David Beaver

Sense and sensitivity : how focus determines meaning

1. Introduction. 2. Intonation and Meaning. 3. Three degrees of association. 4. Compositional analysis of focus. 5. Pragmatic Explanations of Focus. 6. Association with Reduced Material. 7. Extraction and Ellipsis. 8. Monotonicity and Presupposition. 9. Exclusives: facts and history. 10. Exclusives: a discourse account. 11. Conclusion

Always and only: Why not all focus-sensitive operators are alike

We discuss focus sensitivity in English, the phenomenon whereby interpretation of some expressions is affected by placement of intonational focus. We concentrate in particular on the interpretation of always and only, both of which are interpreted as universal quantifiers, and both of which are focus sensitive. Using both naturally occurring and constructed data we explore the interaction of these operators with negative polarity items, with presupposition, with prosodically reduced elements, and with syntactic extraction. On the basis of this data we show that while only lexically encodes a dependency on the placement of focus, always does not. Rather, the focus sensitivity of always results from its dependency on context, and from the fact that focus also reflects what is given in the context. We account for this split using an analysis couched in event semantics.

A Partial Account of Presupposition Projection

In this paper it is shown how a partial semantics for presuppositions can be given which is empirically more satisfactory than its predecessors, and how this semantics can be integrated with a technically sound, compositional grammar in the Montagovian fashion. Additionally, it is argued that the classical objection to partial accounts of presupposition projection, namely that they lack “flexibility,” is based on a misconception. Partial logics can give rise to flexible predictions without postulating any ad hoc ambiguities. Finally, it is shown how the partial foundation can be combined with a dynamic system of common-ground maintenance to account for accommodation.

Chapter 17 – Presupposition*

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the linguistic and philosophical theories that vary in the extent to which they involve definitions of presupposition, which are close to this informal use of the word. A particular point of dispute has been whether presupposition is best thought of as a semantic or a pragmatic notion, or whether indeed such notions must coexist. Multivalence and partiality concerns models in which the dynamics of the interpretation process plays no role, and where the possibility of presupposition failure is tied to the presence of extra truth values in a multivalent semantics. Context dependence and part-time presupposition models are presented in the chapter in which the context of evaluation influences models involving intersentential dynamics where the context of evaluation is modified with each successive utterance. Context change and accommodation theories are discussed in the chapter in which intrasentential dynamics plays a crucial role with sub-sentential constituents being seen as having their own dynamic effects on the context of evaluation used for other constituents, and a process of accommodation allowing presuppositions themselves to produce sophisticated additional modifications.

Social language processing: A framework for analyzing the communication of terrorists and authoritarian regimes

Social Language Processing (SLP) is introduced as an interdisciplinary approach to assess social features in communications by terrorist organizations and authoritarian regimes. The SLP paradigm represents a rapprochement of theories, tools and techniques from cognitive science, communications, computational linguistics, discourse processing, language studies and social psychology. The SLP paradigm consists of three broad stages: (1) linguistic feature identification; (2) linguistic feature extraction; and (3) classifier development. In this paper, we detail the SLP paradigm and review several linguistic features that are especially amenable to uncovering the social dynamics of groups that are difficult to assess directly (i.e. through questionnaires, interviews or direct observation). We demonstrate the application of SLP to identify status, cohesion and deception in the case of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Specifically, we analyzed the memoranda, letters and public communiqués distributed within and from Saddam Hussein’s administration in a recently recovered corpus called the Iraqi Perspectives Project, along with several related projects. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges that SLP faces for assessing social features across cultures in public and captured communications of terrorists and political regimes, along with responses to these organizations.

Vagueness is rational under uncertainty

We seek to show that some properties of vague scalar adjectives are consequences of rational communication. Theories of vagueness are usually directed at a cluster of traditional philosophical desiderata: how vagueness fits into a theory of truth (or metaphysics), the sorites, and related issues. These are important, and we will have more to say about some of them, but we also seek to refocus the analysis of vagueness, moving away from consideration of abstract philosophical problems, and towards consideration of the problems faced by ordinary language users.

Principles of the Exclusive Muddle

This paper provides a lexical entry schema for exclusives covering the adverbs only, just, exclusively, merely, purely, solely, simply, and the adjectives only, sole, pure, exclusive and alone. We argue, on the basis of inter-paraphrasability relations among these exclusives and entailments involving at least and at most, that all of these items make an at-issue contribution of an upper bound on the viable answers to the current question under discussion (expressible with at most), and signal that a lower bound on those answers (expressible with at least) is taken for granted. The lexical entry schema accommodates two main points of variation, which makes it possible to capture the differences in meaning among these terms: (i) semantic type (restricted to the class of modifiers), and (ii) constraints on the current question under discussion or the strength ranking over its alternative possible answers. We propose 22 different specific instantiations of the schema for exclusives in English.

THE (NON)UTILITY OF LINGUISTIC FEATURES FOR PREDICTING PROMINENCE IN SPONTANEOUS SPEECH

Conversational speech is characterized by prosodic variability which makes pitch accent prediction for this genre especially difficult. The linguistic literature points out that complex features such as information status, contrast and animacy help predict pitch accent placement. In this paper, we use a corpus annotated for such features to determine if they improve prominence prediction over traditional shallow features such as frequency and part-of-speech, or over new ones that we introduce. We demonstrate that while correlated with prominence, complex linguistic features do not improve prediction accuracy. Furthermore, the performance of our classifier is quite close to the ceiling defined by variability in human accent placement. An oracle experiment demonstrates, though, that at least some accuracy improvement is still possible.

The Best Question: Explaining the Projection Behavior of Factives

This article deals with projection in factive sentences. The article first challenges standard assumptions by presenting a series of detailed observations about the interpretations of factive sentences in context, showing that what implication projects, if any, is quite variable and that projection is tightly constrained by prosodic and contextual information about the alternatives under consideration. The article then proposes an account which accommodates the variability of the data and sensitivity to contextual alternatives. The account is formulated within a modified version of Roberts 1996/2012 question-based model of discourse.

A Cross-Linguistic Study of the Non-at-issueness of Exhaustive Inferences

Several constructions have been noted to associate with an exhaustive inference, notably the English it-cleft, the French c’est-cleft, the preverbal focus in Hungarian and the German es-cleft. This inference has long been recognized to differ from exhaustiveness associated with exclusives like English only. While previous literature has attempted to capture this difference by debating whether the exhaustiveness of clefts is semantic or a pragmatic phenomenon, recent studies such as (Velleman et al. 2012, Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistics Theory (SALT) 22, pages 441–460) supplement the debate by proposing that the notion of at-issueness is the culprit of those differences. In light of this notion, this paper reconsiders the results from previous experimental data on Hungarian and German (Onea and Beaver 2011, Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 19, pages 342–359; Xue and Onea 2011, Proceedings of the ESSLLI 2011 Workshop on Projective Meaning, Ljubljana, Slovenia) and presents new data on English and French, showing that the “Yes, but” test used in these four languages to diagnose the source of the exhaustive inference (semantics vs. pragmatics), in fact diagnoses its status (at-issue vs. non-at-issue). We conclude that the exhaustiveness associated with clefts and cleft-like constructions is not at-issue, or in other words, exhaustiveness it is not the main point of the utterance.