Pragmatic Scale and the Properties of Scalar Quantificational Determiners

A notion of linguistic scale is examined in connection with some scalar quantificational determiners such as all, most, many, and some in English and their correspondents in Korean. The widely-used definition of scale which is based on the identity of syntactic category and the linear ordering by the degree of semantic strength among the scalar predicates is not adequate enough to explain some set of facts about implicature and entailment that involve quantificational determiners. Attention is paid to many and most (in English and in Korean) that require a context parameter to get properly interpreted. They should be represented not as occupying a point on a scale but as occupying some interval. I also suggest that the properties of a scalar quantificational determiner including mono tonicity and class-inclusiveness play an important role in scalar entailment and implicature, and therefore have to be considered in forming a linguistic scale

Temporal Interpretation of Non-finite Adjuncts in English

There are adjunct clauses in English that have no overt tense morphology. For example, the underlined parts of the sentences - No one knows what Joe did before coming to this town or While painting the old house, they thought they saw a ghost rambling in the basement, are non-finite adjuncts. The matrix clauses in English exhibit tense morphology and thus have direct access to the time of utterance for temporal interpretation. In contrast, non-finite adjuncts contain "no component sensitive to the time of utterance" (Richards 1982: 67), and fail to have direct access to the speech time. They must be linked in some way to the matrix tense to get temporally interpreted. This paper addresses to the question of how such NFA's are interpreted temporally. The paper will show that neither the operator analysis nor the deletion analysis is successful in handling the temporal interpretation of NFA's. Adopting En~'s binding analysis of tense that treats tenses as referential expressions that denote times, I will propose a set of interpretation rules of NFA's. In doing so I will examine En~'s claim that the interpretation of tenses is subject to syntactic conditions that are reminiscent of the binding conditions for the interpretation of anaphors and pronominals. I will show that NFA's are interpreted in terms of semantic inclusion and that this semantic relation is not subject to any significant syntactic constraints

A Study of Non-logical Inference Structure: Q- and R-implicatures

Conversational implicatures, whether they are quantity-based or relation-based, depend critically on features of the context. They have been largely considered as defying any formalistic treatment in logical semantics. The interaction between speaker and hearer has seemed to be beyond any mathematical theorizing and the task has been thrown away into a pragmatic "waste-basket." Even in pragmatics, those who follow the functional approach, e.g. Dinsmore (1979) and Leech (1983), cast doubt on any formalistic account of conversational implicatures. In fact, with some exceptions such as Gazdar (1979), Atlas and Levinson (1981) and Horn (1989), conversational implicatures and the explicating processes have been informally stated, due to the recalcitrant nature of the notion of the speaker's intention. However, as Parikh (1991) shows in the case of ambiguity, game theory provides a means of dealing with such a task. Following Parikh's assumption that communication is an interactive, strategic process that involves interplay of inferences about the participants' intentions, I attempt to show that the structure of non-logical inferences is subject to a mathematical game-theoretic analysis

Conditions on the Temporal Interpretation of Embedded Tenses

The effect of syntactic structure on the interpretation of tenses of complex sentences is examined with reference to the proposal in Enc(1987). An attempt to explain temporal dependency in sentences with embeddings purely in terms of syntactic constraints is shown to have a number of difficulties. An extension of Enc's Anchoring Conditions for anaphorically unspecified tenses is presented