This paper proposes an account of the interpretive effects of two discourse particles in Hungarian, talán and vajon , within the view of context and context change developed in Farkas & Roelofsen (2017) , and shows that the restrictions on their distribution follow from their interpretive properties. Building on Gyuris (2022) , talán will be treated as signaling epistemic bias in both declaratives and interrogatives. Following Farkas (2022) , vajon will be treated as a non-intrusive question marker, which, in the account proposed, is incompatible with bias markers. The restrictions on the sentence types in which these particles occur, as well as the fact that there are restrictions on their co-occurence, will be derived from their interpretive contribution.

This paper introduces on the scene a new type of non-canonical question, dubbed non-intrusive, exemplified by interrogatives marked by the particle oare in Romanian. It does so by providing an account of the distribution and interpretation of this particle using an updated version of the context components in , and an elaboration of the general assumptions in . The intuition the account captures is that by marking an interrogative with oare, the speaker signals that she does not assume that the issue she raises will be resolved in a future state of the conversation. It is further argued that non-intrusive questions are empirically close to but not identical with conjectural questions, discussed most recently in , and therefore have to be recognized as a separate category. The predictions and theoretical implications of the account are discussed relative to a general typology of canonical and non-canonical questions.

This chapter surveys empirical and theoretical issues raised by dependent indefinites in three unrelated languages, Hungarian, Telugu, and Kaqchikel. Dependent indefinites are specially marked noun phrases that can only occur when interpreted within a predication that distributes over events or individuals. Their determiner can either be a simple indefinite or a cardinal numeral. The chapter lays out the theoretical challenges the data raise and discusses how these challenges are met in three approaches that differ with respect to what they take as the core property of these indefinites.

In this paper, we study the distribution and interpretation of a non-temporal use of the future tense in Italian, called ‘presumptive’ or ‘epistemic’, which we label here PF. We first distinguish PF from its closest modal relatives, namely epistemic necessity/possibility/likelihood modals, as well as weak necessity modals. We then propose an account of PF in declaratives and interrogatives that treats it as a special comparative subjective likelihood modal, and test its empirical predictions. A theoretical lesson drawn from this detailed study of the semantics of PF is that semantics needs sharpened theoretical tools to be able to capture the fine-grained distinctions languages make when it comes to signaling modulated epistemic commitment to a proposition.

The general aim of this paper is to make progress in understanding what is common and what is not across canonical and non-canonical questions. After laying out the theoretical assumptions, I argue that the commonly assumed felicity conditions on canonical questions follow from the semantics and the basic conventional discourse effects of unmarked interrogatives. I further argue that special interrogative forms can be used to signal special conventional discourse effects that bring about the weakening or overriding of these default assumptions. As a case study, the properties of interrogatives in Romanian marked by the morpheme oare are investigated and accounted for in detail. I argue that oare-marked interrogatives exemplify a novel kind of non-canonical question that I dub non-intrusive.

AbstractThe chapter casts a look at the role specificity has played in DP semantics since the early 1970s. It puts forward the proposal that the common thread across specificity distinctions is the contrast between stability vs variability in value assignments for the variable introduced by the DP across various types of alternatives. Special determiners are used to mark either variation (nonspecificity) or stability (specificity).

This paper deals with the non-temporal use of the future in Italian knownas ‘epistemic’ or ‘presumptive’ (PF) in declaratives and interrogatives. We firstdistinguish PF from epistemic necessity and possibility, as well as from weaknecessity modals, providing in the process the main empirical challenges PF raises.We then propose and justify a semantic account that treats PF as a special normalitymodal that involves a subjective likelihood component. Since in our account theprejacent (the proposition in the scope of the modal) is at issue, the use of PF triggersthe implicature that the speaker is not in a position to appeal to what she knows inorder to support her commitment to the prejacent. This, we claim, is the source ofthe intuition that PF is often used to offer a “guess” relative to the question underdiscussion (QUD).

Claus et al. (2017) present novel experimental evidence concerning polarity particle responses in German, and discuss the challenges these findings raise for three approaches to such responses, namely the saliency approach of Krifka (20130, the feature model of Roelofsen and Farkas (2015), and the ellipsis approaches of Kramer and Rawlins (2012), and Holmberg (2016). The authors then sketch a way to account for the data within the feature model, as well as a revised version of the saliency account. The first goal of this paper is to work out in full detail an account of the new German data in the feature model. In the process, we will clarify and better articulate those aspects of the feature model that are responsible for how preference patterns are to be explained. Our second goal is to deepen the comparison between this model and the saliency approach by taking a wider cross-linguistic perspective. EARLY ACCESS

Abstract Nominal reference is central to both linguistic semantics and philosophy of language. On the theoretical side, both philosophers and linguists wrestle with the problem of how the link between nominal expressions and their referents is to be characterized, and what formal tools are most appropriate to deal with this issue. The problem is complex because nominal expression come in a large variety of forms, from simple proper names, pronouns, or bare nouns (Jennifer, they, books) to complex expressions involving determiners and various quantifiers (the/every/no/their answer). While the reference of such expressions is varied, their basic syntactic distribution as subjects or objects of various types, for instance, is homogeneous. Important advances in understanding this tension were made with the advent of the work of R. Montague and that of his successors. The problems involved in understanding the relationship between pronouns and their antecedents in discourse have led to another fundamental theoretical development, namely that of dynamic semantics. On the empirical side, issues at the center of both linguistic and philosophical investigations concern how to best characterize the difference between definite and indefinite nominals, and, more generally, how to understand the large variety of determiner types found both within a language and cross-linguistically. These considerations led to refining the definite/indefinite contrast to include fine-grained specificity distinctions that have been shown to be relevant to various morphosyntactic phenomena across the world’s languages. Considerations concerning nominal reference are thus relevant not only to semantics but also to morphology and syntax. Some questions within the domain of nominal reference have grown into rich subfields of inquiry. This is the case with generic reference, the study of pronominal reference, the study of quantifiers, and the study of the semantics of nominal number marking.

This article presents an account of the semantic content and conventional discourse effects of a range of sentence types in English, namely falling declaratives, polar interrogatives and certain kinds of rising declaratives and tag interrogatives. The account aims to divide the labor between compositional semantics and conventions of use in a principled way. We argue that falling declaratives and polar interrogatives are unmarked sentence types. On our account, differences in their conventional discourse effects follow from independently motivated semantic differences combined with a single convention of use, which applies uniformly to both sentence types. As a result, the Fregean 'illocutionary force operators' Assertion and Question become unnecessary. In contrast, we argue that rising declaratives and tag interrogatives are marked sentence types. On our account, their conventional discourse effects consist of the effects that are dictated by the basic convention of use that is common to all sentence types considered here, augmented with special effects that are systematically connected to their formal properties. Thus, a central feature of our approach is that it maintains a parallelism between unmarked and marked sentence types on the one hand, and basic and complex discourse effects on the other.

Languages that have determiners often have a rich inventory of them. In English, indefinite determiners include a(n), some, a certain, this, one, another, cardinals, partitives , the zero determiner of bare plurals (in some analyses) , and, according to Hom 1 999 and Giannakidou 2001 , any. Despite the attention indefinites have received in the literature, characterizing what is common to all of them and what is specific to each is still an elusive task. This paper investigates the first three deter­ miners in this list, attempting to provide a semantic characterization that accounts for their distribution. (For pertinent discussion of issues that overlap to some extent with those taken up below, see Kamp and Bende-Farkas 2002, and for a discussion of the French versions of some and a certain , see Jayez and Tovena (this volume) .) The Ds that concern us here share two characteristics : (i) they are indefinite, and (ii) they are existential when not in the scope of any operator or quantifier. As seen in [ 1 ] , they may occur as pivots in existential there constructions, and therefore all three form weak DPs .

In some contexts, plural nominals have inclusive interpretation, allowing atoms in their reference domain; in others, they are exclusive, allowing only sums. Selecting between the two interpretations has been shown to be sensitive to both world-knowledge pressures (Farkas & de Swart 2010) and contextual relevance (Grimm 2010). The principal semantic factor claimed to be involved is monotonicity direction (Sauerland, Anderssen & Yatsushiro 2005; Spector 2007; Zweig 2009; Farkas & de Swart 2010): upward monotone environments tend to select exclusive readings; downward monotone ones, inclusive readings. In four image verification experiments, we tested this claim and found support for the generalization. The effect of monotonicity direction, however, is small. Moreover we find that varying whether a plural is in the scope of a quantified description has a much larger effect on the prevalence of the exclusive interpretation. This suggests that monotonicity, though involved, is not a decisive factor in plural interpretation.

This article provides an account of the distribution and interpretation of POLARITY PARTICLES in responses, starting with yes and no in English, and then extending the coverage to their crosslinguistic kin. Polarity particles are used in responses to both declarative and interrogative sentences, and thus provide a window onto the semantics and discourse effects of such sentences. We argue that understanding the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles requires a characterization of declaratives and interrogatives that captures a series of challenging similarities and differences across these two sentence types. To meet this challenge we combine and extend insights from inquisitive semantics, dynamic semantics, and commitment-based models of discourse. We then provide a full account of the English data that leads to a typology of polarity particles and a series of crosslinguistic predictions. These predictions are checked against data from Romanian, Hungarian, French, and German, languages that contrast with English in that they have ternary polarity particle systems, and contrast with one another in further subtle ways.

This paper presents an experiment that is designed to quantify the negativity of sentences with different types of negative operators (n-words like never and downward entailing operators like rarely) in different syntactic positions (adverb, subject, and direct object). In the experiment, participants were provided with a minimal context, then asked to choose one tag-question out of two; one of questions had a positive tag and the other had a negative tag. Clearly positive sentences (i.e., sentences without any negative operators) and clearly negative sentences (i.e., sentences with overt sentential negation and no other relevant operators present) were used as controls. The relative frequency of positive and negative tags was then taken as a measure of the sentential negativity of each experimental item. Our main finding is that sentential negativity is a graded notion, sensitive to both semantic and syntactic factors. With respect to semantics, we find that n-words contribute more negativity than downward entailing operators, confirming the logical distinction between anti-additivity and downward entailment identified in the previous semantic literature on NPI licensing. With respect to syntactic position, we find that negative items in subject or adverbial position contribute more negativity than negative items in direct object position.

A prominent treatment of n-words such as nobody and never is as indefinite expressions occurring in the scope of a covert sentential negation operator. This paper presents three experiments using two novel strategies based on polarity particles and VP ellipsis to test the predictions of this treatment of n-words. The first experiment tests a particular prediction of recent accounts of polarity particles with respect to agreeing responses to negative assertions. The other two extend the inquiry to cases involving n-words. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.6.7 BibTeX info

The paper casts a look back at the role specificity has played in DP semantics in the last thirty years and then defends the proposal that the common thread across specificity distinctions is the contrast between stability vs. variability in value assignments for the variable introduced by the DP across various types of alternatives. Special determiners are used to mark either variation (non-specificity) or stability (specificity). We exemplify with a discussion of the singular determiner some in English.

This paper is concerned with discourse moves that induce a choice between two alternatives that are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. We refer to such moves as polar initiatives. Based on distributional considerations, we make a distinction between default polar initiatives, which include default assertions (Kim left) and default polar questions (Did Kim leave? ), and non-default polar initiatives, which include tag questions (Kim left, didn’t she? ) and tentative assertions (Kim left? ). Our aim is to develop a theory of polar initiatives that accounts for the discourse effects of all default polar initiatives in a uniform way, and that captures the intuition that the effects of non-default polar initiatives are more complex than those of default polar initiatives. In developing such a theory, we pay special attention to a particular type of responses to polar initiatives, namely ones that are headed by polarity particles (yes/no). We develop a detailed account of polarity particle responses in English. This account also gives rise to a number of typological predictions, which are corroborated by data from Romanian, Hungarian, German, and French. At the theoretical level, the paper integrates the framework of inquisitive semantics (Ciardelli et al., 2012) with recent work on discourse structure (especially Gunlogson, 2008; Farkas and Bruce, 2010; Malamud and Stephenson, 2011), refining and enriching both. ∗Parts of this paper were presented at a workshop at Newcastle University in June 2012, at Linguistics Colloquia at Yale University and Nijmegen University in April 2012, at the Amsterdam Colloquium and a Linguistics Colloquium at Stanford University in December 2011, and during seminars at the University of Amsterdam in October 2011, and at the Georg August University of Göttingen in April 2011. We are grateful to the audiences at these events for useful comments.