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85Toward a Taxonomy of Projective ContentLanguage 89 (1): 66-109. 2013.Projective contents, which include presuppositional inferences and Potts's conventional implicatures, are contents that may project when a construction is embedded, as standardly identified by the FAMILY-OF-SENTENCES diagnostic. This article establishes distinctions among projective contents on the basis of a series of diagnostics, including a variant of the family-of-sentences diagnostic, that can be applied with linguistically untrained consultants in the field and the laboratory. These diagno…Read more
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67Presuppositions, Conventional Implicature, and Beyond: A unified account of projectionIn Nathan Klinedist & Daniel Rothschild (eds.), Proceedings of Workshop on New Directions in the Theory of Presuppositions, Essli 2009. 2009.We define a notion of projective meaning which encompasses both classical presuppositions and phenomena which are usually regarded as non-presuppositional but which also display projection behavior—Horn’s assertorically inert entailments, conventional implicatures (both Grice’s and Potts’) and some conversational implicatures. We argue that the central feature of all projective meanings is that they are not-at-issue, defined as a relation to the question under discussion. Other properties differ…Read more
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8Accommodation in a Language GameIn Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A companion to David Lewis, Wiley-blackwell. 2015.This chapter focuses on four questions which help to understand the presupposition accommodation as Lewis defines it. The first is a question about how we recognize that an utterance involves a presupposition. The second question is about what it is to accommodate. The third question has to do with the role of scoreboard in accommodation. The fourth question has to do with Lewis's ceteris paribus condition. The chapter considers the characterization of accommodation due to Thomason, and argues t…Read more
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38The indexical character of epistemic modalityLinguistics and Philosophy 46 (5): 1219-1267. 2023.We assume a central thesis about modal auxiliaries due to Angelika Kratzer, the modal base presupposition: natural language expressions that contain a modal component in their meaning, including all English modal auxiliaries and epistemic modal auxiliaries (EMA)s in particular, presuppose a modal base, a function that draws from context a relevant set of propositions which contribute to a premise-semantics for the modal. Accepting this thesis for EMAs leaves open (at least) the following two que…Read more
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60Open Texture and MathematicsNotre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 62 (1): 173-191. 2021.The purpose of this article is to explore the extent to which mathematics is subject to open texture and the extent to which mathematics resists open texture. The resistance is tied to the importance of proof and, in particular, rigor, in mathematics.
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Information structure and truth-conditional semantics / Stefan Hinterwimmer - TopicsIn Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn & Klaus von Heusinger (eds.), Semantics: sentence and information structure, De Gruyter. 2019.
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285What projects and whySemantics and Linguistic Theory 20 309-327. 2010.The empirical phenomenon at the center of this paper is projection, which we define (uncontroversially) as follows: (1) Definition of projection An implication projects if and only if it survives as an utterance implication when the expression that triggers the implication occurs under the syntactic scope of an entailment-cancelling operator. Projection is observed, for example, with utterances containing aspectual verbs like stop, as shown in (2) and (3) with examples from English and Paraguaya…Read more
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55Linguistic Convention and the Architecture of InterpretationAnalytic Philosophy 58 (4): 418-439. 2017.
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30Ontology via semantics? Introduction to the special issue on the semantics of cardinalsLinguistics and Philosophy 40 (4): 321-329. 2017.As introduction to the special issue on the semantics of cardinals, we offer some background on the relevant literature, and an overview of the contributions to this volume. Most of these papers were presented in earlier form at an interdisciplinary workshop on the topic at The Ohio State University, and the contributions to this issue reflect that interdisciplinary character: the authors represent both fields in the title of this journal.
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6Information Structure in Discourse: Towards an Integrated Formal Theory of PragmaticsSemantics and Pragmatics 5 1-69. 1996.A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of …Read more
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159Modal subordination and pronominal anaphora in discourseLinguistics and Philosophy 12 (6). 1989.
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66Demonstratives as DefinitesIn Kees van Deemter & Rodger Kibble (eds.), Information Sharing: Reference and Presupposition in Language Generation and Interpretation, Csli Press. pp. 89-196. 2002.
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Pronouns as DefinitesIn Marga Reimer & Anne Bezuidenhout (eds.), Descriptions and beyond, Oxford University Press. 2004.
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259Review of the logic of conventional implicatures by Chris Potts (review)Linguistics and Philosophy 30 (6): 707-749. 2007.We review Potts' influential book on the semantics of conventional implicature , offering an explication of his technical apparatus and drawing out the proposal's implications, focusing on the class of CIs he calls supplements. While we applaud many facets of this work, we argue that careful considerations of the pragmatics of CIs will be required in order to yield an empirically and explanatorily adequate account
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31Domain restriction in dynamic semanticsIn Emmon W. Bach, Eloise Jelinek, Angelika Kratzer & Barbara H. Partee (eds.), Quantification in Natural Languages, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 661--700. 1995.
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89Spanish Imperfecto and Pretérito: Truth Conditions and Aktionsart Effects in a Situation Semantics (review)Natural Language Semantics 8 (4): 297-347. 2000.Spanish verbs display two past-tense forms, the pret´rito and the imperfecto. We offer an account of the semantics of these forms within a situation semantics, addressing a number of theoretically interesting questions about how to realize a semantics for tense and events in that type of framework. We argue that each of these forms is unambiguous, and that the apparent variety of readings attested for them derives from interaction with other factors in the course of interpretation. The meaning o…Read more
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59Information Structure: AfterwordSemantics and Pragmatics 5 (7): 1-19. 2012.As a graduate student in Linguistics at UMass/Amherst in the 1980s, I was fortunate to be exposed to a number of new developments bearing on the relationship between formal semantics and pragmatics. In the 1970s under the influence of Cresswell, Lewis, Montague, and Partee, enormous progress in semantics was made possible by narrowing the focus of the field mainly to the consideration of the conventional, truth conditional content of an indicative utterance, calculated compositionally as a funct…Read more
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1Anaphora in Intensional ContextsIn Shalom Lappin (ed.), The handbook of contemporary semantic theory, Blackwell Reference. pp. 215--246. 1996.In the semantic literature, there is a class of examples involving anaphora in intensional contexts, i.e. under the scope of modal operators or propositional attitude predicates, which display anaphoric relations that appear at first glance to violate otherwise well-supported generalizations about operator scope and anaphoric potential. In Section 1,I will illustrate this phenomenon, which, for reasons that should become clear below, I call modal subordination; I will develop a general schema fo…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |