Focus structure and the referential status of indefinite quantificational expressions

Many authors who subscribe to some version of generative syntax account for the two readings of [...] sentences [...] in terms of LF-ambiguity. There is assumed to be covert quantifier raising (QR), which results in two distinct possibilities for the indefinite quantificational expressions involved to take scope over each other [...] In this paper, an alternative account is proposed which dispenses with the idea that there are different scope relations involved in the readings of […] sentences [...] and, consequently, with QR as the syntactic operation to be assumed for generating the respective LFs. I argue that it is rather focus structure in connection with type semantic issues pertaining to the indefinite quantificational expressions involved which result in the different readings associated with [...] sentences

Language in aviation:The relevance of linguistics and relevance theory

English and a semi-artificial sublanguage based on English play the dominant role as the means of communication in aviation, especially in the communication between pilots and air traffic controllers and in international contexts. The first part of the paper surveys this state of affairs from the viewpoint of (English) linguistics. In its course, attention is drawn to aviation incidents and accidents, some of which with extremely severe consequences, where the role of language, or of English in particular, was critical. The second part of the paper argues that insights provided by relevance theory can be effectively used in the analysis and explanation of some of the communication problems. Given that relevance theory has not figured as a conceptual tool box with which to approach such problems so far, it is argued that it ought to be employed, especially as it emphasises that linguistic expressions are semantically underdetermined in principle. This means that the utterance of virtually any linguistic expression, including those of the semi-artificial aviation sublanguage, is dependent on pragmatic inferencing for the recovery of what was intended to be conveyed, an important aspect in the evaluation of the role that such a sublanguage may play in principle

If a man buys a horse, … you have no argument against material implication: On a flaw in the foundations of the restrictor approach to conditionals

The paper discusses a prominent one of Kratzer's (1986, 1991, 2012) arguments against material implication analyses of the denotation of (indicative) conditional sentences. This is the argument based on the sentence _Most of the time, if a man buys a horse, he pays cash for it_. It is shown that material implication makes a prediction that does conform to speakers' intuitions, contrary to Kratzer's claim. The paper also argues that Lewis's (1975) attack on material implication analyses of conditional sentences based on examples where the conditional is embedded under the adverbials _sometimes_ and _never_ does not have much force given that the interpretation of such sentences is subject to inferential pragmatic operations in addition to the recovery of their denotation

'Deduction' versus 'inference' and the denotation of conditional sentences

The paper defends a variant of the material implication approach to the meaning of conditional sentences against some arguments that are considered to be widely subscribed to and/or important in the philosophical, psychological and linguistic literature. These arguments are shown to be wrong, debatable, or to miss their aim if the truth conditions defining material implication are viewed as determining nothing but the denotation of conditional sentences and if the function of conditional sentences in deduction (logic) is focused on rather than in inferencing (reasoning). It is shown that some ‘paradoxes of material implication’ are due to inconsistent premises of deductions introduced by semantic relations between clauses constituting the premises, a fact which does not invalidate the approach. Other ‘paradoxes’ are shown to arise because they are based on uninformative deductions, violating a basic pragmatic principle. In addition, the paper introduces the distinction between the set of possible states of a mental model of the actual world and of alternative worlds. It is argued that material implication determines the denotation of an indicative conditional as a subset of the former set and the denotation of a subjunctive conditional as a subset of the latter set, thus unifying these two types of conditionals

Focus types and argument asymmetries: a cross-linguistic study in language production

Skopeteas S, Fanselow G. Focus types and argument asymmetries: a cross-linguistic study in language production. In: Breul C, Göbbel E, eds. Contrastive information structure. Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins; 2010: 169-197.The effects of focus on syntax differ across languages: some languages encode focus in situ, while in other languages focus induces an array of constructions that deviate from the canonical configuration, such as non-canonical orders or clefts. This article presents semi-spontaneously produced data from American English, Québec French, Hungarian, and Georgian which shows that speakers of these languages select different structures under identical discourse conditions. The observed cross-linguistic differences are accounted for by means of grammatical properties of the object languages that hold independently of information structure. This account leads to the conclusion that a non-compositional mapping between information structural concepts and structural configurations is an unnecessary complication of the grammatical model