Condition B effects in two simple steps

This paper is concerned with constraints on the interpretation of pronominal anaphora, in particular Condition B effects. It aims to contribute to a particular approach, initiated by Reinhart (Anaphora and semantic interpretation, 1983) and further developed elsewhere. It proposes a modification of Reinhart’s Interface Rule, and argues that the resulting theory compares favorably with others, while being compatible with independently motivated general hypotheses about the interaction between different interpretive mechanisms

Interpreting concealed questions

Concealed questions are determiner phrases that are naturally paraphrased as embedded questions (e.g., John knows the capital of Italy ≈ John knows what the capital of Italy is). This paper offers a novel account of the interpretation of concealed questions, which assumes that an entity-denoting expression α may be type-shifted into an expression ?z.P(α), where P is a contextually determined property, and z ranges over a contextually determined domain of individual concepts. Different resolutions of P and the domain of z yield a wide range of concealed question interpretations, some of which were not noted previously. On the other hand, principled constraints on the resolution process prevent overgeneration

An Inquisitive Perspective on Modals and Quantifiers

Inquisitive semantics enriches the standard truth-conditional notion of meaning, in order to facilitate an integrated semantic analysis of statements and questions. Taking this richer view on meaning as a starting point, this review presents a new perspective on modal operators and quantifiers, one that has the potential to address a number of challenges for standard semantic analyses of such operators. To illustrate the new perspective, we present an inquisitive take on the semantics of attitude verbs and on quantifiers taking scope out of questions