Indefinite Donkeys on Islands

In this paper I present a theory of indefinites which captures two of their natural properties: indefinites license donkey anaphora (Geach 1962) and they exhibit 'specific' readings in which they appear to scope out of scope islands. In various flavours of dynamic semantics (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982, Dekker (2004)), these properties can be captured to the detriment of compositionally. Other theories have employed more involved technical machinery like choice functions (Kratzer 1998, von Heusinger 2002), Hamblin-semantics (Kratzer & Shimoyama 2002) or independence friendly logics (Brasoveanu & Farkas 2011) to derive exceptional scope readings, but ignored donkey anaphora. Theories of E-type anaphora, on the other hand, generally do not consider exceptional scope readings (Heim 1990, Elbourne 2001). My own analysis combines insights from dynamic semantics with referential indexing in LF-semantics, resulting in a fully compositional, static system

The rise and particularly fall of presuppositions: Evidence from duality in universals

At the center of this paper is the question whether presuppositions are more likely to be gained or lost in the process of language change. We offer a new experimental method that aims at ascertaining the re-learning speed of potentially presuppositional items based on nonce words and which integrates certain factors of change such as social prestige in an artificial but clearly contextualized set-up. The meaning targeted is of a quantifier meaning ‘both’ with speakers of German and the initial results point to higher ease of losing rather than incorporating the presupposition, but with an interesting resilience after a critical questioning of presuppositional status

Hungarian focus is not exhausted

No abstract

Restrictions on complement anaphora

This paper discusses the semantic status and the restrictions on complement anaphora, i.e. pronouns that are anaphorically related to quantifiers and seem to refer to the 'complement set' of the latter -- the set of those individuals that are in the restrictor but not in the nuclear scope of the quantifier. Our main empirical point, motivated by data from German, is that  contrary to the claims in  the literature, true complement set reference is not exclusively determined by the logical properties of the quantifier but also by its the syntactic context. Based on this observation, we argue that plural quantifiers provide anaphoric antecendents by a particular inference mechanism, which is sensitive to syntactic information: We submit that speakers employ verifying strategies for sentences with plural quantifiers where a 'test' discourse referent is inserted in the 'syntactic slot' the plural quantifier originally occurs in. If a discourse referent, when inserted in this slot, yields truth-conditions for the resulting sentence that are equivalent to those of the original sentence, it can be used as an antecendent for anaphora

Contradicting (not-)at-issueness in exclusives and clefts: An empirical study

We present two empirical studies on exclusives, it-clefts, and pseudoclefts (i.e., identity statements with a definite description) in which the at-issue and not-at-issue content – a factor that has not been properly controlled for in prior experimental work on cleft exhaustivity – was teased apart systematically. The results show that violations of exhaustivity in it-clefts, a not-at-issue inference, patterned differently from the necessary presupposition failures of the not-at-issue semantic inferences. These findings pose a new experimental challenge to semantic accounts of exhaustivity in it-clefts, while being in line with pragmatic accounts

It-clefts are IT (Inquiry Terminating) constructions

We offer a new analysis of the semantics of the English it-cleft, building on recent work on exclusive particles such as "only." The analysis emphasizes the discourse function of clefts – which, we claim, is to terminate a line of inquiry by marking an answer as complete. It accounts for the semantic effects – not previously appreciated – of focus placement within the cleft pivot. It also provides a solution to a previously discussed problem with the projection of exhaustivity from embedded contexts

The acquisition of asserted, presupposed, and pragmatically implied exhaustivity in Hungarian

The paper reports on three experiments in which the exhaustive interpretation of sentences containing the focus particle csak ‘only’, structural focus constructions, and sentences with neutral intonation and word order were investigated. The results obtained not only reveal the developmental trajectory of the adult-like comprehension of each sentence type, but also contribute to the discussion concerning the semantic or pragmatic nature of their exhaustive meaning component. As the three construction types were judged in different ways on a three-point scale, the findings appear to support the hypothesis according to which exhaustivity is part of the asserted content of sentences with csak ‘only’, it is context-independently presupposed in the case of structural focus, and in certain contexts it can arise as an implicature in the case of neutral utterances, as well

Between Specification and Explanation. About a German Discourse Particle

This paper provides a unified semantic and discourse pragmatic analysis of the German particle nämlich, traditionally described as having a specificational and an explanative reading. Our claim is that nämlich is a discourse marker which signals that the expression it is attached to is a short (elliptic) answer to a salient implicit question about the previous utterance. We show how both the explanative and the specificational reading can be derived from this more general semantic contribution. In addition we discuss some cross linguistic consequences of our analysis

Der Schein trügt nämlich

The German particle nämlich is puzzling because it seems to have two independent semantic functions which strictly correlate with specific syntactic environments: if nämlich precedes an ,,orphan constituent" (Haegeman 1991) it specifies an underspecified discourse referent in the previous clause, and if nämlich appears in a whole clause its function is marking that the hostclause delivers an explanation to the previous clause. A polysemy- or even homonymy-analysis seems problematic precisely because of this strict correlation between syntactic environment and semantic function. In this paper we propose a unified analysis of nämlich. We argue that nämlich marks the property of the context that there is an implicit question to which the host of nämlich delivers a direct (short) answer (Jacobson 2008). Crucially, constituents are good short answers to constituent-questions (Who?), while whole clauses are only good short-answers to ,,sentence"-questions like Why p? Building on these intuitions we show how both readings of nämlich can systematically be derived and implement our analysis formally