Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this is a lucid and systematic introduction to semantics as applied to transformational grammars of the ...

In this paper I offer an account of the meaning of must and can within the framework of possible worlds semantics. The paper consists of two parts: the first argues for a relative concept of modality underlying modal words like must and can in natural language. I give preliminary definitions of the meaning of these words which are formulated in terms of logical consequence and compatibility, respectively. The second part discusses one kind of insufficiency in the meaning definitions given in (...) the first part, which arise from the ex falso quodlibet paradox of logical consequence. In stepwise fashion, I make an attempt to avoid most of the consequences of this paradox for the meaning definitions of must and can. (shrink)

Situation semantics was developed as an alternative to possible worlds semantics. In situation semantics, linguistic expressions are evaluated with respect to partial, rather than complete, worlds. There is no consensus about what situations are, just as there is no consensus about what possible worlds or events are. According to some, situations are structured entities consisting of relations and individuals standing in those relations. According to others, situations are particulars. In spite of unresolved foundational issues, the partiality provided by situation semantics (...) has led to some genuinely new approaches to a variety of phenomena in natural language semantics. In the way of illustration, this article includes relatively detailed overviews of a few selected areas where situation semantics has been successful: implicit quantifier domain restrictions, donkey pronouns, and exhaustive interpretations. It moreover addresses the question of how Davidsonian event semantics can be embedded in a semantics based on situations. Other areas where a situation semantics perspective has led to progress include attitude ascriptions, questions, tense, aspect, nominalizations, implicit arguments, point of view, counterfactual conditionals, and discourse relations. (shrink)

The last section made it clear that an analysis which at first seems to fail is viable after all. It is viable if we let it depend on a partition function to be provided by the context of conversation. This analysis leaves certain traits of the partition function open. I have tried to show that this should be so. Specifying these traits as Pollock does leads to wrong predictions. And leaving them open endows counterfactuals with just the right amount of (...) variability and vagueness. (shrink)

What are facts, situations, or events? When Situation Semantics was born in the eighties, I objected because I could not swallow the idea that situations might be chunks of information. For me, they had to be particulars like sticks or bricks. I could not imagine otherwise. The first manuscript of “An Investigation of the Lumps of Thought” that I submitted to Linguistics and Philosophy had a footnote where I distanced myself from all those who took possible situations to be units (...) of information. In that context and at that time, this meant Jon Barwise and John Perry. (shrink)

I will assume (without explicitly argue for it here) that the verb’s external argument is not an argument of the verb root itself, but is introduced by a separate head in a neo-Davidsonian way. The content argument can be saturated by DPs denoting the kinds of things that can be believed or reported.

This paper pursues some of the consequences of the idea that there are (at least) two sources for distributive/cumulative interpretations in English. One source is lexical pluralization: All predicative stems are born as plurals, as Manfred Krifka and Fred Landman have argued. Lexical pluralization should be available in any language and should not depend on the particular make-up of its DPs. I suggest that the other source of cumulative/distributive interpretations in English is directly provided by plural DPs. DPs with plural (...) agreement features can ‘release’ those features to pluralize adjacent verbal projections. If there is a lexical source for distributive/cumulative interpretations, there should be instances of such interpretations with singular DPs. But there should also be cases of distributive/cumulative interpretations that require the presence of DPs with plural agreement morphology. (shrink)

They are expressives, too. There is a phonology. There is a syntax. There is a compositional semantics. There are interesting interactions to investigate. German, Greek, and Papago are known examples of discourse particle languages. Intonation has been said to have similar uses in other languages.

The adjectival passive construction that is traditionally called ‘Zustandspassiv’ (‘state passive’) in German seems to have the same syntactic and semantic properties as its English cousin, except that it is easier to identify. German state or adjectival passives select the auxiliary sein (‘be’), and are therefore clearly distinguished from verbal or ‘Vorgangs’- passives (‘process passives’), which use the auxiliary werden (‘get’, ‘become’). In spite of their appearance, German state passives do not form a homogenious class, however. There are two important (...) subclasses that behave differently with respect to the adverbial immer noch (‘still’), for example2. (shrink)

Resultatives raise important questions for the syntax-semantics interface, and this is why they have occupied a prominent place in recent linguistic theorizing. What is it that makes this construction so interesting? Resultatives are submitted to a cluster of not obviously related constraints, and this fact calls out for explanation. There are tough constraints for the verb, for example.

This note is a reply to ‘On the Lumping Semantics of Counterfactuals’ by Makoto Kanazawa, Stefan Kaufmann and Stanley Peters. It shows first that the first triviality result obtained by Kanazawa, Kaufmann, and Peters is already ruled out by the constraints on admissible premise sets listed in Kratzer (1989). Second, and more importantly, it points out that the results obtained by Kanazawa, Kaufmann, and Peters are obsolete in view of the revised analysis of counterfactuals in Kratzer (1990, 2002).

Kratzer 1998 proposes that certain indefinite determiners (at least in some of their uses) might be variables for (Skolemized) choice functions that receive a value from the utterance context. What does it mean for a choice function variable to receive a value from the context of utterance? How can a context provide such a function? To sharpen intuitions, here is an example describing a custom from my home town Mindelheim. After every funeral, all the mourners gathered around the still (...) open grave say a prayer that starts with the words: “And now let us pray for the person among us who will die next.” Suppose an anthropologist attended one or more funerals in Mindelheim, and reports on what she found out in a lecture using (1), or the more general (2). (shrink)

This chapter was written in 2013 and was posted in the Semantics Archive in January 2014. The preprint of the published version has been in the Semantics Archive since 2016. The Semantics Archive is an electronic preprint archive hosted by the Linguistics Society of America. -/- The chapter looks at indicative conditionals embedded under quantifiers, with a special emphasis on ‘one-case’, episodic, conditionals as in "No query was answered if it came from a doubtful address." It agrees with earlier assessments (...) that a complete conditional (with antecedent and consequent) is embedded under a quantifier in those constructions, but then proceeds to create a dilemma by showing that we can’t always find the right interpretation for that conditional. Contrary to earlier assessments, Stalnaker’s conditional won’t always do. The paper concludes that the embedded conditional in the sentence above is a material implication, but the "if"-clause also plays a pragmatic role in restricting the domain of the embedding quantifier. That an appeal to pragmatics should be necessary at all goes with Edgington’s verdict that “we do not have a satisfactory general account of sentences with conditional constituents.” -/- One of the conclusions drawn at the end of the chapter is that the English modal "will" should be given a Stalnaker selection function analysis. The idea is implemented by attaching to "will" an accessibility function variable that receives its value from the context of use and can be dynamically updated by preceding "if"-clauses, as proposed in von Fintel (1994). The argument for a Stalnaker selection function analysis of "will" provided by the paper is that, together with the restrictor analysis of "if"-clauses, it yields the correct truth-conditions for "will"-conditionals (as opposed to episodic, 'one case', conditionals) embedded under quantifiers. The proposal that the English modal "will" should be given a Stalnaker selection function analysis has since been taken up and elaborated considerably in Cariani & Santorio's (2018) paper on "will" in Mind, and is a central idea in Cariani's (2021) book The Modal Future. (shrink)

The BPR assumes that we already know how sentences are partitioned into focused and backgrounded material, and this is quite legitimate, given the literature on the topic , von Stechow ). If the BPR was true, no more would have to be said about the meaning of focus. The behavior of whatever inferences are generated by backgrounding could be taken care of by theories dealing with the projection of presuppositions of the familiar kind, the presuppositions of definite descriptions, clefts, or (...) factives, for example. This is a non-trivial and interesting claim. (shrink)

In this article we will explore the consequences of adopting recent proposals by Chomsky, according to which the syntactic derivation proceeds in terms of phases. The notion of phase – through the associated notion of spellout – allows for an insightful theory of the fact that syntactic constituents receive default phrase stress not across the board, but as a function of yet-to-be-explicated conditions on their syntactic context. We will see that the phonological evi- dence requires us to modify somewhat the (...) theory of which functional categories actually define a phase. Patterns of default, syntax-determined, phrase stress are argued to result from a prosodic spellout requiring the highest phrase in the spellout domain to correspond to a major prosodic phrase in phonological representation, and carry major phrase stress. (shrink)

The chapter looks at an aspect of David Lewis’s work on language that has been important for the foundation and history of formal semantics as a discipline practiced by both linguists and philosophers of language: a referential semantics over possible worlds that is connected to linguistically plausible syntactic structures. Lewis’s original contributions are placed within their historical context: Church’s typed lambda calculus, Carnapian intensions, the categorial grammars of Ajdukiewicz, and Chomsky’s theories of the relation between syntax and semantics. Relying on (...) Lewis’s letters, the chapter identifies the works of Stenius, Davidson, and Katz as triggering Lewis’s interest in formal theories of natural language semantics and clarifies the relation between his and Montague’s contributions to the foundation of the discipline. (shrink)

This squib begins with an argument emphasizing that the grammar of English makes a distinction between constituents that are focused and those that are merely new, hence not given. If the distinction is made via features, we need two features: one indicating focus and one indicating either given or new information. Which one of the two? Semantically, the choice doesn’t matter: whatever information is given is not new and the other way round. For the phonology, there is a difference, however. (...) If the prosody of all-new constituents is default prosody, but the prosody of given constituents is special, we would want to indicate givenness, rather than newness. (shrink)

Both Kratzer 1981 (“Partition and Revision”) and Kratzer 1989 (“Lumps of Thought”) assume that the truth of counterfactuals depends on a parameter. The parameter provides a set of propositions that uniquely characterizes the actual world in Kratzer 1981, and a so-called “set of propositions relevant for the truth of counterfactuals” in Kratzer 1989. Both papers try to find empirical constraints for the relevant sets, but - crucially - without characterizing them uniquely. The vagueness and context-dependency of (...) counterfactuals is assumed to be in part due to the fact that the set of propositions that the truth of counterfactuals depends on is underdetermined. (shrink)

We present diverse evidence for the claim of Pullum and Rawlins (2007) that expressives behave differently from descriptives in constructions that enforce a particular kind of semantic identity between elements. Our data are drawn from a wide variety of languages and construction types, and they point uniformly to a basic linguistic distinction between descriptive content and expressive content (Kaplan 1999; Potts 2007).

This extended collection of papers is the result of putting recent ideas on quantification to work on a wide variety of languages.

"La géocritique de Nietzsche permet de comprendre sa pensée grâce aux pays, régions et villes du monde qui comptent pour lui. Outre la France, l'Allemagne et l'Europe, son regard englobe des espaces extra-européens, l'Inde, la Chine et l'Islam. Des données d'actualité l'intéressent autant que les strates historiques, parmi les paysages naturels, la Haute Engadine n'enchante pas moins que la Méditerranée et le désert. Nietzsche fait découvrir les lieux par l'intermédiaire des personnages qui les habitent ou incarnent. Ils peuvent être écrivains, (...) musiciens, peintres, figures mythologiques ou poétiques, fondateurs de religions, hommes d'Etat, etc. Le côte à côte d'observations anthropologiques, esthétiques et philosophiques ainsi que le lien entre espaces et cultures font apparaître, dans un langage souvent imagé, les concepts-clés, à savoir le surhomme, la volonté de puissance et l'éternel retour du même. La démarche nietzschéenne révèle des contrastes et se caractérise par le désir de dépasser les frontières pour accéder à l'interculturalité. Ouvrant des horizons nouveaux, elle reflète aussi l'héritage des Lumières et du classicisme allemand." -- [4ème de couverture]. (shrink)

Multi-stakeholder initiatives have been praised as vehicles for tackling complex sustainability issues, but their success relies on the reconciliation of stakeholders’ divergent perspectives. We yet lack a thorough understanding of the micro-level mechanisms by which stakeholders can deal with these differences. To develop such understanding, we examine what frames—i.e., mental schemata for making sense of the world—members of MSIs use during their discussions on sustainability questions and how these frames are deliberated through social interactions. Whilst prior framing research has focussed (...) on between-frame conflicts, we offer a different perspective by examining how and under what conditions actors use shared frames to tackle ‘within-frame conflicts’ on views that stand in the way of joint decisions. Observations of a deliberative environmental valuation workshop and interviews in an MSI on the protection of peatlands—ecosystems that contribute to carbon retention on a global scale—demonstrated how the application and deliberation of shared frames during micro-level interactions resulted in increased salience, elaboration, and adjustment of shared frames. We interpret our findings to identify characteristics of deliberation mechanisms in the case of within-frame conflicts where shared frames dominate the discussions, and to delineate conditions for such dominance. Our findings contribute to an understanding of collaborations in MSIs and other organisational settings by demonstrating the utility of shared frames for dealing with conflicting views and suggesting how shared frames can be activated, fostered and strengthened. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs Van Parijs’ core argument for an unconditional basic income and presents three objections against it. The first and most theoretical objection attacks the egalitarian basis of Van Parijs’ argument and suggests an alternative, humanitarian theory of justice. The second and third more concrete objections accuse Van Parijs of selling-out the right to work as well as the right to recognition of work, for example of family work. The conclusion drawn from these three objections, however, is not that (...) an unconditional basic income cannot be defended. Instead the paper ends by indicating an alternative, humanitarian argument for an unconditional basic income. (shrink)

Forschung an und mit Menschen muss sich legitimieren, d. h. sie muss ihre wissenschaftliche Qualität, Rechtmäßigkeit und ethische Vertretbarkeit aufzeigen. Zu den Rechtfertigungsbedingungen zählt ein „günstiges“ Verhältnis von Nutzen- und Schadenpotenzialen des Forschungsvorhabens. Unabhängige Ethikkommissionen sind den Forschenden zur Seite gestellt, um sie bei der Prüfung und Sicherstellung der genannten Erfordernisse zu unterstützen. Eine zum Gebrauch durch Ethikkommissionen und Forschende entwickelte Nutzen- und Schadentaxonomie sowie ein Schema zur Systematisierung von Chancen-Risiken-Bewertungen wurde nachträglich auf alle Ethikanträge des Jahres 2006 an die (...) Ethikkommission der Medizinischen Fakultät der Universität zu Lübeck angewandt. Unter den 206 analysierten Studienvorhaben lassen 46 % die Chance eines direkten Eigennutzens für die Studienteilnehmer erkennen. Als gruppennützig wurden 12 % der Studienprojekte eingestuft. Sie lassen unmittelbar nach Studienabschluss oder nach wenigen weiteren Studien ein Nutzenpotenzial für Personen mit den gleichen demographischen und klinischen Merkmalen wie die Studienteilnehmer erwarten. 42 % der Ethikanträge bezogen sich auf fremdnützige Studienvorhaben mit Nutzenchancen für die Heilkunde und/oder medizinische Wissenschaft. Das Risiko eines mehr als geringfügigen Eigenschadens wurde bei 53 % der Studien identifiziert. Die Analyse der jeweiligen Nutzenchancen und Schadenrisiken führte bei insgesamt 33 der 206 Studien (16 %) zu einem negativen Ergebnis: Im Urteil der nachträglich durchgeführten Bewertung übertreffen die Nutzenchancen nicht die Schadenrisiken. Studien mit einem mehr als geringfügigen Eigenschadenpotenzial sowie nicht-eigennützige Studien weisen besonders häufig eine negative Gesamtbilanz auf. Eine Prozeduralisierung der Analyse von Chancen und Risiken kann die Transparenz vorgenommener Analyse- und Vergleichsprozesse steigern. Die Kommunikation zwischen Forschenden und Ethikkommissionen sowie unter Ethikkommissionsmitgliedern bei strittigen Studienvorhaben wird erleichtert, die Standardisierung und Harmonisierung der Beratungsabläufe der Ethikkommissionen unterstützt. (shrink)

Forschung an und mit Menschen muss sich legitimieren, d. h. sie muss ihre wissenschaftliche Qualität, Rechtmäßigkeit und ethische Vertretbarkeit aufzeigen. Zu den Rechtfertigungsbedingungen zählt ein „günstiges“ Verhältnis von Nutzen- und Schadenpotenzialen des Forschungsvorhabens. Unabhängige Ethikkommissionen sind den Forschenden zur Seite gestellt, um sie bei der Prüfung und Sicherstellung der genannten Erfordernisse zu unterstützen. Eine zum Gebrauch durch Ethikkommissionen und Forschende entwickelte Nutzen- und Schadentaxonomie sowie ein Schema zur Systematisierung von Chancen-Risiken-Bewertungen wurde nachträglich auf alle Ethikanträge des Jahres 2006 an die (...) Ethikkommission der Medizinischen Fakultät der Universität zu Lübeck angewandt. Unter den 206 analysierten Studienvorhaben lassen 46 % die Chance eines direkten Eigennutzens für die Studienteilnehmer erkennen. Als gruppennützig wurden 12 % der Studienprojekte eingestuft. Sie lassen unmittelbar nach Studienabschluss oder nach wenigen weiteren Studien ein Nutzenpotenzial für Personen mit den gleichen demographischen und klinischen Merkmalen wie die Studienteilnehmer erwarten. 42 % der Ethikanträge bezogen sich auf fremdnützige Studienvorhaben mit Nutzenchancen für die Heilkunde und/oder medizinische Wissenschaft. Das Risiko eines mehr als geringfügigen Eigenschadens wurde bei 53 % der Studien identifiziert. Die Analyse der jeweiligen Nutzenchancen und Schadenrisiken führte bei insgesamt 33 der 206 Studien (16 %) zu einem negativen Ergebnis: Im Urteil der nachträglich durchgeführten Bewertung übertreffen die Nutzenchancen nicht die Schadenrisiken. Studien mit einem mehr als geringfügigen Eigenschadenpotenzial sowie nicht-eigennützige Studien weisen besonders häufig eine negative Gesamtbilanz auf. Eine Prozeduralisierung der Analyse von Chancen und Risiken kann die Transparenz vorgenommener Analyse- und Vergleichsprozesse steigern. Die Kommunikation zwischen Forschenden und Ethikkommissionen sowie unter Ethikkommissionsmitgliedern bei strittigen Studienvorhaben wird erleichtert, die Standardisierung und Harmonisierung der Beratungsabläufe der Ethikkommissionen unterstützt. (shrink)

Theoretical models and correlational research suggest that anger and disgust play different roles in moral judgment. Anger is theorized to underlie reactions to crimes against persons, such as battery and unfairness, and disgust is theorized to underlie reactions to crimes against nature, such as sexual transgressions and cannibalism. To date, however, it has not been shown that induction of these two emotions has divergent effects. In this experiment we show divergent effects of anger and disgust. We use sounds to elicit (...) anger and disgust, and participants are then asked to consider moral vignettes. As compared to disgust and control condition, anger increases severity of judgments about crimes against persons, and disgust increases severity of judgments about crimes against nature, but not conversely. (shrink)

Summary Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy, in the broader sense of the term, has developed in various forms on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1920s. Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy, in the narrower sense of the term, came into being in the second half of the 1970s in German-speaking countries. In Austria, it is a state-approved, independent scientific psychotherapy method since 1995, and an integrative psychotherapeutic approach based on the Gestalt theory of the Berlin School. With reference to this comprehensive, consistent, scientific (...) theory, this article presents the basic concepts of therapeutic practice in the field of Gestalt psychotherapy. Starting from the overarching whole to the parts, the paper first examines the concept of therapeutic relationship and therapeutic attitude, and then describes the basic principles of the practical design of the therapeutic process. (shrink)

Postcolonial pedagogy invites academic teaching staff to create situations, in which hegemonic modes of knowledge production can be critically reflected and one’s own entanglement as disciplinary s...

Der Koran ist ein mündlich komponierter, poetischer Text, der bei Muslimen bis heute vor allem im mündlichen Vortrag fortlebt. In der westlichen Forschung wurde er dagegen aufgrund seiner schwer zugänglichen Struktur kaum je als Literatur gelesen, sondern in der Regel als Steinbruch für theologische bzw. legislative Aussagen genutzt. Angelika Neuwirth bringt Ordnung in das vermeintliche Chaos, indem sie für die mekkanischen Suren des Koran kompositionell sinnvolle Strukturen nachweist. Ergänzt wird diese 2. Ausgabe durch eine neue Studie, die die Suren (...) als Zeugnisse einer historischen Entwicklung in der Verkündung des Koran und der Herausbildung einer Gemeinde untersucht. (shrink)