Vehicles of Meaning: Unconventional Semantics and Unbearable Interpretations

I try my hand at the noble pursuit of ambulance chasing. The question is whether the city ordinance in “All vehicles are prohibited from Lincoln Park.” will be construed so as to exempt ambulances and, if so, whether they are exempted by virtue of the function of all or vehicle as \u27regulatory variables\u27 in the interpretation of the ordinance

Anymore once more: geographical and syntactic distribution

Occurrences of non-polarity anymore (NPAM) or so-called “positive anymore” with the approximate meaning of ‘nowadays’ have long been collected by North American dialectologists. The name of the construction is misleading, however, since mainstream anymore, as a garden-variety negative polarity item, is acceptable (like ever or anyone) in a range of grammatically “positive” but downward entailing environments. After touching on the semantic characterization of mainstream and non-polarity anymore and the “stigma enigma” presented by the variable social diagnosis of the construction by those familiar and unfamiliar with it, we present the results a study of the grammatical and geographical distribution of non-polarity anymore. This study draws on 600 responses to sentences (1)–(5) included in two Amazon Mechanical Turk surveys conducted by the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project in 2019. Football is more popular than baseball anymore. It’s expensive to fly first-class anymore. It’s great to fly first-class anymore. Anymore he watches what he eats. Anymore he’s spending too much time on Facebook. Based on these responses, we can expand the geographical range of non-polarity anymore, with favorable responses attested in states beyond those explicitly noted by the Dictionary of American Regional English, while also providing evidence both for a Pennsylvania core area and for DARE’s “least freq. New England” annotation. Respondents’ preference for (2) over (3) supports the observation by Labov and others that non-polarity anymore typically favors negative affect. Also in line with previous claims (e.g. Hindle & Sag 1975), fronting anymore as in (4) and (5) lowers median acceptability ratings. The analysis of respondents’ judgments with age as a variable indicates that the acceptability of NPAM is on the decline in the U.S., echoing the parallel apparent change in progress Chambers (2007) reports for his survey of speakers from Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe. We conclude with some remarks on the complementary nature of dialectological methodologies utilizing surveys vs. corpora drawn from Twitter and similar resources

A brief history of negation

AbstractThe history of scholarship on negation tracks and illuminates the major developments in the history of metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, from Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle through Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein to contemporary formal theorists. Our perspective focuses on the catalytic role played by the 20th century philosopher of language Paul Grice, whose views on negation serve as a fulcrum for his attempt to bridge the (neo-)Traditionalist and Formalist traditions in logical thought. Grice's remarks on negation and speaker meaning and the elaboration of his ideas by subsequent neo-Griceans are summarized and situated within a broader picture of the role of contradictory and contrary negation in the frameworks of Aristotelians, Medievals, early modern schoolmaster-logicians, 19th and early 20th century neo-Idealists and Formalists, Oxford ordinary-language analytics, practitioners of classical and non-classical logics, and a range of other philosophers and linguists. Particular attention is paid to the relations between negation and the other operators of propositional and predicate calculus. Implications for accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language are also pursued and extensive references to related work are provided

Hypernegation, Hyponegation, and Parole Violations

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'Only' XL: The Assertoric Asymmetry of Exponibles

No abstract

Hamburgers and Truth: Why Gricean Explanation is Gricean

Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1990), pp. 453-47

In Defense of Privative Ambiguity

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1984), pp. 141-15

Nonfamiliarity and indefinite descriptions

Kehler & Ward (2006) argue for the existence of NONFAMILIARITY IMPLICATURES, including one that results from the use of English a/an rather than the. This implicature appears intended to subsume the scalar implicature of nonuniqueness postulated by Hawkins (1991). In this paper we try to clarify the nature of such a nonfamiliarity implicature, and we present evidence that such an implicature does not supplant Hawkins's nonuniqueness implicature for indefinites