刊讯｜SSCI 期刊《语义学杂志》2022年第1-2期

Journal of Semantics

Issue 1-2, 2022

Journal of Semantics（SSCI 三区，2021 IF：1）2022年第1期共发文5篇，论文涉及德语eher与英语rather、copredication、焦点、分配性等；2022年第2期共发文5篇，论文涉及反事实句、most和more than half、语调与语义、语境与真值条件等。

目录

Issue1

■ Articulated Homogeneity in Cumulative Sentences, by Keny Chatain, Pages 1–37

■ Comparison via eher, by Carla Umbach & Stephanie Solt, Pages 39–85

■ Property Inheritance, Deferred Reference and Copredication, by Matthew Gotham, Pages 87–116

■ All Focus is Contrastive: On Polarity (Verum) Focus, Answer Focus, Contrastive Focus and Givenness, by Daniel Goodhue, Pages 117–158

■ The Mereological Structure of Distributivity: A Case Study of Binominal Each, by Jess H-K Law, Pages 159–211

Issue2

■ Alternatives in Counterfactuals: What Is Right and What Is Not, by Jacopo Romoli, Paolo Santorio & Eva Wittenberg, Pages 213–260

■ Are Most and More Than Half Truth-Conditionally Equivalent?, by Milica Denić & Jakub Szymanik, Pages 261–294

■ Non-Intrusive Questions as a Special Type of Non-Canonical Questions, by Donka F Farkas, Pages 295–337

■ Intonational Commitments, by Deniz Rudin, Pages 339–383

■ Composing Local Contexts, by Chris Barker, Pages 385–407

摘要

  Articulated Homogeneity in Cumulative Sentences

Keny Chatain

Abstract In this work, I use cumulative readings of every (Champollion, 2010, 2016a; Haslinger & Schmitt, 2018; Kratzer, 2003; Schein, 1993) as a tool to investigate homogeneity in cumulative readings in general. Based on a new observation about the homogeneity properties of cumulative readings of every, I argue that the homogeneity properties of cumulative readings arise from the interaction of multiple operators, each operator contributing one exhaustive participation inference which disappears in negative contexts. I identify these operators with the thematic role heads in a Neo-Davidsonian semantics. The resulting theory is able to predict the homogeneity properties of cumulative sentences from the homogeneity properties of their arguments and the position of these arguments.

Comparison via eher

Carla Umbach & Stephanie Solt

Abstract This paper is about the semantics of the German adverb eher, which has three, or perhaps four, readings: temporal, epistemic, metalinguistic and—depending on whether it is accepted as a genuine reading—preference. In its epistemic reading, eher gained prominence in semantics because it was used by Kratzer (1981) to argue that the notion of possibility is gradable. Eher has also received attention from a diachronic perspective, where it has been compared to the English adverb rather ( Gergel 2009).

Our analysis starts from the temporal reading which, first of all, expresses temporal precedence. We argue that temporal eher is indexical (unlike früher/‘earlier’), comparing closeness to a perspectival center, and that the non-temporal readings inherit their basic structure from the temporal one. The analysis of the non-temporal readings will be embedded in a Kratzer-style ordering semantics, deviating from the standard picture in assuming (i), that both the modal base and the ordering source are relativized to a perspective holder and (ii), that in the case of metalinguistic eher, interpretations (in the sense of Barker 2002/ Krifka 2012) are compared instead of worlds. Our analysis is different from that developed by Herburger & Rubinstein (2018), which ignores the temporal as well as the metalinguistic reading and takes recourse to “degrees of belief”.

At the end of the paper, we briefly look at expressions related to eher, including English more and its German counterpart mehr as well as English rather, and also at the modal reading of German schon (‘already’).

Property Inheritance, Deferred Reference and Copredication

Matthew Gotham

Abstract There are sentences that are coherent and possibly true, but in which there is at the very least the appearance of a conflict between the requirements of two (or more) predicates that are applied to the same argument. This phenomenon, known as copredication, raises various issues for linguistic theory. In this paper I defend and develop an approach to the issues of counting and individuation in copredication put forward in previous work, in dialogue with criticisms made by Liebesman & Magidor and their own positive account of copredication.

All Focus is Contrastive: On Polarity (Verum) Focus, Answer Focus, Contrastive Focus

Daniel Goodhue

Abstract I develop a general theory of focus and givenness that can account for truly contrastive focus, and for polarity focus, including data that are sometimes set apart under the label “verum focus”. I show that polarity focus creates challenges for classic theories of focus (e.g. Rooth 1992, a.o.) that can be dealt with by requiring that all focus marking is truly contrastive, and that givenness deaccenting imposes its own distinct requirement on prominence shifts. To enforce true contrast, I employ innocent exclusion (Fox 2007), which I suggest may impose a general filter on what counts as a valid alternative. A key, novel feature of my account is that focal targets are split into two kinds, those that are contextually supported and those that are constructed ad hoc, and that the presence of a contextually supported target can block the ability to construct an ad hoc target. This enables a novel explanation of the data motivating true contrast, and enables polarity focus to be brought into the fold of a unified and truly contrastive theory of focus. I then compare the account to theories of verum focus that make use of non-focus-based VERUM operators, and make the argument that the focus account is more parsimonious and has better empirical coverage.

The Mereological Structure of Distributivity: A Case Study of Binominal Each

Jess H-K Law

Abstract Binominal each is known to exhibit selectional requirements on the noun phrase that immediately precedes it. The goal of this paper is to reduce these selectional requirements to a single requirement of monotonic growth of measurement in relation to the ‘size’ of distributivity. More concretely, it is argued that binominal each imposes a constraint on the functional dependencies arising from distributive quantification, requiring that the measurement of its host grows monotonically with the number of values being distributively quantified. To make constraints on dependencies formally explicit, I devise a version of dynamic plural logic with features from van den Berg (1996) and Brasoveanu (2008, 2013) to semantically represent dependencies arising from evaluating distributive quantification. The use of a dynamic logic, coupled with a delayed evaluation mechanism in terms of higher order meaning (Cresti, 1995; Swart, 2000; Charlow, 2021, allows the constraint to act as an output context constraint on distributive quantification, which mirrors the use of output constraints pioneered by Farkas (1997, 2002b) and and further developed in Brasoveanu (2013), Henderson (2014) and Kuhn (2017).

Alternatives in Counterfactuals: What Is Right and What Is Not

Jacopo Romoli, Paolo Santorio & Eva Wittenberg

Abstract Classical semantics for counterfactuals is based on a notion of minimal change: If |${\textsf {A}}$|⁠, would |${\textsf {C}}$| says that the worlds that make |${\textsf {A}}$| true and that are otherwise minimally different from the actual world are |${\textsf {C}}$|-worlds. This semantics suffers from a well-known difficulty with disjunctive antecedents (see e.g. Alonso-Ovalle, 2009; Willer, 2018; Santorio, 2018, a.o.). In a recent study, Ciardelli, Zhang, and Champollion (Ciardelli et al., 2018b; henceforth, CZC) present new, related difficulties for the classical approach having to do with unpredicted differences between counterfactuals with De Morgan-equivalent antecedents, and related pattern of inferences. They propose a new semantics for counterfactuals, which builds on inquisitive semantics (see Ciardelli et al., 2018a) and gives up on minimal change. Building on this debate, we report on a series of experiments that investigate the role of overt negation in this data. Our results replicate CZC’s main effects, but they also indicate that those effects are linked to the presence of overt negation. We propose a novel account, based on three key assumptions: (i) the semantics for counterfactuals does involve a notion of minimal change, after all; (ii) the meanings of disjunction and negation are associated with alternatives, which interact with the meaning of counterfactuals; (iii) the alternatives generated by negation are partially determined by the question under discussion (QUD). We compare our account with other existing accounts, including CZC’s own proposal, as well as Schulz (2019) and Bar-Lev & Fox (2020) ones.

Are Most and More Than Half Truth-Conditionally Equivalent?

Milica Denić & Jakub Szymanik

Abstract Quantifying determiners most and more than half are standardly assumed to have the same truth-conditional meaning. Much work builds on this assumption in studying how the two quantifiers are mentally encoded and processed (Hackl, 2009; Lidz et al., 2011; Pietroski et al., 2009; Steinert-Threlkeld et al., 2015; Szymanik & Zajenkowski, 2010; Talmina et al., 2017). There is however empirical evidence that most is sometimes interpreted as ‘significantly more than half’ (Ariel, 2003, 2004; Ramotowska et al., 2020; Solt, 2011, 2016). Is this difference between most and more than half a pragmatic effect, or is the standard assumption that the two quantifiers are truth-conditionally equivalent wrong? We report two experiments which demonstrate that most preserves the ‘significantly more than half’ interpretation in negative environments, which we argue to speak in favor of there being a difference between the two quantifiers at the level of truth conditions.

Non-Intrusive Questions as a Special Type of Non-Canonical Questions

Donka F Farkas

Abstract This paper introduces on the scene a new type of non-canonical question, dubbed non-intrusive, exemplified by interrogatives marked by the particle oare in Romanian. It does so by providing an account of the distribution and interpretation of this particle using an updated version of the context components in Fălăuş & Laca (2014), and an elaboration of the general assumptions in Faller (2002). The intuition the account captures is that by marking an interrogative with oare, the speaker signals that she does not assume that the issue she raises will be resolved in a future state of the conversation. It is further argued that non-intrusive questions are empirically close to but not identical with conjectural questions, discussed most recently in Eckardt (2018), and therefore have to be recognized as a separate category. The predictions and theoretical implications of the account are discussed relative to a general typology of canonical and non-canonical questions.

Intonational Commitments

Deniz Rudin

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of inquisitive rising declaratives (Gunlogson 2001, Jeong 2018) within the Table model (Farkas & Bruce 2010). On this account, intonational tunes are modifiers of context update functions: rising intonation removes the speaker commitment component of a context update. This delivers a compositional account of the contributions of sentence type and intonational tune to the illocutionary mood of an utterance, showing how the semantic type of declarative sentences, the rising intonational tune, and a general-purpose utterance function (Farkas & Roelofsen 2017) conspire to derive the basic discourse effect of rising declaratives without any construction-specific stipulations. The account makes use of only the most fundamental representational primitives independently necessary to model assertions and neutral questions, showing that rising declaratives can be accounted for without recourse to projected commitments, metalinguistic issues, or explicit marking of commitment strength, evidence source, or epistemic bias (cf. Gunlogson 2008, Northrup 2014, Malamud & Stephenson 2015, Farkas & Roelofsen 2017). Inferences of bias generated by rising declaratives are accounted for with a novel pragmatics for the Table model, formalizing what is implicit in discussions of the role played in the model by speaker commitments and projected Common Grounds.

Composing Local Contexts

Chris Barker

Abstract An expression’s presuppositions must be satisfied by its local context, that is, by the utterance context updated with the content of expressions that have already been evaluated. Traditional dynamic approaches track local context by remaking clause denotations into context update functions. This requires crafting for each semantic operator an update recipe that is not fully determined by its truth conditions, failing to capture how local contexts depend only on truth conditions and order of evaluation. In other theories, computing local contexts involves reasoning about the set of all possible grammatical syntactic completions, which relocates local contexts outside of the semantics. I show how to build local contexts systematically and uniformly as part of the composition of ordinary truth conditions. The result is a minimalist dynamic semantics in which the only thing that is dynamically tracked is the semantic content of what has already been said.

期刊简介

Journal of Semantics covers all areas in the study of meaning, with a focus on formal and experimental methods. It welcomes submissions on semantics, pragmatics, the syntax/semantics interface, cross-linguistic semantics, experimental studies of meaning, and semantically informed philosophy of language.

《语义学杂志》涵盖了语义研究的所有领域，尤其关注形式的和实验的方法。杂志欢迎有关语义学、语用学、句法—语义接口、跨语言语义、语义实验研究和涉及语义的语言哲学等研究领域的稿件。

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