Abstract This paper extends a trivalent semantics for indicative conditionals to a language including the modal operators might and must. Specifically, we combine Cooper’s truth-functional, trivalent analysis of the conditional connective with Kratzer’s idea that if-clauses restrict modal operators. By hard-wiring both trivalence and the restriction operation into the truth conditions of conditional-modal expressions, we obtain an attractive theory that yields plausible predictions for the interaction of conditionals and modals, explains the intuitive appeal of the Restrictor View, and avoids the typical problems of Kratzer-style accounts, especially regarding the probability of conditional-modal expressions.
This paper provides an analysis of the Past Tense in English, with the special aim of explaining a curious opposition between the Simple Past and Present Perfect. This contrast is a puzzle especially because the Present Perfect and Simple Past would otherwise be thought to have very similar meanings. On the one hand, the Past Tense has been described as giving rise to cessation inferences, including certain inferences called lifetime effects, that the state described by the main verb does not hold at speech time. On the other hand, the Present Perfect has been described as giving rise to future possibility inferences, including inferences also called lifetime effects, that the state described by the main verb might hold still/again at some point in the future. In this paper I argue that the Past Tense inferences are lexical inferences of the Past Tense, and that they are in fact more general than has been previously described: the Past Tense presupposes that there are no state of the kind described by the VP holds at or after speech time (subject to domain restriction). This accounts directly for many cessation effects of the Past Tense; future possibility inferences of the Present Perfect can then be explained by appeal to competition between the Past and Present Perfect.
This paper examines the polarity asymmetry in 'inference towards the antonym' (ITA): the tendency for negated positive adjectives (e.g. 'not high') to more strongly imply their antonym ('low') than negated negative adjectives (e.g. 'not low') imply their opposite ('high'). Most prior research has operationalized polarity using a combination of evaluative valence (desirable vs. undesirable) and dimensional mapping (measuring a higher vs. lower quantity on the associated measurement scale), with these two criteria consistently aligned such that adjectives that are dimensionally positive are also evaluated more positively and dimensionally negative adjectives more negatively. In an online study, we disentangled these two operationalizations of polarity by using comparison classes that created incongruence between evaluative and dimensional polarity (e.g. 'salary' vs. 'CO2-emission' for the adjectival pair 'high-low': for 'salary', 'high' is both evaluatively and dimensionally positive, where for 'CO2-emission' it is dimensionally positive but evaluatively negative). Our results indicate that the polarity asymmetry in ITA only reliably presents when evaluative and dimensional polarity align. We discuss these findings in the context of the complexity of negative adjectives, face-threat, politeness, and the Pollyanna hypothesis.
A prominent but much-debated theory of the homogeneous behavior of sentences containing definite plurals is that homogeneity arises as the result of a presupposition. Wehbe (2022) and Guerrini and Wehbe (2024) present new arguments for this view based on the observation that definite plurals are infelicitous in certain contexts where one expects them to be infelicitous if homogeneity is a presupposition. We argue that a closer scrutiny of the empirical picture reveals that the infelicity in the cases they discuss is due to independent requirements from focus, and suggests the opposite conclusion, namely that sentences with definite plurals do not themselves give rise to a homogeneity presupposition. We further argue that, when such a presupposition does arise, it is due to the background question (questions under discussion) rather than the sentence itself. We entertain a possible path to reconciling our arguments with the assumption that definite plurals trigger a homogeneity presupposition by making certain assumptions about presupposition accommodation.
This paper proposes an analysis for the long-standing puzzle observed by Chemla (2007) regarding the anti-duality of the French universal quantifier tous, which arises even though French has no word for 'both' to feed a Maximize Presupposition competition. This phenomenon has been cited as an example in language where a dual 'conceptual alternative' is at play (Buccola etal., 2018), but no formal account of it has been put forth. Furthermore, a naive implementation of the idea overgenerates anti-duality inferences in other expressions, such as each, which, and one in English and French, which might be expected to be observed due to anti-dual counterparts in some languages like Icelandic and Japanese. We propose an account where French tous has an unpronounceable dual universal alternative built from a dual core concept, competition with which is licensed by the existence of a pronounceable expression equivalent in meaning, which we call an 'Indirect Alternative'. This proposal accounts for tous's anti-duality and lack of anti-n-ality for n > 2, as well as the lack of anti-duality in other quantifiers.
