The indefatigable “Robert van Rooy”:http://turing.wins.uva.nl/~vanrooy/ has posted two new papers:
“A modal analysis of modal subordination”:http://turing.wins.uva.nl/~vanrooy/JoS03.pdf
bq. In this paper I give a modal two-dimensional analysis of presupposition and modal subordination. I will think of presupposition as a non-veridical propositional attitude. This allows me to evaluate what is presupposed and what is asserted at different dimensions without getting into the binding problem. What is presupposed will be represented by an accessibility relation between possible worlds. The major part of the paper consists of a proposal to account for the dependence of the interpretation of modal expressions, i.e. modal subordination, in terms of an accessibility relation as well. Moreover, I show how such an analysis can be extended from the propositional to the predicate logical level.
“Negative Polarity Items in Questions: Strength as Relevance”:http://turing.wins.uva.nl/~vanrooy/NPIQuest-n.pdf
bq. The traditional approach towards (negative) polarity items is to answer the question in which contexts NPIs are licensed. The inspiring approaches of Kadmon & Landman (1990, 1993) (K&L) and Krifka (1990, 1992, 1995) go a major step further: they also seek to answer the question of why these contexts license NPIs. To explain the appropriate use of polarity items in questions, however, we need to answer an even more challenging question: why is an NPI used in a particular utterance in the first place? K&L and Krifka go some way to answer this question as well, but I seek to give the question a somewhat ‘deeper’ explanation.
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This entry was posted by fintel on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2003, at 2:12 pm.
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