F-constructions in Yucatec Maya

Yucatec Maya, like many other Mayan languages, features a set of constructions, including relative clauses, content questions and focus constructions, that is uniquely characterized by the occurrence of the so-called Agent Focus verb form. The challenge posed by these constructions is to account for why a special verb form occurs only in these constructions. I argue that this is the case because these constructions (which I refer to as F-constructions) share particular structural and semantic properties

German clefts address unexpected questions

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence for Tönnis' (2021) hypothesis that German cleft sentences address relatively unexpected questions in discourse while their canonical variants address relatively expected questions. We present an experiment that measures the relative preference between the German cleft and its canonical variant in contexts that differ with respect to how expected the question is that they answer. The expectedness of the question was measured separately in a norming study. The result of the experiment supports analyses of German clefts that take discourse expectations into account when analyzing the acceptability of clefts in contrast to canonical sentences. Approaches that primarily focus on differences in exhaustivity (e.g., De Veaugh-Geiss et al. 2018) or contrast (e.g., Rochemont 1986) need to be adapted in order to account for the results

Contrastive topics in Paraguayan Guaraní­ discourse

The empirical basis of current formal semantic/pragmatic analyses of utterances containing contrastive topics are languages in which the expression that denotes the contrastive topic is marked prosodically, morphologically or syntactically, such as English, German, Korean, Japanese or Hungarian (e.g. Jackendoff 1972; Szabolcsi 1981; Roberts 1998; Büring 1997, 2003; Lee 1999). Such analyses do not extend to Paraguayan Guaraní­, a language in which neither prosody, nor word order, nor the contrastive topic clitic =katu identify the contrastive topic. This article develops a formal pragmatic analysis of contrastive topic utterances in Paraguayan Guaraní­ and explores cross-linguistic similarities and differences in contrastive topic utterances

A Dynamic Semantic Account of the Temporal Interpretation of Noun Phrases

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Prosodic cues to presupposition projection

In English utterances with factive predicates, the content of the clausal complement of the predicate may project, i.e., taken to be a commitment of the speaker, even when the factive predicate is embedded under an entailment canceling operator (e.g., Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1971; Karttunen 1971). Based on impressionistic judgments, Beaver (2010) and Simons, Beaver, Roberts & Tonhauser (to appear) suggested that whether the content of the complement of an utterance with a factive predicate projects depends on the information structure of the utterance and, since information structure is prosodically marked, on the prosodic realization of the utterance. This paper describes the results of three perception experiments designed to explore the influence of the prosodic realization of an utterance with a factive predicate on the projection of the content of the complement. The results of the experiments suggest that the prosodic realization of such utterances provides a cue to the projectivity of the content of the complement. These findings provide empirical support for the question-based analysis of projection advanced in Simons et al. to appear

A Dynamic Semantic Account of the Temporal Interpretation of Noun Phrases

In general, the temporal interpretation of natural language utterances is concerned with identifying the temporal location of properties and relations expressed within an utterance with respect to contextually salient time points, e.g., the time of utter ance. Most of the literature on temporal interpretation has been concerned with th

What projects and why

The empirical phenomenon at the center of this paper is projection, which we define (uncontroversially) as follows: (1) Definition of projection An implication projects if and only if it survives as an utterance implicatio

An approach to polarity sensitivity and negative concord by lexical underspecification

This paper presents a dynamic semantic approach to the licensing of Polarity Sensitive Items (PSIs) and n--words of Negative Concord. We propose that PSIs are unified by the semantic scale property, which is responsible for their sensitivity to the context; we develop a semantic licensing analysis based on Fauconnier's (1975) scales and Ladusaw's (1979) notion of entailment. The first part of the paper concludes with a formalization of semantic licensing in the sense of Ladusaw (1979) within HPSG (see, e.g., Pollard and Sag (1994)) which allows for a uniform treatment of the licensing of PSIs and n--words of Negative Concord and accounts for the disambiguating nature of PSIs in scopally ambiguous sentences. The second part of the paper is concerned with the limitations of semantic licensing, which, we claim, needs to be sensitive to the context. We present the discussions of, e.g., Heim (1984) and Israel (1996) with respect to the importance of the context in particular licensing constellations, and then turn to linearity constraints on licensing. We present data from German which may not be accounted for by linearity constraints and sketch an analysis for this data which supports the necessity of context--sensitive semantic licensing