This chapter discusses the presupposition of German auch (“too”). While secondary meanings associated with other triggers can often be informative, additive particles require their presupposition to be salient at the time of utterance. According to one account, additives require a parallel proposition to be salient (e.g. Beaver & Zeevat 2007). Another account suggests that only another individual needs to be salient, while the remainder of the presupposition can be accommodated (e.g. Heim 1992). In this chapter, an experiment comparing these two accounts is presented and discussed. It is argued that the second account is better suited to explain the results.
This paper investigates the interpretations of the embedded expressive motto in Japanese. I argue that the expressive motto which is embedded under an attitude predicate can be speaker-oriented only when there is a deontic modal in the main clause and that there is a shift from a conventional implicature (CI) to a secondary at-issue entailment at a clausal level if the embedded motto is subject-oriented. This paper also examines cases where the expressive motto and another expressive (e.g., honorific/diminutive/pejorative) are embedded and claims that, unlike Zazaki indexicals (Anand & Nevins 2004), expressives do not always shift together.
In the literature, English rise-fall-rise (RFR) intonation is known both as a marker of secondary information and as a marker of topics. This paper aims to make plausible that these two uses can be derived from a common core, which in turn can be derived from a recent theory of intonational meaning more generally, according to which rises and falls indicate (non-)compliance with the maxims (Westera 2013, 2014, 2017). The core meaning of RFR, I propose, is that the main question under discussion (Qud) is not compliantly addressed, while some secondary Qud is. Several more concrete predictions are derived from this core meaning, pertaining to secondary information, topic marking, exhaustivity, and discourse strategies. The resulting account is shown to generate certain ingredients of existing accounts, while also doing some things differently in ways that may be empirically accurate. If the proposed account is on the right track, it provides an important new intonational window on Quds.
German discourse particles are semantically/pragmatically separated from focus-background structure: Neither can their meanings be in narrow focus nor can they be included in a broad focus or in the background. I argue that this follows from independently justified assumptions: a) Discourse particles are expressive elements and therefore their meanings cannot be in the scope of other meaning components. b) Focus-background structure is always in the scope of operators. These assumptions, together with a more specific constraint on addressee-oriented expressives, explain the separation of DPRT meanings from focus-background structure. Possible counterevidence comes from stressed uses of some particles in which they have an effect similar to verum focus. But the particle variants involved in these cases have a descriptive meaning component which is not subject to the scope restrictions holding for expressive meanings and therefore can be put into focus.
This chapter is concerned with intensification as triggered by subsective evaluative good in Catalan (in examples such as una bona dosi ‘a good dose’). Its main focus is on providing an account of the fact that intensification only comes about in positive polarity environments. We first entertain an analysis based on the idea that positive polarity is the result of a mismatch of meanings contributed at different dimensions, but end up supporting an alternative in which the dimensions of evaluation of the noun play a crucial role in giving rise to intensification. More specifically, intensification arises when an object is only evaluated according to one dimension. Interestingly, uni-dimensionality is not preserved under negation, which prevents intensification from arising, and, in turn, makes positive polarity an illusion.
This paper studies literal and enriched meanings of sentences with weak definites and bare singulars in complementary distribution. It discusses, among other things, whether or not they display reinforceability, defeasibility, at-issueness and projectivity, which are properties usually used in the literature to characterize different types of inferences. The main conclusions are that literal meanings are regular entailments and that the best way to analyze enriched meanings is as a combination of entailed and conversationally implicated content. This treatment can explain their mixed behavior and, furthermore, is compatible with Aguilar-Guevara and Zwarts’s (2011, 2013) analysis of weak definites and its possible extension to bare singulars.
We present experimental work on the processing of secondary meaning as conveyed by the German modal particles nur and bloß in wh-questions. We compare the processing of these particles with the processing of the polysemous focus particles. We argue that nur and bloß as modal and focus particles have a common semantic denominator, namely domain restriction. As modal particles, they further feature the component of domain extension. This contrast between domain restriction and extension is the semantic reason for why wh-questions featuring these modal particles often express confusion, frustration, if not desperation on the part of the speaker. Results of two comprehension experiments show that while the processing of the modal vs. focus particle meaning does not differ, the particles differ in that bloß is more accessible in its modal particle reading than nur, indicating a distinction between these otherwise synonymous elements that has not been observed so far.
This chapter examines the morphosyntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties of descriptive pronouns in European Portuguese, a set of NP s that refer to the addressee and are formed by the definite article and a noun. These forms display a bundle of conventional meaning components not previously described: (i) they refer to the addressee (deictic component), (ii) the property conveyed by the noun is predicated of the addressee (property component), and (iii) the speaker expresses social distance towards the addressee (expressive component). While the deictic meaning is primary content, the property and expressive meanings are secondary contents. I analyze descriptive pronouns as mixed use-conditional items and discuss the theoretical status of their secondary contents.
The erotetic, or question-based, theory of reasoning has been developed from an account of utterance interpretation but moves beyond interpretation to a general account of human reasoning with multiple premises that covers both ideal valid reasoning as well as fallacious reasoning.The core idea of the erotetic theory of reasoning is that reasoners treat premises as questions and maximally strong answers, which can be made mathematically precise using tools from philosophy and linguistics.We present three experiments showing new fallacious inferences predicted by the erotetic theory, some of which are so frequently endorsed to be akin to cognitive illusions.The results suggest that similar phenomena discussed in the literature are more general and systematic than had been thought.
Moore’s paradox, the infamous felt bizarreness of sincerely uttering something of the form “I believe grass is green, but it ain’t”—has attracted a lot of attention since its original discovery (Moore 1942). It is often taken to be a paradox of belief—in the sense that the locus of the inconsistency is the beliefs of someone who so sincerely utters. This claim has been labeled as the priority thesis: If you have an explanation of why a putative content could not be coherently believed, you thereby have an explanation of why it cannot be coherently asserted. (Shoemaker 1995). The priority thesis, however, is insufficient to give a general explanation of Moore-paradoxical phenomena and, moreover, it’s false. I demonstrate this, then show how to give a commitment-theoretic account of Moore Paradoxicality.
