Semantics etc.

Yoad Winter. Choice Functions and the Semantics of Indefinites (LOT Summer School Lecture Notes, Summer 2004)

Philippe Schlenker. “The Lazy (French)man’s Approach to the Subjunctive (Reference to Worlds, Presuppositions and Semantic Defaults in the Analysis of Mood: Some Preliminary Remarks)”,   first draft, UCLA & IJN (last modified: June 10, 2004; new title, no other modifications for the moment).

bq. Abstract: It has proven rather difficult to provide a unified semantics for the French subjunctive (the difficulty applies more generally to Romance, but we concentrate on French). In this preliminary note, we suggest that this is because the French subjunctive is a semantic default, to be used just in case the indicative would have triggered a presupposition failure. Thus the environments in which the subjunctive appears do not form a natural class, although they are the complement of a natural class. Once this is established, a large part of the question becomes: what is the semantic contribution of the indicative? Modifying minimally the analysis of Stalnaker 1975 (which was concerned with English), we suggest that the indicative triggers a presupposition on the value of a world term w, of the form w{CS(x’, t’, w’)}, indicating that the world denoted by w lies in the Context Set of individual x’ at time t’ in world w’ (x’, t’, and w’ may be left free — if the context provides them with a salient value — or they may be bound). This derives indirectly the intuition, found both in traditional grammar and in recent research (e.g. Farkas 2003), that the indicative marks an assertive act on somebody’s part, though this person need not be the speaker. We also discuss an extension of this theory to the German Konjunktiv I, which we analyze in essence as a reportive indicative, in line with the intuitions though not with the implementation of Fabricius-Hansen & Saebø  2004. If correct, the theory we sketch makes it possible to analyze mood by analogy with person and tense as introducing a presupposition on the value of word-denoting terms, and in particular on world-denoting variables.

I am hopelessly out of the loop on job news. But here’s one bit I just got from Luis Alonso-Ovalle (thanks!):

bq. Ji-yung Kim (UMass) got the Georgetown Semantics (Visiting Assistant Prof.) Position (for next year) and Maria Gouskova (UMass) got also a Visiting Assistant Prof. position (Phonology) there.

David Chalmers, who now posts on the Arizona philosophy group weblog “Desert Landscapes”:http://www.arizonaphilosophy.com/, has compiled “a list of philosophical weblogs”:http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/weblogs.html.

[New at the "semanticsarchive":http://semanticsarchive.net]

Mandy Simons. Dividing things up: The semantics of or and the modal/or interaction. December 2003, NOT THE FINAL VERSION.

bq. Abstract In this paper, the meanings of sentences containing the word or and a modal verb are used to arrive at a novel account of the meaning of or coordinations. It is proposed that or coordinations denote sets whose members are the denotations of the disjuncts; and that the truth conditions of sentences containing or coordinations require the existence of some set made available by the semantic environment which can be ‘divided up’ in accordance with the disjuncts. The relevant notion of ‘dividing things up’ is made explicit in the paper. Detailed attention is given to the question of how the proposed truth conditions are derived from the syntactic input. The account offered allows for the derivation of both the disjunctive and the nondisjunctive readings of modal/or sentences, including the much-discussed free choice readings of such sentences.

Núria Martí Girbau. Partitives: one or two nouns?.

bq. The purpose of this paper is to revise the arguments presented in the literature for a partitive structure with two nouns and show that they provide no (strong) evidence for the presence of an empty noun in partitives. Even in those cases where the explanation based on an empty noun seems plausible, an alternative will be provided to show that there is no need to postulate an empty category to account for the data. Moreover a few new arguments will also be presented against analysing partitives as containing two nouns, which will led as to the conclusion that a partitive structure containing a single noun seems a better option. Finally, a proposal of analysis for partitives with a single noun will be briefly presented.

Xavier Villalba. Exclamatives and negation.

bq. In this paper it is argued that the highly restricted distribution of standard negation within exclamative sentences receives a principled explanation from the interaction of the basic semantic properties of the exclamative sentence-type — factivity and extreme degree quantification — with those of the negative operator. Particularly, the negative operator is shown to contradict in most cases the existential presupposition associated with the inherent factivity of exclamatives and/or the requirement that the exclamative degree operator quantify over a well-defined set of individuals. Moreover, it is argued that the only apparent counterexamples to this strong generalization receive a proper explanation once the crucial role of discourse salience is taken into account. Finally, it is shown that this approach can be extended with much profit to a large and unattested pattern of interactions and restrictions concerning quantification within exclamative sentences, with intesting theoretical consequences for the interval-based approach to the semantics of degree quantification.

[Thanks to Tamina Stephenson for the tip]

Storto, Gianluca (2003) Possessives in Context: Issues in the Semantics of Possessive Constructions. PhD Dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles. (Professor Daniel Büring, Chair)

bq. Abstract
Possessive constructions seem amenable to conveying that a very heterogeneous range of relations hold between two entities (possessor and possessum). This interpretive flexibility has been accounted for by assuming that — excluding cases where the meaning of the possessive relation is determined by the semantics of the possessum (inherent interpretations) — ”the meaning of the possessive relation is entirely determined by contextual information (extrinsic interpretations).
Contra this assumption, it is shown that not all types of possessives license the unrestricted interpretive flexibility predicted by this model: only a proper subset of extrinsic interpretations are licensed by all types of possessives. In particular, it is shown that only definite and partitive possessives license an essentially unrestricted interpretive flexibility. And it is argued that the restricted interpretive flexibility that characterizes other types of possessives indicates that the meaning of the possessive relation is specified in the semantic composition of the possessive construction.
Two types of extrinsic interpretations are thus distinguished. It is proposed that this distinction is determined by a basic ambiguity of the syntactic construction that encodes the possessive relation between possessor and possessum: the meaning of the possessive relation can be specified entirely within this structure (control interpretations), or left unspecified (free interpretations). In control interpretations the meaning of the possessive is determined independently of its context of use: this meaning constrains the (pragmatic) uses that the possessive can be put to when uttered in context. In free interpretations the meaning of the possessive is determined by contextual information: the possessive relation is encoded by a free relational variable, whose value is contextually determined (unrestricted interpretive flexibility follows).
Finally, the restricted distribution of free interpretations is argued to show that referential pronouns do not constitute the paradigm for the interpretation of free variables in discourse. It is suggested that the distribution of free interpretations follows from the interaction between a general restriction on the assignment of contextually determined values to free variables (modeled on Heim’s (1982; 1983a) Novelty Condition) and the presuppositional requirements imposed by the (Fregean) semantics of the definite determiner on the predicate that embeds the variable encoding the possessive relation.