Donka F. Farkas

On Reacting to Assertions and Polar Questions

The aim of this paper is to capture the similarities and differences between assertions and polar questions so as to be able to account for the systematic partial overlap that exists in reactions to these speech acts in English and beyond. We first discuss the discourse components we assume, and then define default assertions and default polar questions in a way that allows us to characterize two types of responses to these speech acts, confirming and reversing reactions. The common characteristics of assertions and polar questions are responsible for the fact that both allow these reactions; the differences between the two speech acts explain the different contextual effects confirming and reversing moves have depending on whether they react to an assertion or a polar question. We then examine the distribution of a set of ‘polarity’ particles in Romanian in terms of the notions defined in the rest of the paper, and end with a series of predictions concerning polarity particles across languages.

Evaluation Indices and Scope

In this paper I propose a theory of scope that is less structure driven than the traditional approach. The traditional view of scope is structural in the sense that the relative scope of two expressions is taken to be determined by their relative position at some level where hierarchical relations are encoded. More precisely, in this view, e 1 is in the scope of e 2 iff e 2 commands e 1 at the appropriate structural level. I take the term command in its generic sense here, meaning ‘higher than’ and leave the details of how to define its domain unspecified for now. Common to all varieties of command is that it is defined at the sentence level.

ON THE COMPARATIVE AND ABSOLUTE READINGS OF SUPERLATIVES

This paper deals with an ambiguity of superlative noun phrases first noticed in Szabolcsi (1986) and discussed in Heim (1985), but which has not been studied in the subsequent literature. After discussing in detail the special properties of the comparative reading, we develop a semantics for both readings and show how it accounts for these properties.

On the syntactic position of focus in Hungarian

SummaryWe have argued here that focused constituents in Hungarian must occur as sisters of S or VP and that the word order peculiarities of sentences containing focused constituents must be accounted for independently of the position of these constituents. Section 3 presented an account of sentences containing focused constituents in the GPSG framework. The theoretical implication of the above discussion is that Hungarian focusing does not provide evidence for the existence of ‘downgrading movement’. Since no other evidence for such movement has been given in the literature so far, we can conclude that the generalization requiring the filler to dominate its gap is valid. The GPSG treatment of unbounded dependencies is superior to the GB treatment with respect to this generalization since the non-existence of downgrading movement follows from the former theory but not from the latter.

Preverb Climbing in Hungarian

This paper offers an account of the distributional possibilities of Hungarian preverbal particles in the autolexical framework proposed in Sadock 1985. We show how a complex range of facts can be predicted from the interaction of a few independently motivated assumptions once autonomous modules of the grammar are allowed to assign partially noncongruent representations to the same linguistic entity. In the course of the discussion the Incorporative Principle of Sadock 1985 is extended and turned into a general constraint on allowable discrepancies between representations contributed by various components of the grammar.*

Division of Labor in the Interpretation of Declaratives and Interrogatives

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.

Exceptional Scope as Discourse Reference to Quantificational Dependencies

The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of exceptional scope (ES) of (in)definites, exemplified by the widest and intermediate scope readings of the sentence Every student of mine read every poem that a famous Romanian poet wrote . We propose that the ES readings have two sources: (i ) discourse anaphora to particular sets of entities and quantificational dependencies between these entities that restrict the domain of quantification of the two universal determiners and the indefinite article; (ii ) non-local accommodation of the discourse referent that restricts the quantificational domain of the indefinite article. Our account, formulated within a compositional dynamic system couched in classical type logic, relies on two independently motivated assumptions: (a ) the discourse context stores not only (sets of) individuals, but also quantificational dependencies between them, and (b ) quantifier domains are always contextually restricted. Under this analysis, (in)definites are unambiguous and there is no need for special choice-functional variables to derive exceptional scope readings.