Antonymy In Space And Other Strictly Ordered Domains

Natural language references different types of entities. Some of these entities (e.g. degrees, locations, times) are strictly ordered with respect to one another; others (e.g. individuals, possible worlds) are not. The empirical goal of this paper is to show that some linguistically encoded relations across these domains (e.g. under, slower than) display a polar asymmetry, while others do not. The theoretical goal of this paper is to argue that this asymmetry – and its restriction to only certain relations – is due to intrinsic properties of strictly ordered domains, coupled with a bias in how language users perceive these domains

Decomposing 'As If'

‘As if’ constructions have been analyzed as only verbal (Bücking 2017) or idiomatic (Bledin & Srinivas 2019, 2020). We argue that ‘as if’ constructions have the same distribution as any clausal similative (i.e. any ‘as’ construction): they can associate with verbal arguments or propositions. And we argue that ‘as if’ constructions are a common and productive cross-linguistic phenomenon, reliably formed with a relativizer; a question subordinator; and X-marking. We thus present a compositional analysis of the constructions based on extant analyses of as (and its cross-linguistic counterparts) as a relativizer (Rett 2013, among others); if as a question subordinator (Starr 2014b, among others); and X-marking as encoding a similarity relation across possible worlds (Schulz 2014; von Fintel & Iatridou 2020). In addition to being compositional, this approach can better account for the wide distribution of ‘as if’ constructions both within a language and across languages

A semantic account of mirative evidentials

Many if not all evidential languages have a mirative evidential: an indirect evidential that can, in some contexts, mark mirativity (the expression of speaker surprise) instead of indirect evidence. We address several questions posed by this systematic polysemy: What is the affinity between indirect evidence and speaker surprise? What conditions the two interpretations? And how do mirative evidentials relate to other mirative markers? We propose a unified analysis of mirative evidentials where indirect evidentiality and mirativity involve a common epistemic component. A mirative interpretation requires a close temporal proximity between the speech event and the event of the speaker's learning the at-issue content

How many Maximizes in the Balkan Sprachbund

This paper begins by arguing that the words many and much (and their Balkan counterparts) are modifiers of degrees, type 〈〈d, t〉, 〈d, t〉〉. They denote functions from a set of d-degrees (the scale D) to a singleton set of the degree d′, which i

A Degree Account of Exclamatives

From the Proceedings of SALT XVIII, 200

Antonymy and Evaluativity

No abstract

Antonymy In Space And Other Strictly Ordered Domains

Natural language references different types of entities. Some of these entities (e.g. degrees, locations, times) are strictly ordered with respect to one another; others (e.g. individuals, possible worlds) are not. The empirical goal of this paper is to show that some linguistically encoded relations across these domains (e.g. under, slower than) display a polar asymmetry, while others do not. The theoretical goal of this paper is to argue that this asymmetry – and its restriction to only certain relations – is due to intrinsic properties of strictly ordered domains, coupled with a bias in how language users perceive these domains