FictionalAssert and Implicatures

In this paper, we present interdisciplinary work of linguists and literary scholars on the emergence of implicatures in fictional, here particularly lyrical texts. By systematically analysing a small corpus of poems by Emily Dickinson, John Donne, and other poets not discussed here, we show that, due to specific characteristics of the text type, an additional effect of pragmatic interpretation occurs that we call apparent flouting: in poetry, the pragmatic interpretation of the text is achieved in a more complex way than in non-fictional discourse. It requires a speech act operator that is different from Assert (Krifka 1995), which applies to the text as a whole and does not assert its actual truth. Because the pragmatic interpretation of poetry is more complex, cases of ambiguity that put forward several possible readings, for example, are not resolved right away. Rather, all possible readings contribute to the overall meaning of the poem

A Semantic Explanation for Intervention Effects

This paper proposes a semantic analysis of intervention effects in wh-constructions. Wh-phrases are assumed to use the same interpretive mechanism as focus. Similar to a focus sensitive operator evaluating the contribution of focus, a question operator evaluates the contribution of a wh-phrase. An intervening focus sensitive operator interferes with this evaluation and renders the structure uninterpretable. Crosslinguistic variation in the appearance of intervention effects arises due to variation in the Logical Form of questions and of focus evaluation

Temporal noch/still and further-to readings of German noch

In this paper I propose an analysis of temporal still and its German counterpart noch. The proposal unifies earlier analyses e.g. of \u27it is still raining\u27, \u27it is still 8am\u27. It is then applied to so-called further-to noch in German as in \u27Ich gehe noch einkaufen\u27 (lit.: \u27I still go shopping\u27 = \u27I will just quickly go shopping\u27). The proposal highlights the interesting interaction of syntactic structure, presupposition, implicature and focus in such sentences

Towards a model of incremental composition

This paper reviews some recent psycholinguistic results on semantic processing and explores their consequences for a cognitively plausible model of incremental composition. We argue that semantic composition is neither strictly incremental (in the sense that every incoming word is composed immediately) nor global (in the sense that composition only proceeds when the entire syntactic structure is available). We conjecture that incremental composition is type driven: elements in the same type domain (e.g. temporal <i>) are composed immediately; elements that concern different type domains (e.g. temporal <i> vs. event <v>) cause delayed processing

Dog After Dog Revisited

This paper presents a compositional semantic analysis of pluractional adverbial modifiers like \u27dog after dog\u27 and \u27one dog after the other\u27. We propose a division of labour according to which much of the semantics is carried by a family of plural operators. The adverbial itself contributes a semantics that we call pseudoreciprocal

Turkish correlatives in monolingual Turkish and bilingual Turkish-German grammar

Our paper presents an experimental study on multiple correlatives in Turkish. The research questions that guided our study are twofold: (a) What are the presuppositions of multiple correlatives in Turkish? (b) Is there a difference between monolingual Turkish speakers and bilingual Turkish-German speakers with respect to multiple correlatives? Question (a) targets the presuppositions of interrogative-based correlatives. Since the presuppositions of multiple questions are crosslinguistically variable, are the presuppositions of correlatives based on them variable in a parallel way? Question (b) targets crosslinguistic variability in the acceptability of multiple correlatives. While Turkish permits them, German does not. Does this variability affect bilingual speakers’ grammars? Our results indicate that (a) multiple correlatives share the presuppositions of the questions they contain and (b) bilingual speakers’ grammar of correlatives is different from that of monolingual speakers. The paper sheds a new light on crosslinguistic variation in the domain of questions and correlatives and on bilingual grammar

Exceptions in Relational Plurals

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Reciprocals and Cumulation

No abstract

Discourse related readings of scalar particles

This paper offers an analysis of certain uses of the particles noch/still according to which they scope above a speech act operator. This allows us to keep their meaning contribution stable, and requires a framework in which the operators are part of the LF