F-constructions in Yucatec Maya

Yucatec Maya, like many other Mayan languages, features a set of constructions, including relative clauses, content questions and focus constructions, that is uniquely characterized by the occurrence of the so-called Agent Focus verb form. The challenge posed by these constructions is to account for why a special verb form occurs only in these constructions. I argue that this is the case because these constructions (which I refer to as F-constructions) share particular structural and semantic properties

Towards an Understanding of the Meaning of Nominal Tense

Paraguayan Guaran´? has nominal inflectional suffixes with temporal meanings. I challenge the claim that they are nominal tenses (cf. Nordlinger and Sadler 2004), and analyze them as nominal aspects. I present evidence that points to crosslinguistic variation in the way in which noun phrases are temporally interpreted, and address the implications of the existence of languages with nominal temporal markers for theories of temporality and crosslinguistic temporal interpretation

German clefts address unexpected questions

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence for Tönnis' (2021) hypothesis that German cleft sentences address relatively unexpected questions in discourse while their canonical variants address relatively expected questions. We present an experiment that measures the relative preference between the German cleft and its canonical variant in contexts that differ with respect to how expected the question is that they answer. The expectedness of the question was measured separately in a norming study. The result of the experiment supports analyses of German clefts that take discourse expectations into account when analyzing the acceptability of clefts in contrast to canonical sentences. Approaches that primarily focus on differences in exhaustivity (e.g., De Veaugh-Geiss et al. 2018) or contrast (e.g., Rochemont 1986) need to be adapted in order to account for the results

Contrastive topics in Paraguayan Guaraní­ discourse

The empirical basis of current formal semantic/pragmatic analyses of utterances containing contrastive topics are languages in which the expression that denotes the contrastive topic is marked prosodically, morphologically or syntactically, such as English, German, Korean, Japanese or Hungarian (e.g. Jackendoff 1972; Szabolcsi 1981; Roberts 1998; Büring 1997, 2003; Lee 1999). Such analyses do not extend to Paraguayan Guaraní­, a language in which neither prosody, nor word order, nor the contrastive topic clitic =katu identify the contrastive topic. This article develops a formal pragmatic analysis of contrastive topic utterances in Paraguayan Guaraní­ and explores cross-linguistic similarities and differences in contrastive topic utterances

Prosodic cues to presupposition projection

In English utterances with factive predicates, the content of the clausal complement of the predicate may project, i.e., taken to be a commitment of the speaker, even when the factive predicate is embedded under an entailment canceling operator (e.g., Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1971; Karttunen 1971). Based on impressionistic judgments, Beaver (2010) and Simons, Beaver, Roberts & Tonhauser (to appear) suggested that whether the content of the complement of an utterance with a factive predicate projects depends on the information structure of the utterance and, since information structure is prosodically marked, on the prosodic realization of the utterance. This paper describes the results of three perception experiments designed to explore the influence of the prosodic realization of an utterance with a factive predicate on the projection of the content of the complement. The results of the experiments suggest that the prosodic realization of such utterances provides a cue to the projectivity of the content of the complement. These findings provide empirical support for the question-based analysis of projection advanced in Simons et al. to appear

A Dynamic Semantic Account of the Temporal Interpretation of Noun Phrases

No abstract

A Dynamic Semantic Account of the Temporal Interpretation of Noun Phrases

In general, the temporal interpretation of natural language utterances is concerned with identifying the temporal location of properties and relations expressed within an utterance with respect to contextually salient time points, e.g., the time of utter ance. Most of the literature on temporal interpretation has been concerned with th

On the Cross-Linguistic Interpretation of Embedded Tenses

We propose a semantic analysis of cross-linguistic variation in the distribution and interpretation of tenses embedded in propositional attitude complements and temporal adjunct clauses in English, Japanese and Russian. We compare our analysis to previous ones proposed by Ogihara (1994, 1996) and Arregui and Kusumoto (1998), which attribute the variation to syntactic differences between the languages, and argue that the semantic analysis is preferable on both empirical and conceptual grounds

Projection variation: Is the family of sentences really a family?

Under the ‘family of sentences’ diagnostic for projection, the projection of content is investigated by embedding the expression that contributes the content in the scope of negation, polar questions, epistemic possibility modals, and conditional antecedents. This paper reports on the results of a set of experiments designed to investigate whether there is variation in the projection of content from under these four types of entailment-canceling operators. The contents investigated are the contents of the complements of 20 English clause-embedding predicates. The results of the experiments suggest (i) that the by-operator variation is small when aggregating over the 20 contents, but (ii) that the effect of operator differs between the clause-embedding predicates. The results of these experiments also extend a result of Degen and Tonhauser 2022, that projection ratings in polar questions do not categorically distinguish factive from non-factive predicates, to cases with negation, the epistemic possibility modal \u27perhaps\u27, and conditional antecedents. The observed by-predicate and by-operator variation is not captured by existing theoretical accounts of projection (e.g., Heim 1983, van der Sandt 1992, Abrusán 2011, Schlenker 2021). Our results suggest that an empirically adequate projection analysis must consider interactions between predicates and operators

The CommitmentBank: Investigating projection in naturally occurring discourse

This paper describes a new resource, the CommitmentBank, developed for the empirical investigation of the projection of finite clausal complements. A clausal complement is said to project when its content is understood as a commitment of the speaker even though the clause occurs under the scope of an entailment canceling operator such as negation or a question. The study of projection is therefore part of the study of commitments expressed by speakers to non-asserted sentence content. The content of clausal complements has been a central case for the study of projection, as there is a long-standing claim that clause-taking predicates fall into two classes—factives and nonfactives—distinguished on the basis of whether the contents of their complements project. This claim identifies the embedding predicate as the primary determinant of the projection behavior of these contents. The CommitmentBank is a corpus of naturally occurring discourses whose final sentence contains a clause-embedding predicate under an entailment canceling operator. In this paper, we describe the CommitmentBank and present initial results of analyses designed to evaluate the factive/nonfactive distinction and to investigate additional factors which affect the projectivity of clausal complements