A Plea for Monsters

To appear, Linguistics & PhilosophyWe argue that attitude operators can manipulate the context of evaluation of some indexicals, and should thus be essentially treated as Kaplanian monsters. The analysis is developed in an extensional system with individual, time, world and context variables. A unified theory of unshiftable, shiftable and obligatorily shifted indexicals is offered, which accounts for a number of cross-linguistic facts in the domain of person, tense and mood

Sequence Phenomena and Double Access Readings Generalized

We claim that two apparent idiosyncracies of tense  have a counterpart in other domains. (i) Sequence of Tense rules were originally posited to account for cases in which tense features appear to remain uninterpreted. We show that similar arguments suggest that Sequence of Person and Sequence of Mood rules are needed as well. (ii) Double Access Readings arise in certain environments in which a Sequence of Tense rule failed to be applied. We suggest that formally analogous readings exist with mood. We develop a fragment that includes a unified account of Sequence of Tense rules and Double Access Readings across domains (the theory is relatively close to the spirit -thought not to the letter- of Abusch 1997)

Context of Thought and Context of Utterance (A Note on Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present)

  Based on the analysis of narrations in Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present, we argue (building in particular on Banfield 1982 and Doron 1991) that the grammatical notion of context of speech should be ramified into a Context of Thought and a Context of Utterance. Tense and person depend on the Context of Utterance, while all other indexicals (including here, now and the demonstratives) are evaluated with respect to the Context of Thought. Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present are analyzed as special combinatorial possibilities that arise when the two contexts are distinct, and exactly one of them is presented as identical to the physical point at which the sentence is articulated

Quantifiers and Variables: Insights from Sign Language (ASL and LSF)

In standard logical systems, quantifiers and variables are essential to express complex relations among objects. Natural language has expressions that have an analogous function: some noun phrases play the role of quantifiers (e.g. every man), and some pronouns play the role of variables (e.g. him, as in Every man likes people who admire him). Since the 1980’s, there has been a vibrant debate in linguistics about the way in which pronouns come to depend on their antecedents. According to one view, natural language is governed by a ‘dynamic’ logic which allows for dependencies that are far more flexible than those of standard (classical) logic. According to a competing view, the treatment of variables in classical logic does not have to be fundamentally revised to be applied to natural language. While the debate centers around the nature of the formal links that connect pronouns to their antecedents, these links are not overtly expressed in spoken language, and the debate has remained open. In sign language, by contrast, the connection between pronouns and their antecedents is often made explicit by pointing. We argue that data from French and American Sign Language provide crucial evidence for the dynamic approach over one of its main classical competitors; and we explore further sign language data that can help choose among competing dynamic analyses

Non -Redundancy: Towards a Semantic Reinterpretation of Binding Theory

 In generative grammar, Binding Theory is traditionally considered a part of syntax, in the sense that some derivations that would otherwise be interpretable are ruled out by purely formal principles. Thus 'Johni likes himi' would  in standard semantic theories yield a perfectly acceptable interpretation; it is only because of Condition B that the sentence is deviant on its coreferential reading. We explore an alternative in which some binding-theoretic principles (esp. Condition C, Condition B, a modified version of the Locality of Variable Binding argued for in Kehler 1993 and Fox 2000, and Weak and Strong Crossover) follow from the interpretive procedure - albeit a somewhat non-standard one. In a nutshell, these principles are taken to reflect the way in which sequences of evaluation are constructed in the course of the interpretation of a sentence. The bulk of the work is done by a principle of Non-Redundancy, which prevents any object from appearing twice in any given sequence of evaluation

Non-Redundancy (6-page abstract)

In generative grammar, Binding Theory is traditionally considered a part of syntax, in the sense that some derivations that would otherwise be interpretable are ruled out by purely formal principles. Thus 'Johni likes himi' would  in standard semantic theories yield a perfectly acceptable interpretation; it is only because of Condition B that the sentence is deviant on its coreferential reading. We explore an alternative in which some binding-theoretic principles (esp. Condition C, Condition B, a modified version of the Locality of Variable Binding argued for in Kehler 1993 and Fox 2000, and Weak and Strong Crossover) follow from the interpretive procedure - albeit a somewhat non-standard one. In a nutshell, these principles are taken to reflect the way in which sequences of evaluation are constructed in the course of the interpretation of a sentence. The bulk of the work is done by a principle of Non-Redundancy, which prevents any object from appearing twice in any given sequence of evaluation

Syntax and Semantics of Music: Preface

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What do monkey calls mean?

Grant acknowledgements: Chemla and Schlenker: Research by Schlenker and Chemla was conducted at Institut d’Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure – PSL Research University. Institut d’Etudes Cognitives is supported by grants ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC et ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL. Schlenker: The research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Coucil under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007- 2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n°324115-FRONTSEM (PI:Schlenker). Zuberbühler: The research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council under ERC grant ‘Prilang 283871’ and also from the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant ‘FN 310030_143359/1’. The project also benefited from the support of the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques en Côte d'Ivoire and Taï Monkey Project.A field of primate linguistics is gradually emerging. It combines general questions and tools from theoretical linguistics with rich data gathered in experimental primatology. Analyses of several monkey systems have uncovered very simple morphological and syntactic rules, and they have led to the development of a primate semantics which asks new questions about the division of semantic labor between the literal meaning of monkey calls, additional mechanisms of pragmatic enrichment, and the environmental context. We show that comparative studies across species may validate this program, and may in some cases help reconstruct the evolution of monkey communication over millions of years.PostprintPeer reviewe