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