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24Our discussion is couched within a compositional implementation of the analysis of the Perfect developed by Iatridou et.al. (a version of Extended Now of McCoard 78, Dowty 72, 79). The basics.
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23dimensions. As a commenter, I should probably concentrate on the central claim and, if possible, probe its solidity. So, that’s what I’ll be doing.
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20(i) Inferences from the (assumed) truth of the asserted sentence. Hearers may have conditional beliefs (if p, q) and upon hearing p asserted they can infer q by Modus Ponens (with suitable caveats about the reliability of their initial conditional belief and the new information that p).
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19Our immediate intuition about (1) is that –ever indicates speaker’s ignorance. We hear the speaker as signaling that she doesn’t know what Arlo is cooking, while at the same time asserting that no matter what Arlo is cooking, there’s a lot of garlic in it. The FR without –ever in (2) carries no such signal of ignorance.
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18Condoravdi shows that the ignorance component is not a presupposition: • Ignorance is not signalled as taken for granted • No presupposition denial • No presupposition filtering So, what else could I have reached for in 2000? Not much, because I tend to buy my tools on the open market rather than develop them myself.
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18Standard assumption: lousy must be an intensional adjective (i.e. it takes the intension of its noun as its argument). BUT: we have not seen a credible meaning for lousy of this type, and it seems the McConnell-Ginet/Larson suspicion is quite right that there couldn’t be such a meaning.
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16SinceIn Daniel Altshuler & Jessica Rett (eds.), The Semantics of Plurals, Focus, Degrees, and Times: Essays in Honor of Roger Schwarzschild, Springer Verlag. pp. 305-333. 2019.The compositional analysis of sentences like “Tony has been happy since he’s been taking Prozac” becomes feasible through a combination of a maximal informativeness semantics for definite descriptions and an elided second “since” inside the “since”-clause.
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14Scientists have made new discoveries about a strange low-level disease. The disease is highly correlated with a particularly gene. 25% of the population has this gene. 90% of those with the gene develop the disease. Among the 75% majority, on the other hand, only 10% develop the disease. There is also a mysterious skin rash which can only occur in people who have the disease. Among the people who have the gene and develop the disease, 90% show the rash. Among the people without the gene that dev…Read more
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13After cataloguing various ‘improper’ sense of only, those which are taken with restricted scope (‘no more than [within a fixed domain]’) as opposed to the purely exclusive ‘proper’ sense, Ockham (1980:137) remarks that These are the senses, then, in which the exclusive expression can be taken improperly. And perhaps there are still other senses in which it can be taken improperly. But since they are not as widely used as the ones we have dealt with, I will leave them to the specialists. Larry Hor…Read more
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11Every member of the club was convinced that if a (particular) friend of his from Texas had died in the fire, he would have inherited a fortune.
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11We show that the morphosyntactic makeup of the SMC is crosslinguistically stable. We show that the semantics of the construction poses a severe compositionality problem. We solve the problem by giving the negation and the exclusive operator differential scope. For only, this means decomposing it into negation and an exclusive other than component.
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7Modality and languageIn D. Borchert (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan Reference. pp. 20-27. 2006.
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4Would you Believe It? The King of France is Back! (Presuppositions and Truth-Value Intuitions)In Marga Reimer & Anne Bezuidenhout (eds.), Descriptions and beyond, Oxford University Press. 2004.
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Comments on Beaver: Presupposition accommodation and quantifier domainsIn Hans Kamp & Barbara Hall Partee (eds.), Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning, Elsevier. 2004.
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Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyRegular Faculty
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
| Philosophy of Language |
| Semantics |
| Methodology of Linguistics |
| Philosophy of Linguistics, Miscellaneous |