Angelika Kratzer

The chapter looks at indicative conditionals embedded under quantifiers, with a special emphasis on ‘one-case’ 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 chapter 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’.

Disjunctions and indefinites trigger so-called 'free choice' effects when interacting with various flavors of modals – be they epistemic, deontic, or what not. Existing accounts of the free choice effect (at the time of writing, that is, 2002) struggled with the traditional assumption that modals select propositions, hence can’t really ‘see’ a free choice indefinite buried somewhere in their scope. There was then no compositional account of the link between free choice indefinites and modals, nor an explanation why there should be such a link. Our analysis of the free choice effect was based on the idea that free choice indefinites – like Japanese so-called 'indeterminate phrases' - create Hamblin sets, hence alternatives. Those alternatives keep expanding until they meet an operator that can make use of them. In this way, a local link between an indefinite and a modal can be established. The alternatives created by the indefinite can then be ‘distributed over’ the set of accessible worlds. On our account, the alternatives to be distributed grow into propositions, and are not individuals any longer. This is what makes a compositional semantics for free choice indefinites possible.

The chapter argues that stage-level and individual-level predicates differ in argument structure. That is, the argument structure of the predicate 'having brown hair', for example, changes when you start using it as a stage-level predicate. I propose that stage-level predicates are Davidsonian in that they have an extra argument for events or spatiotemporal locations. Individual-level predicates lack this position. The proposal has the potential to explain a large number of syntactic and semantic facts ranging from topicalization in German to the proportion problem of donkey sentences. The chapter was only published in 1995, but started circulating in its present form in 1988.

Traditionally, modality has been almost exclusively investigated with modal auxiliaries. I will illustrate the role of modality in producing microvariation in all areas of semantics. Modality with its many different flavors is not linked to any particular syntactic category. In the verbal domain it can be found sublexically, with voice, aspect, tense, mood, and complementizers. In the nominal domain, it provides crucial parameters of variation for indefinites. And it's a key player for sentential complementation. I ask: why is that? What is it about modality that lets it play all those different roles?

Attitude ascriptions and speech reports were at the center of attention when philosophers and logicians began to see natural languages as formal systems. My chapter looks at the history of formal semantics, not for its own sake, but for lessons about how to approach attitude ascriptions and speech reports today. I think we may have taken a few wrong forks in the road. To solve the problem of logical equivalents, we should have listened to Rudolf Carnap, who made it clear that the fact that the truth of an attitude ascription or speech report may depend on the intensional structure of the embedded clause in no way forces the conclusion that propositions can’t be mere intensions. For de re ascriptions, we should have listened to David Kaplan, who replaced names in the scope of attitude verbs with descriptions, rather than associating the individuals those names stand for with modes of presentation. What held us back in both cases was Fregean compositionality. Shedding that legacy, I present prototypes for analyses of attitude verbs and verbs of speech within an intensional semantics where propositions are mere sets of possible worlds and de re ascriptions require no special technologies created just for them.

The paper argues that a core part of what is traditionally referred to as ‘information structure’ can be deconstructed into genuine morphosyntactic features that are visible to syntactic operations, contribute to discourse-related expressive meanings, and just happen to be spelled out prosodically in Standard American and British English. We motivate two features, [FoC] and [G], and we track the fate of those features at and beyond the syntax-semantics and the syntax-phonology interfaces. [FoC] and [G] are responsible for two distinct obligatory strategies for establishing discourse coherence. A [G]-marked constituent signals a match with a discourse referent, whereas a [FoC]-marked constituent invokes alternatives and thereby signals a contrast. In Standard American and British English [FoC] aims for highest prosodic prominence in the intonational phrase, whereas [G] lacks phrase-level prosodic properties. There is no grammatical marking of newness: The apparent prosodic effects of newness are the result of default prosody.

Cognitive scientists have become increasingly interested in understanding how natural minds represent and reason about possible ways the world could be. However, there is currently little agreement on how to understand this remarkable capacity for modal thought. We argue that the capacity for modal thought is built from a set of relatively simple component parts, centrally involving an ability to consider possible extensions of a part of the actual world. Natural minds can productively combine this ability with a range of other capacities, eventually allowing for the observed suite of increasingly more sophisticated ways of modal reasoning. We demonstrate how our (de)compositional account is supported by both the trajectory of children’s developing capacity for reasoning about possible ways the world could be and by what we know about how such modal thought is expressed within and across natural languages. Our approach makes new predictions about which kinds of capacities are required by which kinds of experimental tasks and, as a result, contributes to settling currently open theoretical questions about the development of modal thought and the acquisition of modal vocabulary in children. Our work also provides a more systematic way of understanding possible variation in modal thought and talk, and, more generally, paves the way toward a unified theory that will ultimately allow researchers across disciplines to relate their findings to each other within a framework of shared assumptions.

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.

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.

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.

The paper pursues a premise semantics for counterfactuals. The way conflicts are resolved in a premise semantics depends on the way the premises are divided up and lumped together. Are there deep and non-trivial principles guiding this process that might be worth exploring? The article explores a positive answer to this question, which is then taken up in much more detail in my 'An investigation of the lumps of thought', in particular in the 2012 version. The article has been reprinted without substantial changes in my 2012 'Modals and Conditionals. New and Revised Perspectives.'

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'. My goal for this paper was to give a truth-conditional account of modals based on a mechanism for drawing conclusions from premises. Premise sets can be inconsistent, so the mechanism I was after had to be able to resolve inconsistencies. There are many areas in human cognition where inconsistencies arise and need to be resolved. Theories of belief revision have attracted most of the attention here, culminating in the 1980s with Alchourrón, Gärdenfors, and Makinson (1985). As Makinson (2003) explains, he and his co-workers were motivated by David Lewis’s work on counterfactuals, but they found possible worlds semantics ontologically unacceptable. My work from the 1970s also took off from Lewis's work on counterfactuals, but I saw no need to escape from possible worlds.

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.

This paper is about a connection between knowledge ascriptions and counterfactual reasoning. In both cases, facts are central. And in neither case can we get away with facts that are merely true propositions. A more specific notion is needed. The unifying theme of the chapter are variations of Gettier puzzles. Gettier puzzles are widely discussed with knowledge ascriptions, but we also find them in other areas. There are Gettier‐analogs of mere belief ascriptions, of content ascriptions without mental attitudes, and of counterfactual reasoning. In the first part of the paper, I suggest that what makes a Gettier example a Gettier example in knowledge ascriptions is that the propositional content of the belief is described correctly, but it so happens that the content is exemplified by a fact that the believer has no belief about. A true description of the propositional content of the belief picks out the wrong res. The second part of the paper shows that an analogous mismatch between propositions and exemplifying facts is a potential source of trouble for counterfactual reasoning. In counterfactual reasoning, too, we have to keep an eye on the exemplifying facts of true propositions. The paper concludes with the suggestion to project premise sets for counterfactuals at various levels of specificity from worldly facts.

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.

My 1981 paper Partition and Revision presented a premise semantics for counterfactuals that attributed their indeterminacy and context dependency to the many ways the facts of a world hang together - form 'lumps', that is. This paper is an investigation of lumping relations and their role in explaining certain puzzles of counterfactual reasoning. The version listed here is the 1989 version of the paper. My 2012 book 'Modals and Conditionals', chapter 5, has a thoroughly expanded and updated version. Please consult and refer to the 2012 version when you want to cite this work. Lumping relations rely on a semantics based on partial possible worlds or situations. A situation semantics opens up entirely new possibilities for the analysis of counterfactuals and has also led to progress in other areas of semantics, but it does so at a price. There are now many possible denotations for even the most basic logical words. Are there guidelines that help us pick the right ones? If there are several possible denotations for a given logical word, all equally plausible, do we find the expected ambiguities? About a third of the paper wrestles with those questions – primarily quantifiers and negation - before a framework is in place for the discussion of counterfactual reasoning proper in the rest of the paper.

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.