-
Context and Coherence: The Logic and Grammar of ProminenceOxford University Press. 2021.Natural languages are riddled with context-sensitivity. One and the same string of words can express many different meanings on occasion of use, and yet we understand one another effortlessly, on the fly. How do we do so? What fixes the meaning of context-sensitive expressions, and how are we able to recover the meaning so effortlessly? This book offers a novel response: we can do so because we draw on a broad array of subtle linguistic conventions that determine the interpretation of context-s…Read more
-
Probabilistic semantics for epistemic modals: Normality assumptions, conditional epistemic spaces and the strength of must and mightLinguistics and Philosophy 45 (4): 985-1026. 2021.The epistemic modal auxiliaries must and might are vehicles for expressing the force with which a proposition follows from some body of evidence or information. Standard approaches model these operators using quantificational modal logic, but probabilistic approaches are becoming increasingly influential. According to a traditional view, must is a maximally strong epistemic operator and might is a bare possibility one. A competing account—popular amongst proponents of a probabilisitic turn—says …Read more
-
Università degli Studi di SienaRegular Faculty
Siena, Italy
Areas of Interest
Formal Semantics |
Pragmatics |
Logic in Philosophy |