Attempts to indentify the fundamental concepts of language, argues that the study of language reveals hidden facts about the mind, and looks at the impact of propaganda.

The goal of this paper is to re-examine some aspects of the nature of specificational copular constructions by looking at the ways in which the semantics of tense interacts with the semantics of the copula in English. I propose that Tense Harmony (restrictions on the tense of a relative clause in the subject position of specificational copular constructions) is imposed by the interaction between the matrix and embedded tenses.

This paper is concerned with the relationship between the semantics of specificational and predicational sentences and the Connectivity effects they display. It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of semantic and syntactic approaches to Connectivity (the ‘unconstrained-be theory’, the ‘question-in-disguise theory’, and the ‘unclefting theory’), concluding that a semantic theory of Connectivity is not only preferable, but necessary. The paper also discusses the implications of such a move regarding Binding phenomena (i.e., Principle A, B, and C effects): adopting a semantic theory (...) of Connectivity requires a theory of Binding which is different from the standard GB Binding Theory. (shrink)

In this paper I assume that syntactic structures contain items that function as variables over possible worlds (or things like possible worlds). I show that in certain syntactic positions we can use some variables but not other. I accordingly motivate a "binding theory" for the items that occupy these positions, and I discuss some consequences of this binding theory.

This paper discusses the semantics of intensional transitive verbs such as 'need', 'want','recognize', 'find', and 'hire'. It proposes new linguistic criteria for intensionality and defends two semantic analyses for two different classes of intensional verbs. The paper also includes a systematic classification of intensional verbs according to the type of lexical meaning they involve.

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)

W. Labov's & T. Labov's findings concerning their child grammar acquisition ("Learning the Syntax of Questions" in Recent Advances in the Psychology of Language, Campbell, R. & Smith, P. Eds, New York: Plenum Press, 1978) are interpreted in terms of different semantics of why & other wh-questions. Z. Dubiel.

From Higgins (1973) to Iatridou and Varlokosta (1998), connectivity has been considered in the literature to be a defining characteristic of specificational pseudoclefts. This paper argues against this view based on an analysis of specificational pseudoclefts in Hebrew. Pseudoclefts in Hebrew are interesting in two ways. First, predicational and specificational pseudoclefts are distinguished lexically in the choice of the copula. Second, specificational pseudoclefts fall into two classes, each exhibiting a different set of connectivity effects. The connectivity pattern in Hebrew is (...) accounted for following Jacobson (1994) and Sharvit (1999), who assume that connectivity effects are independent of each other and derive them as a by-product of semantic equation. It is shown that this pattern cannot be obtained using any single grammatical operation, such as reconstruction or coping, which would necessarily derive all connectivity effects at once. (shrink)

Definite descriptions, I shall argue, have two possible functions. 1] They are used to refer to what a speaker wishes to talk about, but they are also used quite differently. Moreover, a definite description occurring in one and the same sentence may, on different occasions of its use, function in either way. The failure to deal with this duality of function obscures the genuine referring use of definite descriptions. The best known theories of definite descriptions, those of Russell and Strawson, (...) I shall suggest, are both guilty of this. Before discussing this distinction in use, I will mention some features of these theories to which it is especially relevant. (shrink)

A semantics for interrogatives is presented which is based on Karttunen's theory, but in a flexible manner incorporates both weak and strong exhaustivity. The paper starts out by considering degree questions, which often require an answer picking out the maximal degree from a certain set. However, in some cases, depending on the semantic properties of the question predicate, reference to the minimal degree is required, or neither specifying the maximum nor the minimum is sufficient. What is needed is an operation (...) which defines the maximally informative answer on the basis of the Karttunen question denotation. Shifting attention to non-degree questions, two notions of answerhood are adopted from work by Heim. The first of these is weakly exhaustive and the second strongly exhaustive. The second notion of answerhood is proven to be equivalent to Groenendijk and Stokhof's interrogative semantics. On the basis of a wide range of empirical data showing that questions often are not interpreted exhaustively, it is argued that a fairly rich system of semantic objects associated with questions is needed to account for the various ways in which questions contribute to the semantics and pragmatics of the utterances in which they appear. (shrink)

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 ...

Specificational sentences show Connectivity Effects (Akmajian 1970, Higgins 1979, Halvorsen 1978, Jacobson 1994, among others). For example, an NP like no man embedded in a relative clause in general cannot bind a pronoun outside the relative clause, as illustrated in (3a); but in specificational copular sentences this binding is possible, as in (3b). This effect is called Variable Binding Connectivity. Similarly, the NP a unicorn cannot be interpreted de dicto with respect to the embedded verb look for in (4a); but (...) a de dicto reading is possible in the specificational sentence (4b) (Opacity Connectivity). Connectivity will be used in this paper as a diagnosis for specificational sentences. (shrink)

This paper is about the semantic analysis of opaque verbs such as seek and owe, which allow for unspecific readings of their indefinite objects.1 One may be looking for a good car without there being any car that one is looking for; or, one may be looking for a good car in that a specific car exists that one is looking for. It thus appears that there are two interpretations of these verbs – a specific and an unspecific one – (...) and one may wonder how they are related. The present paper is a contribution to this question. (shrink)

Connectivity, found in a number of constructions involving typically a trace of movement or gap, is the effect by which a constituent behaves grammatically as if it occupied not its surface position but the position of the gap. The phenomenon is central to the debate between defendants of Direct Compositionality –where the semantics is read off the ‘visible’, surface syntax– and the defendants of the so-called Logical Form (LF) –according to which semantics is computed on an abstract syntactic representation, LF, (...) obtained after applying some transformations to the surface syntax. The present paper is concerned with connectivity in specificational copular sentences. A simple specificational copular sentence is given in (1), where the post-copular constituent Smith identifies the actual value of the subject N(oun) P(hrase) the murderer. More complex examples reveal connectivity effects, as shown in (2)-(4) (Akmajian 1970, Higgins 1973, Halvorsen 1978, among others). (shrink)