This paper brings a developmental perspective to the discussion of a longstanding issue surrounding the proper characterization of presuppositions. On an influential view (Stalnaker in Synthese 22(1–2):272–289, 1970; Stalnaker, in Milton, Unger (eds) Semantics and philosophy, New York University Press, New York, 1974; Karttunen in Theor Linguist 1:181–194, 1974), formal presuppositions reflect admittance conditions: an utterance of a sentence which presupposes p is admitted by a conversational context c only if p is common ground in c . The theory distinguishes two modes of satisfying this formal requirement: (i) presuppositions may have common ground status prior to utterance, or (ii) they may achieve common ground status post hoc, via accommodation, an adjustment of the common ground by cooperative listeners so as to meet the requirements of an uttered sentence. While intuitive and general, the theory has been criticized (among other things) on methodological grounds (see e.g. Gazdar in Pragmatics: implicature, presupposition and logical form, Academic Press, New York, 1979): the availability of accommodation makes it difficult to empirically examine the notion of presupposition as admittance conditions because a central tenet—pragmatic infelicity results whenever c does not entail p —may be masked due to the pragmatic sophistication of language users. In this paper, we argue that child language presents an opportunity to avoid this intrinsic difficulty. In a series of behavioral experiments, we show that young children generate a default expectation that the presuppositions of an asserted sentence have common ground status prior to utterance. Furthermore and more tellingly, we also find that even when accommodation is the preferred option for adults, children fail to accommodate presuppositions in an adult-like manner. This pattern of behavior, we argue, is expected under the admittance theory: in a population where the interference from accommodation is reduced, the impact of failing to satisfy the formal admittance conditions becomes directly observable.

This paper contributes to a body of research using parasitic gaps (PGs; Engdahl 1983, Culicover and Postal 2001, a.o.) to explore the nature of movement (Nissenbaum 2000, Legate 2003, Overfelt 2015b, Bondarenko and Davis 2019, Davis 2020, a.o.). In particular, this paper examines the implications of a particular variety of PG for the hypothesis that movement paths often involve several successive-cyclic steps:

Scalar inferences are ubiquitous in human reasoning. Correspondingly, language has many means of expressing and encoding them. One of these means is the focus particle even, which utilizes scalar inferences to signal the pragmatic status of asserted content as noteworthy. The vehicles that even employs to signal noteworthiness are scalar likelihood inferences. A peculiarity of these inferences is that they are presuppositional in nature (not-at-issue) and yet, they are responsive to the polarity of the sentence expressing the proposition whose likelihood is signaled. This property raises intricate questions about what learners might expect scalar operators of this sort to look like (initial hypothesis space) as well as what type of evidence and learning strategies they have access to as they figure out the specific properties of even in adult English. This paper presents a detailed study of this development, combining data from a series of comprehension experiments and corpus studies. We find that children are sensitive to the basic scalar nature of even much earlier than previous literature has claimed. We additionally find, however, that children sometimes exhibit non-adult-like responses to even sentences, which we argue provide insight into their developing grammar. On this view, the child grammar offers a larger option space for even than the adult grammar. Becoming adult-like, in turn, involves eliminating some of these options, namely those that are underutilized in production due to their limited conversational value.

With the increasing complexity of both application software and the underlying hardware platforms found in current Real-Time Systems (RTSs), static timing analysis methods are struggling to capture the wide variety of delays. In case of real-time control systems, it thus is common practice in industry to measure system latencies over extended periods of time to ensure compliance with predefined control deadlines that specify the maximum permissible delay between the arrival of a sensor value and the transmission of an actuation signal. As such monitoring is commonly implemented using code instrumentation, it not only requires modification of the RTS-under-test, but also is unable to capture delays caused by I/O peripherals or other components that contribute to the end-to-end (i.e., input-to-output) latencies. In this paper, we propose a latency monitoring methodology for current heterogeneous RTSs that combine a fixed-function System-on-Chip (SoC) with configurable FPGA fabric. The proposed extension enables an RTS based on such a Programmable SoC (pSoC) to perform In situ Monitoring (i.e., without software modification or external hardware) of end-to-end latencies including the I/O delays of current interfaces such as Gigabit Ethernet. We present I/O-to-Fabric Redirecting (to tap into the I/O paths of a pSoC-based RTS) combined with a Trigger/Binning Subsystem (to identify sensor/actuation signals and perform online execution of both latency calculation and histogram generation), for which we propose two implementation options. Our experimental evaluation of the software-driven Trigger/Binning Subsystem shows that our proposed methodology is capable of capturing latency variations over extended periods with sub-microsecond accuracy.

We present a series of experiments investigating English-speaking children's comprehension of it-clefts and wh-pseudoclefts. Previous developmental work has found children to have asymmetric difficulties interpreting object clefts. We show that these difficulties disappear when clefts are presented in felicitous contexts, where children behave adultlike both in their evaluation of the truth of cleft sentences and in their response-time patterns. When the pragmatic requirements on cleft use were not satisfied, children succeeded only on some types of clefts. However, they did not uniformly show difficulties with infelicitous object clefts; rather, success correlated with the amenability of the structure to a word-order-based parsing strategy. We argue that children fail to build an adultlike representation for infelicitous clefts across the board, but pressures to carry out the task lead them to adopt interpretive means outside of what is licensed in adult grammar.

Children's comprehension of scope interaction has received much attention especially since Musolino's (Universal grammar and the acquisition of semantic knowledge: An experimental investigation into the acquisition of quantifier-negation interaction in English, 1998) observation of isomorphism. Many studies report that English-speaking children prefer to assign the surface scope interpretations/isomorphic readings to sentences with multiple quantifiers or a quantifier and a logical operator, especially when there is no contextual support prior to a target sentence which would make one of the readings felicitous. Our set of experiments investigates whether children are sensitive to prosodic cues for scope assignment comparing a falling contour (i.e. neutral contour) and the Rise-Fall-Rise (RFR) contour, which in the literature has been argued to lead to the inverse scope interpretation (Jackendoff in Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1972; Buring in Linguist Philos 20: 175-194, 1997; Constant in Linguist Philos 35: 407-442, 2012; Contrastive topics: Meanings and realizations, 2014; a.o.). The results show that children are keenly sensitive to the difference between the two intonational patterns, and that they strongly associate the RFR contour with the inverse scope interpretation just like adults do.

This paper examines bi-sentential sequences where additive presupposition triggers (e.g. too, again) seem to be obligatory in the second sentence. We present linguistic and experimental evidence against treating these obligatory additivity effects as uniformly following from Maximize Presupposition! (Heim 1991). We propose that the environments giving rise to these effects involve a discourse move that corrects for over-restrictive assumptions about the domain in the immediately preceding move. Crucially, the second move must be compatible with the first. General considerations about how the discourse unfolds, in conjunction with a principle that sentences are interpreted exhaustively by default, make it so that two sentences in such sequences are mutually inconsistent in the absence of the additive.

Introduction: It has been known since at least Heim (1991) that presupposition triggers are sometimes obligatory in contexts where the presuppositions are satisfied (1a); failure to use the relevant trigger results in an inference, an anti-presupposition, that its presupposition does not hold (1b). To account for such cases, Heim (1991) proposed the pragmatic principle Maximize Presupposition (MP), which has since been recruited to account for a range of phenomena involving competition between two lexical items that differ only in their semantic presuppositions (Percus 2006, Chemla 2008, Sauerland 2008, a.o). Beyond cases like (1), we find obligatory trigger effects in sentences like (2), in which the triggers do not have an obvious lexical competitor. One line of analysis claims that the cases in (2) follow from the same principle of MP, taking elements like too as competing with a null morpheme (Chemla 2008). Another line of analysis takes (1) and (2) to be fundamentally different, with too being inserted in (2) to counteract unwanted exhaustivity implicatures that would be generated otherwise (Krifka 1999, Saebo 2004, Bade 2016). For instance, Bade (2016) argues that too is inserted to block the otherwise obligatory insertion of an EXH-operator (c f . Magri 2011), which interprets the second sentence in (2) exhaustively wrt. the QUD and create a contradiction. (1) a. John broke both of his legs. b. # John broke all of his legs. (2) a. John came to the party. Bill did, too. b. # John came to the party. Bill did. The MP-analysis is complicated by the fact that unlike the more straightforward cases, obligatoriness of too disappears in certain embedded contexts (3). (3) a. John came to the party. It’s not the case that Bill did {3too, 3 / 0}. b. John broke both of his legs. It’s not the case that Bill broke {3both, 7all} of his legs. On the other hand, the unwanted implicatures approach has trouble making sense of the fact that the effect unexpectedly persists in certain embedded contexts. In (4), for instance, the trigger appears in a DE-environment, where the insertion of an EXH-operator is not usually expected (Chierchia et al. 2012). Moreover, the trigger is part of a conjunction, which independently marks additivity, raising the question of why too’s putative contribution of blocking exhaustive interpretations is not redundant in this case. (4) If John came to the party and Bill did {too, # / 0}, it would have been a good time. The resulting state of affairs is one in which it seems difficult to adjudicate between the two theories on the basis of the intuitive judgments discussed in the literature. Our goal in this paper is to offer evidence of a different sort, namely from child language, that contributes novel arguments to this theoretical debate. The two theories make diverging predictions about the developmental trajectory of sensitivity to obligatory trigger effects in (1) vs. (2). If (1) and (2) are governed by the same underlying principle, e.g. MP, all else being equal, we expect children’s abilities with both environment to emerge at the same time. On the other hand, if the effects have independent sources, we might see reflexes of this distinction in development. Present Study: We compare children’s sensitivity to obligatory trigger effects with both vs. too (a between-subjects factor) in a Felicity Judgment Task. Sentences with and without the trigger served as alternative descriptions of a pictured event, as illustrated in Figure (1). Afterwards, two characters described what happened and the child had to judge which one described it better. In the critical

This paper investigates children’s knowledge of the auxiliary selection patterns in French. “Auxiliary selection” is the label used to describe the syntactic phenomenon found in a number of languages, where the auxiliary used with compound tenses is varyingly BE or HAVE. In such “split auxiliary selection” systems, each of the two auxiliaries appear with a subclass of verbs or constructions, but the precise rules determining when each auxiliary is used is subject to a great degree of cross-linguisitic variation. Auxiliary selection systems may be uniform in selecting one auxiliary or the other, e.g. exclusively HAVE in English and Spanish versus exclusively BE in Slavic languages. Languages may also make auxiliary splits based on various criteria. For instance, in certain Italian dialects, the choice of auxiliary depends on the person or number of the subject; yet others make the split based on tense and/or mood (McFadden, 2007). A greater number of languages make a split based on aspects of the verbal domain, but we find finer-grained distinctions here, as well: whereas auxiliary selection in Dutch and German is determined on the basis of VP-level properties like telicity, French and Italian select auxiliaries based on the lexical properties of the verb alone. Another set of criteria is also at play in French and Italian: these languages have reflexive clitic constructions, which obligatorily take BE regardless of the specific verbal semantics. This paper focuses on French, which makes the auxiliary selection split along two dimensions, one based on the lexical semantics of specific verbs, and one based on reflexivization. A small set of intransitive verbs, generally characterizable as unaccusative verbs, take the auxiliary être ‘to be’, and the rest take avoir ‘to have’. Henceforth, we refer to this type of alternations in French as involving “lexical” domain, as it is modulated by the lexical-semantics of individual verbs. While transitive verbs uniformly select avoir, in reflexive clitic constructions, i.e. constructions where a clitic coreferential with the subject appears is used as the object, être appears. The split between reflexive and non-reflexive transitive sentences is not conditioned by the lexical semantics of the verb, but rather seems

A well-documented asymmetry in children’s acquisition of A-bar movement constructions is that movement of objects is more difficult than movement of subjects. This asymmetry has been most frequently observed with relative clauses (de Villiers et al. 1979, Correa 1995, Friedmann and Novogrodski 2004, Adani 2011, Guasti et al. 2012, a.o), but has also been reported, to a lesser extent, with wh-questions (Tyack and Ingram 1977, Stromswold 1995, Philip et al. 2000) and clefts (Bever 1979, Lempert and Kinsbourne 1980, Hirsch and Wexler 2006). This asymmetry is not straightforwardly predicted by syntactic theories of movement, according to which A-bar dependencies can be established while skipping over elements that do not have properties directly relevant to that particular A-bar operation. For instance, the NP the dog in (1) is taken to be irrelevant for the computation of the wh-dependency, since it is not a wh-phrase and cannot participate in whquestion formation to begin with (see e.g. Rizzi 1990).

A well-documented asymmetry in children’s acquisition of A-bar movement constructions is that movement of objects is more difficult than movement of subjects. This asymmetry has been most frequently observed with relative clauses (de Villiers et al. 1979, Correa 1995, Friedmann and Novogrodski 2004, Adani 2011, Guasti et al. 2012, a.o), but has also been reported, to a lesser extent, with wh-questions (Tyack and Ingram 1977, Stromswold 1995, Philip et al. 2000) and clefts (Bever 1979, Lempert and Kinsbourne 1980, Hirsch and Wexler 2006). This asymmetry is not straightforwardly predicted by syntactic theories of movement, according to which A-bar dependencies can be established while skipping over elements that do not have properties directly relevant to that particular A-bar operation. For instance, the NP the dog in (1) is taken to be irrelevant for the computation of the wh-dependency, since it is not a wh-phrase and cannot participate in whquestion formation to begin with (see e.g. Rizzi 1990).

In the study of natural language quantification, much recent attention has been devoted to the investigation of verification procedures associated with the proportional quantifier most . The aim of these studies is to go beyond the traditional characterization of the semantics of most , which is confined to explicating its truth-functional and presuppositional content as well as its combinatorial properties, as these aspects underdetermine the correct analysis of most. The present paper contributes to this effort by presenting new experimental evidence in support of a decompositional analysis of most according to which it is a superlative construction built from a gradable predicate many or much and the superlative operator -est (Hackl, in Nat Lang Semant 17:63–98, 2009 ). Our evidence comes in the form of verification profiles for sentences like Most of the dots are blue which, we argue, reflect the existence of a superlative reading of most . This notably contrasts with Lidz et al.’s (Nat Lang Semant 19:227–256, 2011 ) results. To reconcile the two sets of data, we argue, it is necessary to take important differences in task demands into account, which impose limits on the conclusions that can be drawn from these studies.

In this paper we show that most DPs in subject position can receive three kinds of truth-condition, yielding a proportional reading, a ‘regular’ superlative reading and a ‘partition-based’ superlative reading. We propose an analysis of the three readings that views them as resulting from the interaction of several components, including (a generalized version of) the superlative operator -est, covert and overt movement, and focus. Furthermore, we explain how movement affects the distribution of readings of most.

Current theories of interrogative syntax/semantics adopt two strategies for the interpretation of in-situ wh-phrases: covert movement and in-situ interpretation. The covert movement strategy is traditionally assumed to be all-or-nothing: the in-situ wh-phrase covertly moves to C or else stays in-situ and is interpreted in its base-generated position at LF. In this paper we argue that neither approach to wh-in-situ can be maintained as is. We present evidence from real-time processing of English multiple wh-questions that in-situ wh-phrases require both covert movement and in-situ interpretation for their computation: an ”in-situ” wh-phrase undergoes a short movement step, parallel to the behavior of traditional quantifiers such as every, immediately upon integration into the structure. Following that step, the wh-phrase can but need not move any further unless independent factors are at play. To account for this pattern we propose the partial movement approach to wh-in-situ: A wh-phrase must be interpreted at a position with propositional type at LF. Wh-phrases in object position are thus never interpreted in their base-generated position; instead some covert movement is always required.

Quantifier Raising (QR) is an instance of covert movement – movement which has been argued to lack an explicit cue for children to acquire. Significant attention has been given to the acquisition of QR in the literature, and many studies of the acquisition of QR have investigated children’s ability to interpret sentences where different scope relations are relevant. Some early studies reported that children have difficulty understanding readings that require QR (Musolino 1998, Musolino et al. 2000, Lidz and Musolino 2002). However, more recent studies have shown that children at the age of four have QR in their grammars (Lidz et al. 2004, Gualmini 2004, Musolino and Lidz 2006, Conroy et al. 2009, among others). The early studies of QR only focused on scope relations between quantified phrases, or between a quantified phrase and negation, and quite poor performance has been accounted for by difficulties “processing” quantified sentences. It is well-known that these cases can be accounted for in theories that do not require QR (cf. Ruys and Winter 2011). In contrast, the experiment presented in this paper investigates children’s ability to interpret sentences with Antecedent Contained Deletion (ACD). Such sentences do not necessarily contain quantified phrases such as some or every, but nevertheless require a mechanism such as QR for their interpretation. 1 Thus, investigating

Thus, we conclude that a modal like ‘think’ is a necessary ing redient forde re/de dictoambiguity. Roughly put, the ambiguity of (1) can be understood as follow s. In the interpretation where ‘the linguist’ refers to Sue, it is evaluated against what we know , so the referent of ‘the linguist’ is who we know as the unique linguist, i.e. Sue. This is the same for the unembedded sentence in (4). On the other hand, under the other interpretation, the description is ev aluated against what John thinks is true. So the referent of ‘the linguist’ is the person who John thinks is th e linguist, i.e. Mary. In this paper, we will call the former reading a de rereading, and the latter reading a de dictoreading. It is important to notice that depending on what John believe s, thede reandde dictoreadings could in principle be identical. That is, if John correctly knew th a Sue was the linguist, ‘the linguist’ would denote Sue under both readings. In such a context, therefore , ther is no way for us to know whether the preceived reading is de reor de dicto. In other words, in order to detect de re/de dictoambiguity of a definite description in a sentence like (1), we need a contex t where the attitude holder is wrong about the identity of the referent (‘misapprehension context’), as in (2), or a context where the attitude holder

The study of the syntax–semantics interface is concerned with linguistic phenomena that are the product of interactions between principles of syntactic organization and principles of semantic interpretation. Such interactions abound in natural language and can be found in all subsystems of the grammar. This paper examines a particular subclass of such phenomena revolving around quantificational expressions. The central concern of the discussion are the grammatical mechanisms that mediate between the syntactic position a quantifier appears in and the semantic import it has on the sentence meaning. Of particular interest are cases where a quantifier is interpreted in a position that is different from the position it seems to occupy in the syntax. A leading hypothesis to explain cases of this sort, which exemplify a general property of natural language called displacement, is that they are the product of overt or covert movement operations. Empirical support for this approach is presented in the form of correlations between three grammatical phenomena – Quantifier Scope, Antecedent Contained Deletion, and Extraposition – which receive a uniform account under the above hypothesis.