•  69
    A language is a system of signs used for communication, and linguists are tasked with, among other things, uncovering the syntax and semantics of such systems. In this paper I explore to what extent pictures fit this characterization of a language and hence would fall within the domain of linguistics. I conclude that at the very least there are well-defined systems of depiction for which we can give a precise semantics, in a familiar possible worlds framework, although pictorial propositions are…Read more
  •  164
    Coping with imaginative resistance
    Journal of Semantics 39 (2): 523-549. 2022.
    We propose to characterize imaginative resistance as the failure or unwillingness of the reader to take a fictional description of a deviant reality at face value. The goal of the paper is to explore how readers deal with such a breakdown of the default Face Value interpretation strategy. We posit two distinct interpretative ‘coping’ strategies which help the reader engage with the resistance-inducing fiction by attributing the offending content to one of the fictional characters. We present nov…Read more
  •  15
    Other Points of View: Replies to Comments
    Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 59 (2): 81-84. 2022.
  •  1408
    Unreliability and Point of View in Filmic Narration
    Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 59 (2): 23-37. 2022.
    Novels like Fight Club or American Psycho are said to be instances of unreliable narration: the first person narrator presents an evidently distorted picture of the fictional world. The film adaptations of these novels are likewise said to involve unreliable narration. I resist this extension of the term ‘unreliable narration’ to film. My argument for this rests on the observation that unreliable narration requires a personal narrator while film typically involves an impersonal narrator. The kin…Read more
  •  427
    Emojis as Pictures
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (n/a). 2023.
    I argue that emojis are essentially little pictures, rather than words, gestures, expressives, or diagrams. ???? means that the world looks like that, from some viewpoint. I flesh out a pictorial semantics in terms of geometric projection with abstraction and stylization. Since such a semantics delivers only very minimal contents I add an account of pragmatic enrichment, driven by coherence and nonliteral interpretation. The apparent semantic distinction between emojis depicting entities (like ?…Read more
  •  81
    The Language of Fiction (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2021.
    This volume brings together new research on fiction from the fields of philosophy and linguistics. Fiction has long been a topic of interest in philosophy, but recent years have also seen a surge in work on fictional discourse at the intersection between linguistics and philosophy of language. In particular, there has been a growing interest in examining long-standing issues concerning fiction from a perspective that is informed both by philosophy and linguistic theory. Following a detailed intr…Read more
  •  353
    Semantics traditionally focuses on linguistic meaning. In recent years, the Super Linguistics movement has tried to broaden the scope of inquiry in various directions, including an extension of semantics to talk about the meaning of pictures. There are close similarities between the interpretation of language and of pictures. Most fundamentally, pictures, like utterances, can be either true or false of a given state of affairs, and hence both express propositions (Zimmermann, 2016; Greenberg, 20…Read more
  •  786
    Extracting fictional truth from unreliable sources
    In Emar Maier & Andreas Stokke (eds.), The Language of Fiction, Oxford University Press. 2021.
    A fictional text is commonly viewed as constituting an invitation to play a certain game of make-believe, with the individual sentences written by the author providing the propositions we are to imagine and/or accept as true within the fiction. However, we can’t always take the text at face value. What narratologists call ‘unreliable narrators’ may present a confused or misleading picture of the fictional world. Meanwhile there has been a debate in philosophy about so-called ‘imaginative resist…Read more
  •  390
    Death on the Freeway: Imaginative resistance as narrator accommodation
    In Ilaria Frana, Paula Menendez Benito & Rajesh Bhatt (eds.), Making Worlds Accessible: Festschrift for Angelika Kratzer, Umass Scholarworks. 2020.
    We propose to analyze well-known cases of "imaginative resistance" from the philosophical literature (Gendler, Walton, Weatherson) as involving the inference that particular content should be attributed to either: (i) a character rather than the narrator or, (ii) an unreliable, irrational, opinionated, and/or morally deviant "first person" narrator who was originally perceived to be a typical impersonal, omniscient, "effaced" narrator. We model the latter type of attribution in terms of two inde…Read more
  •  475
    Shifting perspectives in pictorial narratives
    with Sofia Bimpikou
    In Uli Sauerland & Stephanie Solt (eds.), Proceeding of Sinn und Bedeutung 23, Leibniz-centre General Linguistics (zas). 2018.
    We propose an extension of Discourse Respresentation Theory (DRT) for analyzing pictorial narratives. We test drive our PicDRT framework by analyzing the way authors represent characters’ mental states and perception in comics. Our investigation goes beyond Abusch and Rooth (2017) in handling not just free perception sequences, but also a form of apparent perspective blending somewhat reminiscent of free indirect discourse.
  •  27
    Denial and correction in Layered DRT
    with Rob van der Sandt
    In Proceedings of Diabruck'03, . pp. 1-10. 2003.
    The central characteristic of denials is that they perform a non-monotonic correction operation on discourse structure. A second characteristic is that they may be used to object to various kinds of information including presuppositions and implicatures. In this paper we first use standard DRT to capture these features, implement an earlier proposal of van der Sandt (1991) in DRT and point out a shortcoming of that approach. We then adopt Layered DRT. LDRT is an extension of standard DRT designe…Read more
  •  96
    Shows that both anaphoricity and egocentric de se binding play a crucial role in the interpretation of tense in discourse. Uses the English backwards shifted reading of the past tense in a mistaken time scenario to bring out the tension between these two features. Provides a suitable representational framework for the observed clash in the form of an extension of DRT in which updates of the common ground are accompanied by updates of each relevant agent's complex attitudinal state.
  •  2626
    Quotation and Unquotation in Free Indirect Discourse
    Mind and Language 30 (3): 345-373. 2015.
    I argue that free indirect discourse should be analyzed as a species of direct discourse rather than indirect discourse. More specifically, I argue against the emerging consensus among semanticists, who analyze it in terms of context shifting. Instead, I apply the semantic mechanisms of mixed quotation and unquotation to offer an alternative analysis where free indirect discourse is essentially a quotation of an utterance or thought, but with unquoted tenses and pronouns
  •  1
    Layered Discourse Representation Theory
    In Alessandro Capone, Franco Lo Piparo & Marco Carapezza (eds.), Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics, Springer. pp. 311--327. 2013.
  •  43
    Quotation marks as monsters, or the other way around?
    In Floris Paul Maria Roelofsen Dekker Aloni (ed.), Proceedings of the Sixteenth Amsterdam Colloquium, . pp. 145-150. 2007.
    Mixed quotation exhibits characteristics of both mention and use. Some even go so far as to claim it can be described wholly in terms of the pragmatics of language use. Thus, it may be argued that the observed shifting of indexicals under all quotation shows that a monstrous operator is involved. I will argue the opposite: a proper semantic account of quotation can be used to exorcize Schlenker's monsters from semantic theory
  •  14
    Iterated de re: A new puzzle for the relational report semantics
    In Arndt Riester & Torgrim Solstad (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 13, . pp. 347-55. 2009.
    I present and solve a puzzle involving iterated de re reports in a relational attitudes framework. The investigation shows that de re reporting is even more noncompositional than hypothesized earlier.
  • Acquaintance resolution and belief de re
    In Laura Alonso i Alemany & Paul Égré (eds.), Proceedings of the 9th Esslli Student Session, . 2004.
    This paper proposes a way of semantically representing de re belief ascriptions that involves contextual resolution of the acquaintance relation between the attitude holder and the object about which the attitude is de re. A special case is that where the belief is about the believer herself. Here, we may discern two possibilities: the acquaintance relation is equality, in which case we end up with a de se belief, or, if the first option fails, we search the context for a different suitable rela…Read more
  •  381
    Why my I is your you: On the communication of de se attitudes
    In Manuel García-Carpintero & Stephan Torre (eds.), About Oneself: De Se Thought and Communication, Oxford University Press. 2016.
    The communication of de se attitudes poses a problem for “participant- neutral” analyses of communication in terms of propositions expressed or proposed updates to the common ground: when you tell me “I am an idiot”, you express a first person de se attitude, but as a result I form a different, second person attitude, viz. that you are an idiot. I argue that when we take seriously the asymmetry between speaker and hearer in semantics this problem disappears. To prove this I propose a concrete mo…Read more
  •  55
    On the roads to de se
    Proceedings of Salt 21 (1): 393--412. 2011.
    It is rather uncontroversial that there are different ways to report de se attitudes, but there is still disagreement about the number and the nature of the different mechanisms at work. Following Anand (2006), I distinguish three types of de se reporting: one a special case of de re, another expressed by shifted indexicals, and a third expressed by dedicated de se pronouns. For the first two I propose reductions to de re and de dicto reporting, respectively, couched in a dynamic framework where…Read more
  •  49
    Contrast as denial in multi-dimensional semantics
    with Jennifer Spenader
    Journal of Pragmatics 41 1707-26. 2009.
    We argue that contrastive statements have the same underlying semantics and affect the context in the same way as denials. We substantiate this claim by giving a unified account of the two phenomena that treats contrast as a subtype of denial. This analysis crucially requires a dynamic semantics view of context-dependence with a multi-dimensional representation of information.
  •  261
    This paper deals with the semantics of de dicto , de re and de se belief reports. First, I flesh out in some detail the established, classical theories that assume syntactic distinctions between all three types of reports. I then propose a new, unified analysis, based on two ideas discarded by the classical theory. These are: (i) modeling the de re/de dicto distinction as a difference in scope, and (ii) analyzing de se as merely a special case of relational de re attitudes. The resurrection of t…Read more
  •  42
    De re and de se in quantified belief reports
    In Sylvia Blaho, Luis Vicente & Erik Schoorlemmer (eds.), Proceedings of Console Xiii, . pp. 211-29. 2005.
    Percus & Sauerland (2003) use quantified belief reports of the form 'Only Peter thinks he's...' to argue for dedicated de se LFs. The argument is targeted against any reductionist account that sees de se as merely a particular subtype of de re, viz. a de re belief about oneself from a first person perspective, requiring nothing but an account of de re attitudes. My acquaintance resolution framework is an attempt at just such a reduction and in this paper I extend that theory with a projection me…Read more
  •  46
    The information conveyed by any utterance is a motley ensemble. Utterances carry content about the world as it is according to the speaker, but also about speakers’ attitudes, the way they speak, what has been said before, and so on. There are many kinds of information that are conveyed by way of language, and differences in kind correlate with differences in status. Presupposed information exhibits a distinctive projection behaviour; conversational implicatures are cancellable in a way that asser…Read more
  •  128
    Linguistics and philosophy have provided distinct views on the nature of reference to individuals in language. In philosophy, in particular in the tradition of direct reference, the distinction is between reference and description. In linguistics, in particular in the tradition of generative grammar, the distinction is between pronouns and R-expressions. I argue for a third conception, grounded in dynamic semantics, in which the main watershed is between definites, which trigger presuppositions …Read more
  •  89
    Attitudes and Mental Files in Discourse Representation Theory
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (2): 473-490. 2016.
    I present a concrete DRT-based syntax and semantics for the representation of mental states in the style of Kamp. This system is closely related to Recanati’s Mental Files framework, but adds a crucial distinction between anchors, the analogues of mental files, and attitudes like belief, desire and imagination. Attitudes are represented as separate compartments that can be referentially dependent on anchors. I show how the added distinctions help defend the useful notion of an acquaintance-based…Read more
  •  48
    Review of Elbourne's (2006) unification of pronouns, definite descriptions and proper names.
  •  69
    English direct discourse is easily recognized by e.g. the lack of a complementizer, the quotation marks (or the intonational contour they induce), and verbatim (`shifted') pronouns. Japanese employs the same complementizer for all reports, does not have a consistent intonational quotation marking, and tends to drop pronouns where possible. Some have argued that this just shows many Japanese reports are ambiguous: despite the lack of explicit marking, the underlying distinction is just as hard. O…Read more
  •  86
    This thesis deals with the phenomenon of attitude reporting. More specifically, it provides a unified semantics of de re and de se belief reports. After arguing that de se belief is best thought of as a special case of de re belief, I examine whether we can extend this unification to the realm of belief reports. I show how, despite very promising first steps, previous attempts in this direction ultimately fail with respect to some relatively recent linguistic data involving quantified and infini…Read more
  •  506
    Parasitic attitudes
    Linguistics and Philosophy 38 (3): 205-236. 2015.
    Karttunen observes that a presupposition triggered inside an attitude ascription, can be filtered out by a seemingly inaccessible antecedent under the scope of a preceding belief ascription. This poses a major challenge for presupposition theory and the semantics of attitude ascriptions. I solve the problem by enriching the semantics of attitude ascriptions with some independently argued assumptions on the structure and interpretation of mental states. In particular, I propose a DRT-based repres…Read more