On Presupposition Projection with Trivalent Connectives

A basic puzzle about presuppositions concerns their projection from propositional constructions. This problem has regained much attention in the last decade since many of its prominent accounts, including variants of the trivalent Strong Kleene connectives, suffer from the so-called *proviso problem*. This paper argues that basic insights of the Strong Kleene system can be used without invoking the proviso problem. It is shown that the notion of *determinant value* that underlies the definition of the Strong Kleene connectives leads to a natural generalization of the filtering conditions proposed in Karttunen's article "Presuppositions of compound sentences" (LI, 1973). Incorporating this generalized  condition into an incremental projection algorithm avoids the proviso problem as well as the derivation of conditional presuppositions. It is argued that the same effects that were previously modelled using conditional presuppositions may be viewed as effects of presupposition suspension and contextual inference on presupposition projection

Karttunen logic for presupposition projection

Presuppositions of complex sentences are empirically distinguished from the propositional contexts that render a sentence coherent. This distinction is at the heart of the proviso problem for presupposition projection. Here we show that Karttunen’s inference-based approach in his proposals from the early 1970s can be used to directly avoid the proviso problem. Inference-based projection is different from trivalent accounts or satisfaction-based methods in distinguishing presuppositions from admittance conditions on contexts. This distinction is used within a new propositional fragment, whose rules for updating local contexts and satisfying presuppositions are explained using the same Incrementality principle of previous accounts, but without any of the additional assumptions that have been used to tackle the proviso problem

Atom Predicates and Set Predicates: Towards a General Theory of Plural Quantification

No abstract

On the event semantics of nominals and adjectives - the one-argument hypothesis

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A modular approach to intensionality

This paper introduces a procedure that takes a simple version of extensional semantics and generates from it an equivalent possible-world semantics that is suitable for treating intensional phenomena in natural language. This process of intensionalization allows to treat intensional phenomena as stemming exclusively from the lexical meaning of words like believe, need or fake. We illustrate the proposed intensionalization technique using an extensional toy fragment. This fragment is used to show that independently motivated extensional mechanisms for scope shifting and verb-object composition, once properly intensionalized, are strictly speaking responsible for certain intensional effects, including de dicto/de re ambiguities and coordinations containing intensional transitive verbs. While such extensional-intensional relations have often been assumed in the literature, the present paper offers a formal sense for this claim, facilitating the dissociation between extensional semantics and intensional semantics

Atom Predicates and Set Predicates: Towards a General Theory of Plural Quantification

The interpretation of sentences with plural determiners and collective predicates is a highly complex problem that has not been sufficiently investigated, despite many advances in theories of plurality and quantification. This paper proposes a new typology of predicates that serves as a basis for a general treatment of singular an

Functional Readings and Wide-Scope Indefinites

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Object mass nouns and comparative judgements

The mass/count distinction is often semantically manifested in comparative judgements as a difference between counting and measurement. Thus, the count nouns in \u27more stones/packs\u27 trigger counting whereas the mass nouns in \u27more stone/sugar\u27 involve measuring. \u27Object mass nouns\u27 (OMNs) like \u27furniture\u27, \u27weaponry\u27 and \u27baggage\u27 are exceptional among mass nouns in showing strong counting effects in comparatives. There is little agreement on the interpretation of this fact. Some works propose that OMNs have discrete meanings while others attribute their countability in comparatives to other reasons. Deciding between these approaches is challenging, partly because it has remained unclear if OMNs in comparatives show any semantic distinction from count nouns. In this paper we demonstrate that they do. We report experimental findings showing that in contexts that favor measurement, counting with OMNs is less frequently preferred than with count nouns. We analyze these results by proposing that although referents of both common nouns and OMNs are perceived as discrete objects, OMN denotations are continuous. The tolerant mass/count syntax of the comparative leaves the discrete perception of both kinds of nouns as the prominent factor in their interpretation. However, when the context primes measurement, the continuity of OMN denotations allows them to trigger non-discrete measures more easily than count nouns. This proposal retains the advantages of semantic theories of the mass/count distinction while employing them in a model that is also sensitive to biases coming from pragmatics and the perception of real-world objects

Reciprocal predicates: a prototype model

Many languages have verbal stems like hug and marry whose intransitive realization is interpreted as reciprocal. Previous semantic analyses of such reciprocal intransitives rely on the assumption of symmetric participation. Thus, 'Sam and Julia hugged' is assumed to entail both 'Sam hugged Julia' and 'Julia hugged Sam'. In this paper we report experimental results that go against this assumption. It is shown that although symmetric participation is likely to be preferred by speakers, it is not a necessary condition for accepting sentences with reciprocal verbs. To analyze the reciprocal alternation, we propose that symmetric participation is a typical feature connecting the meanings of reciprocal and binary forms. This accounts for the optionality as well as to the preference of this feature. Further, our results show that agent intentionality often boosts the acceptability of sentences with reciprocal verbs. Accordingly, we propose that intentionality is another typical semantic feature of such verbs, separate from symmetric participation

Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology

cognitive science; semantics; languag