Drawing on earlier work by Ebert and Ebert (2014), we argue that co-speech gestures contribute non-at-issue information by default (cf. Schlenker, 2018), flesh out their proposal that gestural content can be shifted via demonstratives (i.e. demonstratives function as dimension shifters from the non-at-issue to the at-issue dimension), and present experimental validation for this claim.

We bring out syntactic and semantic similarities of two types of conditionals with fronted antecedents [normal indicative conditionals (NCs) and biscuit conditionals (BCs)] and two types of left dislocation constructions in German (German left dislocation and hanging topic left dislocation), which mark two types of topicality (aboutness topicality and relevance topicality). On the basis of these similarities we argue that (the antecedent if-clauses of) NCs and BCs are aboutness topics and relevance topics, respectively. Our analysis extends the approach to aboutness topicality of Endriss (Quantificational topics. A scopal treatment of exceptional wide scope phenomena, 2009) to relevance topics to derive the semantic and pragmatic contribution of left-dislocated DPs and applies it to an analysis of conditionals as (maximal) pluralities of possible worlds. We show how this uniform approach to the interpretation of topicality accounts for the nominal left dislocation constructions as well as for the semantic and pragmatic effects observed in connection with the two types of conditionals. We furthermore discuss the potential of our proposal to deal with subjunctive biscuit conditionals, if-clauses modifying speech acts different from assertions, conditionals with right-dislocated if-clauses, and nested conditionals.

How do conventions of communication emerge? How do sounds or gestures take on a semantic meaning, and how do pragmatic conventions emerge regarding the passing of adequate, reliable, and relevant information? My colleagues and I have attempted in earlier work to extend spatialized game theory to questions of semantics. Agent-based simulations indicate that simple signaling systems emerge fairly naturally on the basis of individual information maximization in environments of wandering food sources and predators. Simple signaling emerges by means of any of various forms of updating on the behavior of immediate neighbors: imitation, localized genetic algorithms, and partial training in neural nets. Here the goal is to apply similar techniques to questions of pragmatics. The motivating idea is the same: the idea that important aspects of pragmatics, like important aspects of semantics, may fall out as a natural results of information maximization in informational networks. The attempt below is to simulate fundamental elements of the Gricean picture: in particular, to show within networks of very simple agents the emergence of behavior in accord with the Gricean maxims. What these simulations suggest is that important features of pragmatics, like important aspects of semantics, don't have to be added in a theory of informational networks. They come for free. 1

We closely investigate two specificity markers in German, namely, bestimmt and gewiss, by discussing their commonalities and differences w.r.t. matters of identification and scope-taking properties in connection with negation, nominal quantifiers, conditionals and intensional operators. Eventually we propose to analyse both markers as uniformly contributing the information that some salient agent is in possession of identifying knowledge of the referent that is introduced by the modified indefinite. The crucial differences between the two markers are that in case of gewiss, (1) this agent must be the speaker and (2) this information is contributed as a conventional implicature, whereas in the case of bestimmt, (1) the agent must not necessarily coincide with the speaker and (2) the information is contributed as at-issue meaning, which will allow for interaction of this meaning component with other operators in the sentence.

IntroductionRecent years have witnessed an increased interest in formal pragmatics and especially the establishment of game theory as a new research methodology for the study of language use. Within this field of research, three major currents can be distinguished: one is closely related to the Gricean paradigm and aims at a precise foundation of pragmatic reasoning, the second originates in the economic literature and is concerned with the role of game theory in the context of language use, and the third aims at language evolution seen either from a biological or from a cultural perspective.

presentation,at the workshop. Those seven abstractswere,elaborated,into the articles of the present proceedings. In addition, it contains three articles of alternate,speakers,and,an,article co-authored,by,Josef Hofbauer and Simon Hutegger, one of our invited speakers. We would like to thank him and Rohit Parikh, our second invited speaker, for accepting our,invitation and,their contributions. We would,also like to thank them,as well as Gerhard Jäger for their thoughtful reviews. We gratefully acknowledge,the support,for this workshop by Project P13

This pair exemplifies a peculiar contrast that has been discussed in the linguistic community at least since Strawson (1964). While hearers who are aware of the nonexistence of a French king will feel squeamish about (1-a) they will judge (1-b) as plainly false. Strawson (1964) explains this contrast along the following lines. As starting point, definite descriptions such as the king of France are taken to introduce a presupposition asking for the existence of a suitable referent1. This contrasts with the Russellian treatment of definite descriptions, where this statement of existence is construed as part of the semantics proper. Under the presuppositional Strawsonian view, the hearer’s squeamishness in case of (1-a) is expected: since his belief is contradictory to the presupposition he is not able to judge the sentence as either true or false. However, one would expect the same squeamishness in case of (1-b) along the same lines of reasoning. Strawson took the observed judgements as a direct indication of the presuppositionality of the description in question. Since (1-a) induces squeamishness and (1-b) is judged as false, he concluded that the first carries the (failed) existential presuppositions while the latter does not carry that presupposition at all. He then resorted to the information structural notion of topicality to explain the presence/absence of the presupposition. Here topicality is understood in the aboutness sense, i.e. as marking

In this paper we discuss the two German specificity markers bestimmt and gewiss. Both markers share a tendency to indicate wide scope of the modified DP and to require identifiability of a certain kind. In these respects they correspond to specificity markers in other languages such as certain in English and French or koe-wh in Russian, although their precise semantic and pragmatic contributions differ from these items as well as from another. To illustrate, consider the following examples.

We show syntactic and semantic similarities of two types of conditionals with fronted antecedents (normal indicative conditionals and biscuit conditionals) and two types of left dislocation constructions in German (german left dislocation and hanging topic left dislocation), which mark two types of topicality (aboutness topicality and frame setting topicality). On basis of these similarities we argue that (the antecedent if-clauses of) ICs and BCs are aboutness topics and frame setting topics, respectively. Concerning our analysis, we first extend the approach to abountess topicality of Endriss (to appear) to frame setting topics to derive the semantic and pragmatic contribution for the left dislocation constructions. Then we apply it to the analysis of indicative conditionals of Schlenker (2004) and show how it accounts for both types of conditionals. We thus propose one uniform approach to the interpretation of topicality that accounts for the left dislocation constructions as well as the two types of conditionals.

In this paper we explain the variation in availability of (exceptionally wide) intermediate scope readings (ISRs). We argue that ISRs have to be kept apart from functional readings and provide a formal analysis of ISRs. Our approach is based on the assumption that exceptional wide scope readings are the eect of interpreting the involved indenite as aboutness topic, where the introduction of an aboutness topic is analyzed as a distinct speech act, similar to an act of referring. We adopt this view and show that intermediate scope readings only occur in the presence of certain topic-comment embedding operators.

In this paper, we present data of German integrated verb second clauses and verb final relative clauses that seem problematic for a compositional analysis. We show that although the compositional analysis of restrictive relative clauses in [Janssen, T. M. (1982). In: Groenendijk et al. (eds.) Formals Methods in the study of Language (pp. 237–276). Amsterdam: UvA publications] can be adapted, it cannot be sustained due to overgeneration and must be considered unintuitive in light of the paratactic syntactic analysis for the verb second clauses from Gärtner [(2001). Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 3, 97–141]. Hence we present a conceptually simpler analysis along the lines of [Endriss and Gärtner, 2005 In: F.-J. d’Avis (ed.) Deutsche Syntax: Empirie und Theorie, (pp. 195–220). Göteborg], which makes use of information structural properties of the involved clauses. We conclude with a brief discussion on the compositional status of such an approach.

(1) a. Every girl will be sad if some horse falls ill. [∀ > ∃] [∃ > ∀] b. Every girl will be sad if three horses fall ill. [∀ > 3] [3 > ∀] c. Every girl will be sad if at least three horses fall ill. [∀ > at least 3] ??[at least 3 > ∀] d. Every girl will be sad if exactly three horses fall ill. [∀ > exactly 3] ??[exactly 3 > ∀] e. Every girl will be sad if at most three horses fall ill. [∀ > at most 3] *[at most 3 > ∀]

In recent years it has turned out that only a subclass of indefinites can scope out of syntactic islands. As data from German suggests, this class corresponds to the class of quantifiers that can be interpreted as topics and therefore it seems to be desirable to correlate topicality and specificity (i.e. wide scope). In this paper, we will argue that the specific interpretation of indefinites is the result of the application of an illocutionary operator TopAssert (Topic Assert) to sentences in order to update a common ground. As a consequence of this operation, the topic-marked constituent receives wide scope and relates to the rest of the clause in a way that corresponds to the intuitive content of the notion of aboutness topic. Thus the ability to be a topic and to be interpreted specifically is reduced to the application of one and the same operation to the respective constituents. For this reason, we predict that only those quantifiers that can take wide scope out of syntactic islands can be topics. The observation that wide scope phenomena are restricted to only a subclass of quantifiers (and even indefinites) will be explained by a Topic Condition. This condition tests the lexical semantics of quantifiers and determines the applicability of TopAssert on the basis of a comparison of the aboutness and familiarity definitions we propose.

Much previous work on generation has focused on the general problem of producing lexical strings from abstract semantic representations. We consider generation in the context of a particular task, creating full sentential paraphrases of fragments in dialogue. When the syntactic, semantic and phonological information provided by a dialogue fragment resolution system is made accessible to a generation component, much of the indeterminacy of lexical selection is eliminated. One major challenge for any dialogue interpretation system is the proper treatment of fragments. Examples include bare NP answers (2a), where the NP a personnel manager is resolved as the assertion (2b), and sluicing (4a), where thewh-phrase is interpreted as the question (4b) .

One property of underspecified representation formalisms is that of expressive completeness, i.e. the ability to provide representations for all possibly occuring sets of readings. In this paper a general and formal definition of completeness along the lines of [6] will be given. Several formalisms will then be compared concerning their expressive power and shown to be incomplete.