Focus presuppositions

This paper reviews notions related to focus and presupposition and addresses the hypothesis that focus triggers an existential presupposition. Presupposition projection behavior in certain examples appears to favor a presuppositional analysis of focus. It is argued that these examples are open to a different analysis using givenness theory. Overall, the analysis favors a weak semantics for focus not including an existential presupposition

Epistemic NP Modifiers

The paper considers participles such as "unknown", "identified" and "unspecified", which in sentences such as "Solange is staying in an unknown hotel" have readings equivalent to an indirect question "Solange is staying in a hotel, and it is not known which hotel it is." We discuss phenomena including disambiguation of quantifier scope and a restriction on the set of determiners which allow the reading in question. Epistemic modifiers are analyzed in a DRT framework with file (information state) discourse referents. The proposed semantics uses a predication on files and discourse referents which is related to recent developments in dynamic modal predicate calculus. It is argued that a compositional DRT semantics must employ a semantic type of discourse referents, as opposed to just a type of individuals. A connection is developed between the scope effects of epistemic modifiers and the scope-disambiguating effect of "a certain".Comment: Final pre-publication version, 27 pages, Postscript. Final version appears in the proceedings of SALT VI

Presupposition triggering from alternatives

Final prepublication version of a paper to be published in Journal of Semantics.This paper considers a set of presupposition triggers including focus, questions, 'contrastive' statives, and an 'affirmation/negation' construction involving and not, where presuppositions are cancelable. It is proposed that these constructions, rather than having strict semantic presuppositions, have representations involving alternative sets in the sense of alternative semantics of questions and focus, and that a default process generates a presupposition from the alternative set. Presupposition projection facts are dealt with by stating a default constraint referring to dynamic denotations. The analysis can be extended to other constructions and lexical items with defeasible presupposition triggering behavior, such as inchoatives, by hypothesizing a representation involving alternatives

On verbs and time.

PhilosophyDoctor of Philosophy (PhD

Lexical Alternatives as a Source of Pragmatic Presuppositions

No abstract

Lexical Alternatives as a Source of Pragmatic Presuppositions

This paper is about the presuppositions of verbs like know and stop. Example (1) has a factive implication that the cat is on the mat, and a belief implication tha

Possible worlds semantics for pictures

Prepublication version of handbook article.Possible worlds semantics for pictures is reviewed. Pictures are mapped to propositional semantic values by a geometric method. On this basis, an account of the temporal interpretation of pictorial narratives is constructed. Another pragmatic aspect of pictorial narratives is anaphora or indexing across pictures in a sequence. An argument based on sentences that describe pictures indicates that the semantics for pictures should represent a distinguished viewpoint. There is an analogy between ambiguity in language and ambiguous pictures. Perceptual semantics for pictures considers the effect of pictures on viewers