Forks in the Road to Rule I

Introduction: Tanya Reinhart pioneered and developed a new and very influential approach to the syntax and semantics of anaphora. It originated in Reinhart (1983a, b) and underwent various later modifications, e.g., Grodzinsky & Reinhart (1993), Heim (1993), Fox (1998, 2000), Reinhart (2000, 2006), Büring (2005). The central innovation concerned the architecture of the theory. The labor traditionally assigned to Binding Theory was broken up into two very different modules. One component (the “real” Binding Theory, if you will) regulates only one type of anaphoric relation, namely variable binding in the sense of logic. A new and different mechanism, variously thought of as a pragmatic principle, an economy constraint, and an interface rule, takes care of regulating other semantic relations, particularly conference. The latter mechanism crucially involves the construction and comparison of alternative Logical Forms and their meanings

Predicates or Formulas? Evidence from Ellipsis

No abstract

Presupposition Projection and the Semantics of Attitude Verbs

Karttunen observed that, if the complement of an attitude sentence presupposes p, then that sentence as a whole presupposes that the attitude-holder believes p. I attempt to derive some representative instances of this generalization from suitable assumptions about the lexical semantics of attitude predicates. The enterprise is carried out in a framework of context change semantics, which incorporates Stalnaker's suggestion that presupposition projection results from the stepwise fashion in which information is updated in response to complex utterances. The empirical focus is on predicates of desire and on the contribution of counterfactual mood

Mixed Quotation

The central challenge posed by mixed quotation is that it exhibits both regular semantic use and metalinguistic reference, simultaneously. Semanticists disagree considerably on how to capture the interplay between these two meaning aspects. In this case study I present the various semantic approaches to mixed quotation and compare their predictions with respect to empirical phenomena like indexical shifting, projection, and non‐constituent mixed quotation

Negation and the functional sequence

There exists a general restriction on admissible functional sequences which prevents adjacent identical heads. We investigate a particular instantiation of this restriction in the domain of negation. Empirically, it manifests itself as a restriction the stacking of multiple negative morphemes. We propose a principled account of this restriction in terms of the general ban on immediately consecutive identical heads in the functional sequence on the one hand, and the presence of a Neg feature inside negative morphemes on the other hand. The account predicts that the stacking of multiple negative morphemes should be possible provided they are separated by intervening levels of structure. We show that this prediction is borne out

The History and Prehistory of Natural-Language Semantics

Contemporary natural-language semantics began with the assumption that the meaning of a sentence could be modeled by a single truth condition, or by an entity with a truth-condition. But with the recent explosion of dynamic semantics and pragmatics and of work on non- truth-conditional dimensions of linguistic meaning, we are now in the midst of a shift away from a truth-condition-centric view and toward the idea that a sentence’s meaning must be spelled out in terms of its various roles in conversation. This communicative turn in semantics raises historical questions: Why was truth-conditional semantics dominant in the first place, and why were the phenomena now driving the communicative turn initially ignored or misunderstood by truth-conditional semanticists? I offer a historical answer to both questions. The history of natural-language semantics—springing from the work of Donald Davidson and Richard Montague—began with a methodological toolkit that Frege, Tarski, Carnap, and others had created to better understand artificial languages. For them, the study of linguistic meaning was subservient to other explanatory goals in logic, philosophy, and the foundations of mathematics, and this subservience was reflected in the fact that they idealized away from all aspects of meaning that get in the way of a one-to-one correspondence between sentences and truth-conditions. The truth-conditional beginnings of natural- language semantics are best explained by the fact that, upon turning their attention to the empirical study of natural language, Davidson and Montague adopted the methodological toolkit assembled by Frege, Tarski, and Carnap and, along with it, their idealization away from non-truth-conditional semantic phenomena. But this pivot in explana- tory priorities toward natural language itself rendered the adoption of the truth-conditional idealization inappropriate. Lifting the truth-conditional idealization has forced semanticists to upend the conception of linguistic meaning that was originally embodied in their methodology