Arnim von Stechow

Meaning, Use, and Interpretation of Language

Bibliothek München CIP-Kurztitelaufnahme der Deutschen Bibliothek Meaning, use and interpretation of language / ed. Cognitive impairments in aphasia : new results and new problems 30 Florian Coulmas Underdeterminacy and plausibility in word-formation 46 Maxwell J. Cresswell A highly impossible scene. The semantics of visual contradictions 62 Urs Egli The Stoic theory of arguments 79 Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen Wieder ein wieder? Zur Semantik von wieder 97 Jacques François On the perspectival ordering of patient and causing event in the distribution of French and German verbs of change: a contrastive study 121 Harold Goodglass Disorders of lexical production and comprehension 134 Christopher Habel Inferences-the base of semantics? 147 VIII Contents Irene Heim File change semantics and the familiarity theory of definiteness , 164 Jaap Hoepelman Adjectives and nouns: a new calculus 190 Hans Hörmann The calculating listener, or : How many are einige, mehrere, and ein paar (some, several, and a few) ? 221 Karlheinz Hülser The fragments on Stoic dialectic: a new collection 235 Hans Kamp and Christian Rohrer Tense in texts 250 Walther Kindt Neue modelltheoretische Ansätze für die Semantik. The logical analysis of plurals and mass terms : a lattice-theoretical approach 302

Against LF Pied-Piping

The arguments for LF Pied-Piping given by Nishigauchi and others are represented. It is shown that Nishigauchis semantics for pied-piped phrases gives the wrong meaning for interrogatives. We argue that none of the arguments for LF Pied-Piping is tenable and most of the arguments against the traditional approach (unbounded wh-movement at LF) do not stand up to scrutiny. However, some data turn out to be problematic for the traditional account. The alternative considered here involves pied-piping at an intermediate level between S-structure and LF. It is called WH-structure and is followed by reconstruction at LF. This proposal will combine the essential insights of Nishigauchis idea and have all its advantages over the traditional view, without running into the problems of his approach.

Topic, Focus and Local Relevance

T. Reinhart (80) has claimed that the naive identification of topic information with old information and of focus information with new information is inconsistent.

Some Remarks on Choice Functions and LF-Movement

It is well known that indefinite phrases are more liberal in taking scope than other quantifying phrases. In general, the scope of indefinites is not limited by the finite clause in which they occur, although the scope of universal quantifiers is. Wh-phrases behave very much like indefinites: in languages with wh in situ, their scope need not be restricted by anything like clause boundedness.

Eine erweiterte Extended Now-Theorie für Perfekt und Futur

SummaryIt is argued that the German present perfect can be best analyzed by an extended-now-theory in the spirit of McCoard (1978); the future tense is treated in a similar fashion. It is claimed that the German present perfect locates the situation time of the VP within a time interval that is given by the perfect auxiliary haben/sein and reaches from some lexically or contextually given limit in the past up to the reference time. Two main readings of the present perfect construction are dealt with, the universal perfect and the existential perfect. Their distribution is determined by adverbs of quantification that can be overt or phonetically empty.

MODIFICATION OF NOUN PHRASES. A CHALLENGE FOR COMPOSITIONAL SEMANTICS

This article critically compares the N-S-analysis of relatives with the NP-S-analysis. The main stress of the investigation lies on the relativmtion of plural NPs like Napoleon and Snowball\ who were generally recognised as being the cleverest of the pigs, the black dog and the grey horse that hated eachother or most animals who were in the farm. Constructions of this kind speak in favour of the NP-S-analysis both on syntactic and on semantical grounds. The following results are obtained. 1) The rule underlying the NP-S-analysis, i.e. NP—»NPS is semantically interpreted and the adequacy of the semantics is shown. 2) The quantifying phrases (i.e. the NPs) are classified semantically. It is argued that the quantifiers of English reduce to a very small number of semantically interesting different types, presu mably six. 3) The appositive-restrictive distinction for relatives comes out as a consequence of the semantics. There is no corresponding syntactic distinction. 4) A unified semantics for and is introduced, which explains that and behaves in a lot of cases differently form or.

Future vs. Present in Russian and English Adjunct Clauses

We treat the interpretation and motivate the morphology of tense in adjunct clauses in English and Russian (relative clauses, before/after/when-clauses) with a future matrix verb. The main findings of our paper are the following: 1. English has a simultaneous reading in present adjuncts embedded under will. This follows from our SOT parameter. Russian present adjuncts under budet or the synthetic perfective future can only have a deictic interpretation. 2. The syntax of Russian temporal adjunct clauses (do/posle togo kak…) shows overt parts that had to be stipulated for English as covert in earlier papers. We are thus able to present a neat and straightforward analysis of Russian temporal adjuncts.

Presupposition and Context

In our days, the notion of semantic presupposition is not very much en vogue. There are followers of Russell, who try to eliminate this concept from semantics altogether, for instance Boer and Lycan (cf. [4]) or Cresswell (cf. [8]). Second, there is another very influential group which includes authors like Atlas, Gazdar, Kempson and Wilson. These authors claim the following: Sentence (1) entails sentence (3), whereas sentence (2) does not. (1) The king of France is bald. (2) The king of France is not bald. (3) There is a king of France. Unlike Russell, they say that (2) is not ambiguous. The negation does not have different scopes such that there is a reading of (2) which entails (3) and another reading which does not. The negation is simply supposed to be general. (2) may be true for different reasons: Either the king of France does not exist at all; then he can’t be bald and therefore (2) is true. Or the king of France exists but he fails to be bald. In the latter case, (2) is true, too. The negation just does not tell us which of the two cases obtains.

Tense in Adjuncts Part 2: Temporal Adverbial Clauses

Part 1 of this article treats tense in relative clauses in English, Russian and Japanese. The temporal center in relative clauses can always be anaphoric, and sometimes it has to be the anaphoric Tpro. In Part 2, we investigate tense in temporal adverbial clauses (TACs) headed by ‘after’, ‘before’ and ‘when’. We argue for the following points: 1. English TAC Tense is bound in Present adjuncts under matrix ‘will’, in other constructions the TAC Tense is deictic. Tense licensing is non-local in bound constructions, while in deictic constructions it is local. 2. Russian TAC Tense is deictic, and the tense licensing is local. 3. Japanese TAC Tense is bound. We have a ‘tenseless’ construction in the adjunct, and tense licensing is local.

Tense in Adjuncts Part 1: Relative Clauses

Part 1 of Tense in Adjuncts presents a compositional analysis of tense in relative clauses (RCs). The languages under investigation are English, Russian, and Japanese. We introduce the syntax and semantics of tense and the theory of feature transmission under variable binding, which mediates between syntax/semantics and morphology. In sequence of tense languages such as English, the morphology of the tense in a RC will be licensed by a non-local tense if the RC is embedded under will. In other constructions, the RC tense is licensed by a local tense. In non-sequence of tense languages, the tense in the RC is also determined by a local tense. The paper says which factors are responsible for the tense distribution in the different languages under consideration.