Linguistics and Philosophy

ISSNs: 0165-0157, 1573-0549

29 found

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  1.  6
    Even in presupposition denials.Naomi Francis - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (6):949-991.
    This paper explores a puzzling polarity-based asymmetry in the use of _even_ in sentences that deny presuppositions. It argues that this asymmetry is produced by the interaction of _even_’s controversial additive presupposition with the alternatives that are salient in the relevant contexts and demonstrates that this proposal makes good crosslinguistic predictions. Along the way, this paper shows that presupposition denials are a fruitful testing ground for uncovering details about the behaviour of _even_ and the role of presuppositions triggered within focus (...)
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  2.  19
    A new argument for linguistic determinants of human thought.Wolfram Hinzen, Txuss Martin & Martina Wiltschko - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (6):1027-1043.
    We argue that the commonly accepted existence of grammatical concepts such as Person (in the grammatical sense) or Tense poses an unrecognized challenge to the idea that human thought is independent of language. The argument is that such concepts identify aspects of linguistic expressions that also systematically define the contents and identity of the thoughts expressed in language. Since grammatical concepts are not known to have non-grammatical analogues, the thoughts in question do not appear to be non-linguistic in nature. We (...)
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  3.  12
    The problem of the many: a view from the semantics of numerals and countability.Peter R. Sutton - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (6):993-1026.
    This paper addresses both semantic issues of countability in linguistics, and philosophical issues arising from the problem of the many. I argue (i) that the problem of the many is orthogonal to vagueness and we should look to the semantics of count nouns and numerals for its solution; (ii) that the problem of the many is a challenge for contemporary mereological analyses of count nouns in semantics; but (iii) that the count criterion in these theories can be weakened to avoid (...)
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  4.  44
    On the logical substantiveness of compositionality.Kai F. Wehmeier - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (6):1071-1087.
    Given any set _E_ of expressions freely generated from a set of atoms by syntactic operations, there exist trivially compositional functions on _E_ (to wit, the injective and the constant functions), but also plenty of non-trivially compositional functions. Here we show that within the space of non-injective functions (and so _a fortiori_ within the space of non-injective and non-constant functions), compositional functions are not sufficiently abundant in order to generate the consequence relation of every propositional logic. Logical consequence relations thus (...)
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  5.  53
    Defining common ground.Seth Yalcin - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (6):1045-1070.
    Stalnaker (_Context_, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014) defends two ideas about common ground. The first is that the common ground of a conversation is definable in terms of an iterated propositional attitude of _acceptance_, so that _p_ is common ground iff _p_ is commonly accepted. The second is the idea that the “default setting" of conversational acceptance is belief, so that as a default, what is accepted in conversation coincides with what is (commonly) believed. In this paper, I argue that (...)
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  6.  30
    Negotiated contextualism and disagreement data.Martín Abreu Zavaleta - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (5):749-777.
    Suppose I assert “Jim is rich”. According to negotiated contextualism, my assertion should be understood as a proposal to adopt a standard of wealth such that Jim counts as “rich” by that standard. Furthermore, according to negotiated contextualism, this is so in virtue of the semantic properties of the word “rich”. Defenders of negotiated contextualism (Khoo & Knobe in Noûs 52(1):109–143, 2016; Khoo in Philos. Phenomenol. Res. 100(1):26–53, 2020) claim that this view is uniquely well-placed to account for certain disagreement (...)
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  7.  73
    Counting individuals and their halves.Alan Bale & David Nicolas - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (5):867-914.
    Expressions like "two novels" are traditionally taken to convey information about cardinality and are analyzed using a cardinality function. Salmon (Philosop Perspect 11:1–15, 1997), Liebesman (Australasian J Philos 93:21–42, 2015; Philos’ Impr 16:1–25, 2016; In D. W. Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford studies in metaphysics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, forthcoming), and Haida and Trinh (in: Dočekal, Wagiel (eds) Formal approaches to number in Slavic and beyond, Language Science Press, Berlin, 2001) argue against this traditional account, claiming that it can’t explain our use (...)
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  8.  15
    Intentional identity, mental files, and coordination: a DRT account of anaphora in attitude contexts.Naoya Fujikawa - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (5):915-947.
    This paper proposes a semantics of anaphora in attitude contexts within the framework of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). The paper first focuses on intentional identity, a special kind of cross-attitudinal anaphora. Based on the DRT semantics of attitude reports summarized by Kamp et al. (in: D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (Eds.), Handbook of philosophical logic, 2011), the author proposes a semantics of intentional identity that implements the following two ideas: (1) indefinites and pronouns appearing in attitude contexts introduce _metadiscourse referents_, (...)
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  9.  20
    Iconological Semantics.Philippe Schlenker & Jonathan Lamberton - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (5):779-838.
    We argue that sign language requires a radical extension of formal semantics. It has long been accepted that sign language employs the same logical machinery as spoken language (occasionally making its abstract components overt), and simultaneously makes extensive use of iconicity. But the articulation between these two modules has only been discussed piecemeal. To capture it, we propose an ‘iconological semantics’ that combines standard logical semantics with a pictorial semantics in the Greenberg/Abusch tradition. We start by reanalyzing from this perspective (...)
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  10. ‘Might’ counterfactuals.Ginger Schultheis - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (5):839-865.
    The epistemic thesis is the thesis that a 'might' counterfactual like 'If Matt had gone to the parade, David might have gone to the parade' has the same meaning as 'Maybe, if Matt had gone to the parade, David would have gone to the parade.' I offer a new theory of the counterfactual interpretation of the modal 'might' on which 'might' has the same meaning as 'maybe would'. And I show that, when coupled with a plausible semantics for 'if' clauses, (...)
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  11.  16
    ‘Might’ counterfactuals.Ginger Schultheis - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (5):839-865.
    The epistemic thesis is the thesis that a ‘might’ counterfactual like (1) has the same meaning as (2). (1) If Matt had gone to the parade, David might have gone to the parade. (2) Maybe, if Matt had gone to the parade, David would have gone to the parade. In this paper, I give a compositional semantics for ‘might’ counterfactuals that predicts the epistemic thesis. I offer a new theory of the counterfactual interpretation of the modal ‘might’ — the interpretation (...)
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  12.  12
    Strengthening, exhaustification, and rational inference.Daniel Asherov, Danny Fox & Roni Katzir - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (4):505-516.
    The literature in semantics and pragmatics provides extensive evidence for the strengthening of linguistic expressions, both in matrix positions and when embedded under various operators. We study the properties of such strengthening using a very simple setting. Specifically, we look at when the expression “crate with a banana” can be understood as a unique crate even though two different crates have a banana in them. By varying the scenarios in which an expression such as “Pick the crate with a banana” (...)
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  13.  10
    Verb roots encode outcomes: argument structure and lexical semantics of reversal and restitution.Diti Bhadra - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (4):557-610.
    This paper explores the distribution and semantics of the reversative affix _un-_ and the restitutive affix _re-_, and overall makes a new proposal about the lexical semantics of verbs. I argue that these affixes tell a story of derivational morphology that is based not on categorization of verbs into neat aspectual and decompositional classes, but on the result of the verb’s action on the object and whether or not such a result state permits reversal and restitution. The argument structure of (...)
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  14.  26
    Negation and modality in unilateral truthmaker semantics.Lucas Champollion & Timothée Bernard - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (4):517-555.
    Fine (J Philos Logic 46(6):625–674, 2017) develops a unilateral and a bilateral truthmaker semantics for propositional logic. The unilateral approach trades off the primitive exact falsification relation of the bilateral approach for a primitive exclusion relation between states, thereby raising the question if exclusion serves any purpose other than to avoid exact falsification. We argue that exclusion is motivated independently of its use in avoiding exact falsification, namely as a foundation for the reconstruction of modal notions such as possibility and (...)
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  15.  10
    A distributed analysis of only.Luka Crnič - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (4):611-652.
    The positive, non-exclusive inference of _only_ has been famously elusive with respect to its projective status and its content: in some cases the positive inference behaves like a presupposition, while in others it does not; in some cases the inference is non-modal, corresponding to the prejacent of _only_ or an existential counterpart of it, while in others it is modalized. This behavior, we argue, surfaces the exceptive nature of _only_ (cf. von Fintel and Iatridou in Linguist Inq 38(3):445–483, 2007). More (...)
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  16.  18
    Preconditions and projection: Explaining non-anaphoric presupposition.Craige Roberts & Mandy Simons - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (4):703-748.
    In this paper we articulate a pragmatic account of the projection behavior of three classes of non-anaphoric projective contents: the pre-states of change of state (CoS) predicates, the veridical entailments of factives, and the implication of satisfaction of selectional restrictions. Given evidence that the triggers of these implications are not anaphoric, hence do not impose presuppositional constraints on their local contexts, we argue that the projection behavior of these implications cannot be explained by the standard Karttunen/Heim/van der Sandt proposals. But (...)
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  17.  10
    Sense-based low-degree modifiers in Japanese and English: their relations to experience, evaluation, and emotions.Osamu Sawada - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (4):653-702.
    This study investigates the meanings of the Japanese low-degree modifiers _kasukani_ ‘faintly’ and _honokani_ ‘approx. faintly’ and the English low-degree modifier _faintly_. I argue that, unlike typical low-degree modifiers such as _sukoshi_ ‘a bit’ in Japanese and _a bit_ in English, they are sense-based in that they not only semantically denote a small degree but also convey that the judge (typically the speaker) measures the degree of predicates based on their own sense (the senses of sight, smell, taste, etc.) at (...)
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  18.  18
    Ignorance and concession with superlative modifiers: a cross-linguistic perspective.Yi-Hsun Chen - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (3):361-400.
    Superlative modifiers (SMs) are known to demonstrate an ambiguity between an epistemic reading (EPI) conveying speaker ignorance and a concessive reading (CON) conveying speaker concession. Such EPI-CON ambiguity has often been taken, implicitly or explicitly, to be a lexical coincidence. While there may be some justification for such a position when a single language is considered, we argue for an intrinsic connection between the two readings based on cross-linguistic considerations. This paper focuses on English _at least_ and Mandarin _zhi-shao_ as (...)
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  19.  20
    Modal tense: if and wish.Paul Crowley - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (3):401-443.
    This paper is concerned with uses of certain morphemes, most notably the past, to represent meanings of distance from reality in modal expressions. This class of morphology has been identified with the names subjunctive, fake tense, fake past, modal past and is referred to here as X-marking, after von Fintel and Iatridou (Linguist Philos, 2020). X-marking has been most studied in the context of English conditionals however, it is well-known that the morphology is observed in many non-English languages and can (...)
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  20. Truth, topicality, and transparency: one-component versus two-component semantics.Peter Hawke, Levin Hornischer & Francesco Berto - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (3):481-503.
    When do two sentences say the same thing, that is, express the same content? We defend two-component (2C) semantics: the view that propositional contents comprise (at least) two irreducibly distinct constituents: (1) truth-conditions and (2) subject-matter. We contrast 2C with one-component (1C) semantics, focusing on the view that subject-matter is reducible to truth-conditions. We identify exponents of this view and argue in favor of 2C. An appendix proposes a general formal template for propositional 2C semantics.
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  21. Truth, topicality, and transparency: one-component versus two-component semantics.Peter Hawke, Levin Hornischer & Franz Berto - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (3):481-503.
    When do two sentences say the same thing, that is, express the same content? We defend two-component (2C) semantics: the view that propositional contents comprise (at least) two irreducibly distinct constituents: (1) truth-conditions and (2) subject-matter. We contrast 2C with one-component (1C) semantics, focusing on the view that subject-matter is reducible to truth-conditions. We identify exponents of this view and argue in favor of 2C. An appendix proposes a general formal template for propositional 2C semantics.
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  22.  8
    Same and different are additive presupposition triggers.Line Mikkelsen & Daniel Hardt - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (3):445-480.
    We propose an account of interpretive effects involving _same_ and _different_, relying on two claims: the first is that _same_ and _different_ are able to take scope, and the second is that they are presuppositional. On this account, _same_ and _different_ are decomposed into two parts: an additive operator TOO and a (non-)identity predicate. We argue that this account provides a more parsimonious account of well-known properties of _same_ and _different_, such as the distinction between internal and external readings, as (...)
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  23.  37
    Demonstratives, context-sensitivity, and coherence.Michael Devitt - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (2):317-339.
    Una Stojnić urges the radical view that the meaning of context-sensitive language is not “partially determined by non-linguistic features of utterance situation”, as traditionally thought, but rather “is determined entirely by grammar—by rules of language that have largely been missed”. The missed rules are ones of discourse coherence. The paper argues against this radical view as it applies to demonstrations, demonstratives, and the indexical ‘I’. Stojnić’s theories of demon-strations and demonstratives are found to be seriously incomplete, failing to meet the (...)
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  24.  94
    Absolute gradable adjectives and loose talk.Alexander Dinges - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (2):341-360.
    Kennedy (Linguist Philos 30:1–45, 2007) forcefully proposes what is now a widely assumed semantics for absolute gradable adjectives. On this semantics, maximum standard adjectives like “straight” and “dry” ascribe a maximal degree of the underlying quantity. Meanwhile, minimum standard adjectives like “bent” and “wet” merely ascribe a non-zero, non-minimal degree of the underlying quantity. This theory clashes with the ordinary intuition that sentences like “The stick is straight” are frequently true while sentences like “The stick is bent” are frequently informative, (...)
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  25.  38
    Intention reports and eventuality abstraction in a theory of mood choice.Thomas Grano - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (2):265-315.
    Recent work on mood choice considers fine-grained semantic differences among desire predicates (notably, ‘want’ and ‘hope’) and their consequences for the distribution of indicative and subjunctive complement clauses. In that vein, this paper takes a close look at ‘intend’. I show that cross-linguistically, ‘intend’ accepts nonfinite and subjunctive complements and rejects indicative complements. This fact poses difficulties for recent approaches to mood choice. Toward a solution, a broad aim of this paper is to argue that—while ‘intend’ is loosely in the (...)
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  26.  71
    Representing multiply de re epistemic modal statements.Cem Şişkolar - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (2):211-237.
    I review Ninan’s Hundred Tickets case pertaining to quantification into epistemic modal contexts, and his counterpart theoretic way to address it (Ninan, Philos Rev, 2018). Ninan’s solution employs a ‘counterpart relation’ parameter intended to reflect how the domain of quantification is thought of in a context. This approach theoretically rules out the possibility of contexts where different ways of thinking about the domain can be deployed through different quantificational noun phrases. I bring out the case of the multiply de re (...)
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  27.  19
    Unattainable duties.Pablo Fuentes - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (1):1-36.
    Despite its somewhat marginal occurrence, unattainability has been acknowledged as a genuine problematic element for the semantic analysis of modal constructions, particularly for those expressing desires (Heim in J Semant 9(3):183–221, 1992; Portner in Nat Lang Semant 5(2):167–211, 1997). However, considerably less attention has been given to unattainable duties. In this article, I suggest that just as worlds that are deemed desirable are not necessarily linked to worlds considered candidates for actuality, some circumstantial arrangements allow for obligational expressions the semantics (...)
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  28.  49
    Language games and their types.Jonathan Ginzburg & Kwong-Cheong Wong - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (1):149-189.
    One of the success stories of formal semantics is explicating responsive moves like answers to questions. There is, however, a significant lacune concerning the characterization of _initiating utterances_, which are strongly tied to the conversational activity [language game (Wittgenstein), speech genre (Bakhtin)], or—our terminology—_conversational type_, one is engaged in. To date there has been no systematic proposal trying to account for the range of possible _language games_/_speech genres_/_conversational types_ and their global structure. In particular, concerning the range of subject matter (...)
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  29.  28
    Iconic Syntax: sign language classifier predicates and gesture sequences.Philippe Schlenker, Marion Bonnet, Jonathan Lamberton, Jason Lamberton, Emmanuel Chemla, Mirko Santoro & Carlo Geraci - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (1):77-147.
    We argue that the pictorial nature of certain constructions in signs and in gestures explains surprising properties of their syntax. In several sign languages, the standard word order (e.g. SVO) gets turned into SOV (with preverbal arguments) when the predicate is a classifier, a distinguished construction with highly iconic properties (e.g. Pavlič, 2016). In silent gestures, participants also prefer an SOV order in extensional constructions, irrespective of the word order of the language they speak (Goldin-Meadow et al., 2008). But in (...)
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