Semantics etc.

Bart Geurts (with Rob van der Sandt). “Interpreting focus”:http://www.kun.nl/phil/tfl/bart/papers/focus.pdf. ms in progress.

bq. Abstract Although it is widely agreed, if often only tacitly, that there is a close connection between focus and presupposition, recent research has tended to shy away from the null hypothesis, which is that focus is systematically associated with presupposition along the following lines:
The Background-Presupposition Rule (BPR) Whenever focusing gives rise to a background lambdax.phi(x), there is a presupposition to the effect that lambda x.phi(x) holds of some individual.
This paper aims to show, first, that the evidence in favour of the BPR is in fact rather good, and attempts to clarify its role in the interpretation of focus particles like ‘only’ and ‘too’, arguing that unlike the former the latter is focus-sensitive in an idiosyncratic way, adding its own interpretative constraints to those of the BPR. The last part of the paper discusses various objections that have been raised against the BPR, taking a closer look at the peculiarities of ‘nobody’ and ’somebody’, and comparing the interpretative effects of focusing with those of it-clefts.

Bart Geurts (with Frans van der Slik). “Ups and downs in syllogistic reasoning”:http://www.kun.nl/phil/tfl/bart/papers/upsdowns.pdf. ms in progress.

bq. Abstract The difficulty of a syllogistic argument is affected by the meanings of the quantifiers it contains and the way they are arranged. A quantifier may be upward entailing (i.e. license inferences from subsets to supersets) or downward entailing (i.e. license inferences from supersets to subsets). We present data showing that sentences and arguments containing both types of quantifier are more difficult than others. Furthermore, inferences from subsets to supersets turn out to be easier than inferences that go in the opposite direction.

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