamic theory that can connect sentence-level and discourse-level semantics. We concentrate on data from Hungarian, where incorporated nominals may be either morphologically singular or plural. We set out to capture two sets of contrasts: (i) those we find when comparing incorporated nominals on the one hand and their non-incorporated, full-fledged argument sisters on the other, and (ii) those we find when comparing morphologically singular and morphologically plural incorporated nominals. A more elaborate version of the analysis can be found in Farkas and de Swart (2003)

Varieties of Indefinites

No abstract

How Clause-bounded is the Scope of Universals?

No abstract

The exclusive interpretation of plural nominals in quantificational environments

In some contexts, plural nominals have inclusive interpretation, allowing atoms in their reference domain; in others, they are exclusive, allowing only sums. Selecting between the two interpretations has been shown to be sensitive to both world-knowledge pressures (Farkas & de Swart 2010) and contextual relevance (Grimm 2010). The principal semantic factor claimed to be involved is monotonicity direction (Sauerland, Anderssen & Yatsushiro 2005; Spector 2007; Zweig 2009; Farkas & de Swart 2010): upward monotone environments tend to select exclusive readings; downward monotone ones, inclusive readings. In four image verification experiments, we tested this claim and found support for the generalization. The effect of monotonicity direction, however, is small. Moreover we find that varying whether a plural is in the scope of a quantified description has a much larger effect on the prevalence of the exclusive interpretation. This suggests that monotonicity, though involved, is not a decisive factor in plural interpretation

Age-related microvascular degeneration in the human cerebral periventricular white matter

Clinical studies have identified white matter (WM) lesions as hyperintensive regions in the MRI images of elderly patients. Since a cerebrovascular origin was attributed to such lesions, the present analysis set out to define the microvascular histopathologic changes in the periventricular WM in the aged. Post-mortem samples of the frontal, parietal, and occipital periventricular WM of 40-90-year-old subjects were prepared for quantitative light and electron microscopy. Light microscopic examination revealed microvascular fibrohyalinosis as the most common type of microvascular damage in the elderly. Ultrastructural analysis identified the microvascular thickening as collagen deposits affecting the basement membrane. The vascular density did not correlate with the age. The basement membrane pathology significantly increased, while the number of intact microvessels gradually decreased, with advancing age in the frontal and occipital WM. Finally, peripheral atherosclerosis coincided with massive microvascular fibrosis, particularly in the frontal WM. Our results demonstrate an age-related microvascular degeneration in the periventricular WM, which may contribute to the development of WM lesions by hindering a sufficient supply of nutrients to the affected WM sites. Furthermore, the data accord with previous observations identifying the frontal lobe as the site at which WM vulnerability is most pronounced. Finally, atherosclerosis in large, peripheral vessels is considered to be a predictive marker of microvascular pathology in the WM.</p

Isolating Processing Factors in Negative Island Contexts *

Introduction The phenomenon referred to as negative islands was originally observed by (1) a. Which project didn&apos;t the intern complete __ conscientiously? b. *How didn&apos;t the intern complete the project __? A number of proposals have been made in the theoretical linguistics literature that account for the difference between (1a) and (1b) in terms of global constraints operating within the grammar. Building on previous findings in the psycholinguistics literature, we used acceptability judgment measures to provide a new window into our understanding of negative islands. On the basis of results from two such studies, we argue that negative islands are not a unitary phenomenon due to a single global grammatical constraint, but rather the by-product of the simultaneous co-occurrence of different processing factors. The paper is structured as follows. In section 2, we show that alongside the global constraints proposed in existing accounts of negative islands, there is abundant evidence in the psycholinguistics literature that each of the individual factors that figure into negative islands -namely negation, extraction, and referentiality -incurs its own processing cost. The results from the acceptability judgment studies reported in section 3 demonstrate the importance of taking these individual factors into consideration when analyzing negative islands. In Experiment 1, we investigate the effects of the factors negation and extraction, and in Experiment 2 we additionally manipulate the factor of referentiality. In section 4, we discuss the results of these experiments and sugges