Journal of Semantics

Volume 39, Issue 3, August 2022

Journal of Semantics（SSCI三区，2021 IF: 1）2022年第3-4期共刊文9篇。其中，2022年第3期共发文5篇。论文涉及含义推理、歧义等。第4期共发文4篇。论文涉及模态、焦点敏感度、预设等。欢迎转发扩散！（2022年已更完）

往期推荐：

刊讯｜SSCI 期刊《语义学杂志》2022年第1-2期

目录

ISSUE 3

■ Structural Effects on Implicature Calculation, by Jon Ander Mendia, Pages 409–442.

■ Donkey Anaphora in Non-Monotonic Environments, by Milica Denić, Yasutada Sudo, Pages 443–474.

■ People are fed up; don’t mess with them.’ Non-quantificational Arguments and Polarity Reversals, by Gennaro Chierchia, Pages 475–521.

■ Coping With Imaginative Resistance, by Daniel Altshuler, Emar Maier, Pages 523–549.

■ Who and What Do Who and What Range Over Cross-Linguistically? by Patrick D Elliott, Andreea C Nicolae, Uli Sauerland, Pages 551–579.

ISSUE 4

■ Figuring Out Root and Epistemic Uses of Modals: The Role of the Input, by Annemarie van Dooren, Anouk Dieuleveut, Ailís Cournane, Valentine Hacquard, Pages 581–616.

■ On the Role of Focus-Sensitivity for a Typology of Presupposition Triggers, by Alexander Göbel, Pages 617–656.

■ Relative Tense without Existential Quantification and Before, by Toshiyuki Ogihara, Pages 657–691.

■ Steps towards a Semantics of Dance, by Pritty Patel-Grosz, Patrick Georg Grosz, Tejaswinee Kelkar, Alexander Refsum Jensenius, Pages 693–748.

摘要

Structural Effects on Implicature Calculation

Jon Ander Mendia, Cornell University

Abstract A sample of over 3,800 students representing the four socioeconomic status (SES) levels (SES 1–4), selected by stratified random sampling, was analyzed with correlational statistics to determine their performance levels at CLIL and non-CLIL schools, according to their competence in Spanish L1, English L2, and history. Results point to certain egalitarian effects of CLIL education: while a staircase pattern is constantly present in the performance of non-CLIL students (with those from higher social classes obtaining better results), all CLIL students seem to obtain equally high results regardless of their SES.

Donkey Anaphora in Non-Monotonic Environments

Milica Denić, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam

Yasutada Sudo, Department of Linguistics, University College London

Abstract Donkey anaphora in quantified sentences is ambiguous between an existential and a universal reading. The extent to which different readings are accessible depends on the quantifier, but how to model this dependence is debated (Kanazawa, 1994; Champollion et al. 2019). This study advances this debate by providing novel experimental data on the interpretation of donkey anaphora in sentences with non-monotonic quantifiers exactly 3 and all but one. We establish that while the existential reading of donkey anaphora is the preferred one with both exactly 3 and all but one, the universal reading is accessed more with all but one than with exactly 3. These results have important implications for both Kanazawa (1994) and Champollion et al. (2019) theories, as both need to be amended to fully capture the empirical picture.

‘People are fed up; don’t mess with them.’ Non-quantificational Arguments and Polarity Reversals

Gennaro Chierchia, Harvard University

Abstract The first sentence in the title means roughly: All the people around are tired. The second means: Do not mess with any of them. Even though the second sentence looks just like a negative counterpart of the first, it doesn’t have the expected compositional meaning: it doesn’t mean “do not mess with all the people”. This phenomenon is extremely general. It takes place with Bare Plurals, as in the title. It figures prominently in the behavior of Plural Definites (I spoke to the students in trouble ≅ ∀/I didn’t speak to the students in trouble ≅ ¬∃). It also takes place with Donkey pronouns (Every farmer who had a donkey sold it ≅ ∀/No man who had a donkey sold it ≅ ¬∃). These switches of quantificational force under polarity reversals call to mind Free Choice phenomena. In particular, a determiner like any is interpreted as a narrow scope existential in a sentence like I didn’t talk to any student in trouble ≅ ¬ ∃; however, in positive environments, the existential meaning of any emerges as strengthened to universal I spoke to any student in trouble ≅ ∀. It is tempting to conjecture that the source of this uniform behavior is a uniform mechanism. While these constructions (Free Choice any, Bare Plurals, Plural Definites, and Donkey pronouns) have been studied extensively, and insightful approaches to Plural Definites in terms of Free Choice mechanisms have also been proposed (Bar Lev 2018, 2021), a unitary analysis has not been attempted to the best of my knowledge. In spite of the many challenges that a unified analysis faces, it is worth a try, for, if successful, it would considerably push forward our understanding of a wide range of very diverse constructions.

Coping With Imaginative Resistance

Daniel Altshuler, University of Oxford

Emar Maier, University of Groningen

Abstract We propose to characterize imaginative resistance as the failure or unwillingness of the reader to take a fictional description of a deviant reality at face value. The goal of the paper is to explore how readers deal with such a breakdown of the default Face Value interpretation strategy. We posit two distinct interpretative ‘coping’ strategies which help the reader engage with the resistance-inducing fiction by attributing the offending content to one of the fictional characters. We present novel empirical evidence that shows that actual readers use these strategies and we flesh out the exact workings of these strategies by integrating them into a general formal semantic framework for interpreting fiction.

Who and What Do Who and What Range Over Cross-Linguistically?

Patrick D Elliott, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Andreea C Nicolae, Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics

Uli Sauerland, Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics

Abstract Dayal’s (1996) account of the presuppositions of wh-questions makes faulty predictions for languages which draw number distinctions in the domain of simplex wh-expressions: (Dayal, 1996) predicts that a singular wh-expression should always give rise to a Uniqueness Presupposition; the Anti-Singleton Inference associated with its plural counterpart is expected to be parasitic on the uniqueness presupposition. Using data from Spanish, Greek, and Hungarian, where simplex wh-expressions inflect for number, we claim that singular simplex wh-expressions do not give rise to a Uniqueness Presupposition, but plural simplex wh-expressions nonetheless give rise to an Anti-Singleton Inference. We provide an analysis of these facts that is consistent with Dayal’s (1996) account of constituent questions, by assigning simplex wh-expressions a type-ambiguous denotation.

Figuring Out Root and Epistemic Uses of Modals: The Role of the Input

Annemarie van Dooren, Groningen University

Anouk Dieuleveut, Université de Paris

Ailís Cournane, Department of Linguistics, New York University

Valentine Hacquard, Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland

Abstract This paper investigates how children figure out that modals like must can be used to express both epistemic and “root” (i.e. non epistemic) flavors. The existing acquisition literature shows that children produce modals with epistemic meanings up to a year later than with root meanings. We conducted a corpus study to examine how modality is expressed in speech to and by young children, to investigate the ways in which the linguistic input children hear may help or hinder them in uncovering the flavor flexibility of modals. Our results show that the way parents use modals may obscure the fact that they can express epistemic flavors: modals are very rarely used epistemically. Yet, children eventually figure it out; our results suggest that some do so even before age 3. To investigate how children pick up on epistemic flavors, we explore distributional cues that distinguish roots and epistemics. The semantic literature argues they differ in “temporal orientation” (Condoravdi, 2002): while epistemics can have present or past orientation, root modals tend to be constrained to future orientation (Werner 2006; Klecha, 2016; Rullmann & Matthewson, 2018). We show that in child-directed speech, this constraint is well-reflected in the distribution of aspectual features of roots and epistemics, but that the signal might be weak given the strong usage bias towards roots. We discuss (a) what these results imply for how children might acquire adult-like modal representations, and (b) possible learning paths towards adult-like modal representations.

On the Role of Focus-Sensitivity for a Typology of Presupposition Triggers

Alexander Göbel, McGill University

Abstract This paper presents two experiments comparing presupposition triggers that differ with respect to Focus-sensitivity. The hypothesis was that Focus-sensitive (+FOCUS) triggers require a linguistic antecedent in the discourse model, whereas presuppositions of triggers lacking Focus-sensitivity (–FOCUS) are satisfied as entailments of the Common Ground. Each experiment tested a distinct prediction of this hypothesis, namely (i) being subject to salience, operationalized relative to the QUD, and (ii) global accommodation difficulty. Experiment 1 compared too as a +FOCUS trigger and again as a –FOCUS trigger in short dialogues and manipulated the presence or absence of material intervening between the target sentence containing the trigger and the utterance satisfying its presupposition. Intervening material led to a decrease in ratings as well as longer full sentence reading times of the target sentence for too but not again, in line with the prediction. Experiment 2 compared four trigger pairs that differed in Focus-sensitivity relative to presuppositionless control in a rating study in contexts that did not explicitly satisfy their presupposition. As predicted, +FOCUS triggers showed a larger decrease in ratings than –FOCUS triggers. The picture that emerges from these results is that the same kind of meaning - presuppositions - can be grounded in different aspects of the context in relation to an independent property of the trigger - Focus-sensitivity - which directly affects the discourse behavior of a trigger. The paper concludes with a discussion of some implications of the findings for linguistic theory, in particular anaphoricity.

Relative Tense without Existential Quantification and Before

Toshiyuki Ogihara, Department of Linguistics, University of Washington

Abstract This article discusses the semantics of tense morphemes in Japanese in temporal adverbial clauses as well as in relative clauses. We claim that they are non-pronominal higher order entities but do not carry existential quantifier meanings on their own. Specifically, we argue against the view that Japanese past tense sentences are necessarily existentially quantifying and that this is the reason why they cannot occur as mae ‘before’ clauses. This view is incompatible with the fact that Japanese ato ‘after’ clauses must occur in the past tense. By contrast, our own proposal about Japanese tense morphemes is based on the idea that the inherent meaning of ‘before’ (or ‘after’) agrees with the “relative” meaning of the tense morpheme in the temporal adverbial clause. That is, a ‘before’ clause must be in the future tense (conveyed by the non-past tense form) because it describes a situation that follows the matrix predication time, whereas an ‘after’ clause must be in the past tense because it describes a situation that precedes the matrix predication time. Choosing the wrong tense form would then result in a contradiction. We will make two separate compositional proposals within two major accounts of ‘before’ and ‘after’: Beaver and Condoravdi’s and Anscombe’s. This enables us to show that correct empirical predictions can be made about ‘before’ and ‘after’ clauses, including non-veridical ‘before’ clauses, regardless of which account of temporal connectives turns out to be optimal. Our proposal also covers ‘when’ clauses and (nominal) relative clauses. Japanese tense morphemes are higher order entities and are “quantifier-raised” to yield “simultaneous readings” for present tense relative clauses. From the viewpoint of natural language semantic theory, this article establishes that non-pronominal relative tense morphemes are not always existentially quantifying. When an existential quantifier interpretation is needed, it is supplied through independent means. This is a promising approach to the semantics of relative-tense languages such as Japanese.

Steps towards a Semantics of Dance

Pritty Patel-Grosz, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo

Patrick Georg Grosz, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo

Tejaswinee Kelkar, Department of Musicology, University of Oslo

Alexander Refsum Jensenius, Department of Musicology, University of Oslo and RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion, University of Oslo

Abstract As formal theoretical linguistic methodology has matured, recent years have seen the advent of applying it to objects of study that transcend language, e.g., to the syntax and semantics of music (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983, Schlenker 2017a; see also Rebuschat et al. 2011). One of the aims of such extensions is to shed new light on how meaning is construed in a range of communicative systems. In this paper, we approach this goal by looking at narrative dance in the form of Bharatanatyam. We argue that a semantic approach to dance can be modeled closely after the formal semantics of visual narrative proposed by Abusch (2013, 2014, 2021). A central conclusion is that dance not only shares properties of other fundamentally human means of expression, such as visual narrative and music, but that it also exhibits similarities to sign languages and the gestures of non-signers (see, e.g., Schlenker 2020) in that it uses space to track individuals in a narrative and performatively portray the actions of those individuals. From the perspective of general human cognition, these conclusions corroborate the idea that linguistic investigations beyond language (see Patel-Grosz et al. forthcoming) can yield insights into the very nature of the human mind and of the communicative devices that it avails.

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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