Online research in philosophy

Temporal reference in natural language is inherently context dependent: what counts as a moment in one context may be structurally analysed in another context, and vice versa. In this note we outline a way of accounting for this phenomenon within event-based semantics.

The goal of this paper is to offer a compositional semantics for subjunctive and indicative will conditionals, and to derive the projection properties of the types of conditionals we consider and in particular those of counterfactual conditionals. It is argued that subjunctive conditionals are "bare" conditional embedded under temporal and aspectural operators, which constrain the interpretation of the modal operators in the embedded conditional. Furthermore, it is argued that a theory of presupposition projection à la Heim together with the present proposal about their logical form explains the projection facts.

Temporal necessity and the subjunctive conditional appear to be related by the principle of Past Predominance, according to which past similarities and differences take priority over future similarities and differences in determining the comparative similarity of alternative possible histories with respect to the present moment. R. H. Thomason and Anil Gupta have formalized Past Predominance in a semantics that combines selection functions with branching time; in this paper I show that Past Predominance can be formalized and axiomatized using ordinary possible worlds semantics (without branching time).

In this paper we reconsider the issue of free choice and the role of the whmorphology employed in it. We show that the property of being an interrogative whword alone is not sufficient for free choice, and that semantic and sometimes even morphological definiteness is a pre-requisite for some free choice items (FCIs) in certain languages, e.g. in Greek and Mandarin Chinese. We propose a theory that explains the polarity behaviour of FCIs cross-linguistically, and allows indefinite (Giannakidou 2001) as well as definite-like FCIs. The difference is manifested as a lexical distinction in English between any (indefinite) and wh-ever (definite); in Greek it appears as a choice between a FCI nominal modifier (taking an NP argument), which illustrates the indefinite option, and a FC free relative illustrating the definite one. We provide a compositional analysis of Greek FCIs in both incarnations, and derive in a parallel manner the Chinese FCIs. Here the definite..

In this work, we treat the interpretation of tense in adjunct clauses in English and Russian (relative clauses, before/after/when-clauses) with a future matrix verb. The main findings of our paper are the following: 1. English has a simultaneous reading in Present adjuncts embedded under will. Russian Present adjuncts under budet or the synthetic perfective future can only have a deictic interpretation. This follows from our SOT parameter. 2. The syntax of Russian temporal adjunct clauses (do/posle togo kak…) shows overt parts that had to be stipulated for English as covert in earlier papers. We present a neat and straightforward analysis of Russian temporal adjuncts. Contrary to Russian, English has Present under Future in before-clauses. It would be nice to relate this feature to the SOT parameter, but the construction seems to be an idiosyncrasy in the domain of subordinate tense.

In this work, we treat the interpretation of tense in adjunct clauses in English and Russian (relative clauses, before/after/when-clauses) with a future matrix verb. The main findings of our paper are the following: 1. English has a simultaneous reading in Present adjuncts embedded under will. Russian Present adjuncts under budet or the synthetic perfective future can only have a deictic interpretation. This follows from our SOT parameter. 2. The syntax of Russian temporal adjunct clauses (do/posle togo kak…) shows overt parts that had to be stipulated for English as covert in earlier papers. We present a neat and straightforward analysis of Russian temporal adjuncts. Contrary to Russian, English has Present under Future in before-clauses. It would be nice to relate this feature to the SOT parameter, but the construction seems to be an idiosyncrasy in the domain of subordinate tense.

The main focus of this article is the occurrence of some polarity items (PIs) in the complements of emotive factive verbs and only. This fact has been taken as a challenge to the semantic approach to PIs (Linebarger 1980), because only and factive verbs are not downward entailing (DE). A modification of the classical DE account is proposed by introducing the notion of nonveridicality (Zwarts 1995, Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2001) as the one crucial for PI sanctioning. To motivate this move, it is first shown that two solutions in the direction of weakening classical monotonicity do not work: Strawson DE (von Fintel 1999) and weak DE (Hoeksema 1986). Weakening DE systematically either overgenerates or undergenerates, in either case failing to characterize the correct set of licensers. Nonveridicality is introduced as a conservative extension of DE and is shown to account for PIs also in contexts that are not DE (i.e. questions, modal verbs, imperatives, directive propositional attitudes). This theory, augmented with the premise that certain PIs (i.e. the liberal class represented by any) are subject to a weaker polarity dependency identified not as LICENSING but as RESCUING by nonveridicality, explains the occurrence of this particular class with only and emotive factive verbs. Crosslinguistic comparisons illustrate that the occurrence of PIs with only and emotive factives is not a general phenomenon, and further support the dual nature of polarity dependency and the semantic characterization of the elements that license or rescue PIs.

In Spanish (and other Romance languages) certain predicates select the subjunctive mood in the embedded clause, while others select the indicative mood. In this paper, I present a new analysis for the predicates that select the subjunctive mood in Spanish that is based on a semantics of comparison. The main generalization proposed here is the following: in Spanish, a predicate selects the subjunctive mood in its embedded proposition if the proposition is compared to its contextual alternatives on a scale introduced by the predicate. In this proposal, predicates that select the subjunctive mood are thus analyzed as gradable predicates. Furthermore, the subjunctive mood morpheme is claimed to make a semantic contribution, namely to evaluate the contextual alternatives that are compared by the predicate. In comparing this proposal to other approaches, I show that it can more straightforwardly account for a number of properties of these predicates (entailment relations, practical inferences, and contexts with more than two alternatives). New empirical evidence for two crucial properties of the predicates that select the subjunctive mood is provided: these predicates are focus sensitive and they are gradable, two properties that follow directly from the proposal developed here. In the vast literature on mood, the link between the appearance of the subjunctive mood and these important properties has never been made before.

This paper explores the role that the scalar properties and presuppositions of even play in creating polarity sensitive even meanings crosslinguistically (henceforth EVEN). I discuss the behavior of three lexically distinct Greek counterparts of even in positive, negative, subjunctive sentences, and polar questions. These items are shown to be polarity sensitive, and a three-way distinction is posited between a positive polarity (akomi ke), a negative polarity (oute), and a ‘flexible scale’even(esto) which does not introduce likelihood, but is associated with scales made salient by the context. The analysis is a refinement of Rooth’s original idea that negative polarity is involved in the interpretation of English even, and establishes further that the “negative” polarity domain of EVEN includes a sensitivity that is not strictly speaking negative (flexible scale esto). The distributional restrictions of EVEN items are shown to follow from distinct presuppositions (positive polarity and flexible scale EVEN), or from their lexical featural specification (negative polarity EVEN), a result that squares neatly with the fact that ill-formedness is systematic pragmatic deviance in the former case but robust ungrammaticality in the latter. This result supports the by now widely accepted view that polarity dependencies are not of uniform nature, and that we need to distinguish presupposition failures (which are weaker and possibly..

In this article I defend the view that many central aspects of the semantics of tense are determined by independently-motivated principles of syntactic theory. I begin by decomposing tenses syntactically into a temporal ordering predicate (the true tense, on this approach) and two time-denoting arguments corresponding to covert a reference time (RT) argument and an eventuality time (ET) argument containing the verb phrase. Control theory accounts for the denotation of the RT argument, deriving the distinction between main clause and subordinate clause tenses. The theory of covert movement is used to account for the independent/indexical interpretation of relative clause tenses, and for the correlation between independent tense interpretation and a de re construal of the relative clause. A theory of “past polarity”, based on traditional negative polarity theory, accounts both for the simultaneous “sequence of tense” construal of past tenses in subordinate clauses embedded within past tense contexts, and for the obligatory indexical/independent interpretation of present tense in a relative clause embedded within a past tense context. Combined with the copy theory of movement, the polarity theory also provides an account of the semantics of double access sentences, treating them as involving a special kind of reconstruction effect.