Strong Necessity Modals: Four Socio-pragmatic Corpus Studies

Need to is less ambiguous than have to or got to about the source of the obligation; need to is said to require the obligation to stem from someone’s priorities or internal needs, whereas have to and got to can tie the obligation to any contextually plausible source. This paper investigates the social reasons that a speaker might choose or avoid the less ambiguous form. In view of the semantics of need to, the speaker who utters you need to unambiguously acts as if she is familiar with the hearer’s priorities and licensed to tell him what is good for him – a socially risky move. I therefore predict that you need to will be more appropriate and thus more common from people with knowledge about the relevant domain, people in authority over the hearer, and people who play a mentoring role in the hearer’s life because these people are more likely to be licensed to tell the hearer what is good for him in the context. I find evidence consistent with these predictions by investigating corpora that contain information about how the speaker and hearer relate to each other

Using Lexical Semantics to Predict the Distributivity Potential of Verb Phrases in a Large Dataset

Applied to a plural subject (“Alice and Bob”), some predicates are understood distributively (individually true of each member of the subject: “Alice and Bob smiled” conveys that Alice smiled and Bob smiled); some are understood nondistributively (true of the subject as a whole, but not each member individually: “Alice and Bob met”); and some can be understood in both ways (“Alice and Bob opened the window”: distributive if they each individually opened it, nondistributive if they opened it jointly). This paper tackles the open question of which predicates are understood in which way(s) and why: Which other predicates act like “smile”, like “meet”, or like “open the window”? Researchers would agree that a verb phrase's distributivity potential depends on world knowledge about the event that it describes. Making that truism predictive, this paper presents an experimental study providing evidence consistent with several large-scale, theoretically-motivated generalizations in this realm

Verbs describing routines facilitate object omission in English

Which normally-transitive English verbs can omit their objects (I ate), and why? This paper explores three factors that have been suggested to facilitate object omission: (i) how strongly a verb selects its object (Resnik 1993); (ii) a verb's frequency (Goldberg 2005); (iii) the extent to which the verb is associated with a routine – a recognized, conventional series of actions within a community (Levin & Rapaport Hovav 2014; Martí­ 2015). To operationalize (iii), this paper leverages the assumption that a given verb may be more strongly associated with a routine in one community than another. Comparing writings across communities, this paper offers corpus and experimental evidence that verbs omit their objects more readily in the communities where they are more strongly associated with a routine. Object-omitting uses of verbs are analyzed, following other work, as intransitive aspectual activities describing an agent's routine actions; so the hearer's task is not to recover a missing object, but to recognize the routine described by the verb. More broadly, the paper explores how the meaning and syntactic potential of verbs are shaped by the practices of the people who use them

Deriving the distributivity potential of adjectives via measurement theory

The boxes are heavy can convey that each box is heavy (distributive), or that some individually light boxes qualify as heavy when lifted together (nondistributive; Schwarzschild 1996, Schwarzschild 2011). In contrast, the boxes are fragile generally requires each box to be fragile (distributive). Which adjectives behave like heavy or like fragile, and why? This paper proposes a measurement-theoretic account. For a gradable adjective to be understood nondistributively, I argue that a⊕b must exceed a and b along the scale associated with the adjective. That way, the contextual standard θ for what ‘counts as’ (adjective) in the context can be set in such a way that the composite object a⊕b surpasses the contextual standard θ while a and b individually fall short of it – a nondistributive understanding, in that the adjective is true of a⊕b together but not of a or b individually. This ordering is possible for heavy but not fragile, deriving their differences. More generally, researchers agree that an adjective’s potential for distributivity depends on what we know about the property it describes. Making that idea more explanatory, this paper articulates which features of the property described by the adjective matter for distributivity and why

Adjectives relate individuals to states: Evidence from the two readings of English Determiner + Adjective

As an argument in favor of the (minority) view that adjectives involve a neo-Davidsonian state argument, I argue that it grounds an analysis of the English Determiner + Adjective construction ('the old'). On its “individuated” reading ('the old are generally happier'), this seems to refer to 'old individuals'; on its “mass” reading ('the old is never ordinary'), to something like 'oldness'. Empirically, this paper uses naturally-occurring data to show that both readings are more productive than sometimes  suggested. Theoretically, the two are parsimoniously derived by existentially closing off one or the other of the two arguments (the individual argument 'x', the state argument 's') made available by the state analysis – 'λxλs'['old'('s') ∧ 'holder'('x','s')] – deriving a predicate of individuals for the individuated reading, and a predicate of states for the mass reading. This account of Determiner + Adjective further reflects the philosophical idea that properties can be construed as predicates of individuals or as the abstract thing that those individuals share; and connects to other ways of nominalizing both verb phrases and adjectives

The lexical and formal semantics of distributivity

Some predicates are distributive (true of each member of a plural subject: if two people 'smile', they each do). Others are nondistributive (if two people 'meet', they do so jointly rather than individually), or go both ways: if two people 'open a door', perhaps they each do so (distributive), or perhaps they do so jointly but not individually (nondistributive). This paper takes up the rarely-explored lexical semantics question of which predicates are understood in which way(s) and why, presenting quantitative evidence for predictions about how certain features of an event shape the inferences drawn from the predicate describing it. Causative predicates ('open a door'), and predicates built from transitive verbs more generally, are shown to favor a nondistributive interpretation, whereas experiencer-subject predicates ('love a movie') and those built from intransitive verbs ('smile') are mostly distributive. Turning to the longstanding formal semantics question about how distributivity should be represented compositionally, any such theory ends up leaving much of the work to lexical/world knowledge of the sort that this paper makes explicit