Eric McCready

Expressives and Identity Conditions

EXPRESSIVES AND IDENTITY CONDITIONS Christopher Potts Ash Asudeh Seth Cable Yurie Hara Eric McCready Luis Alonso-Ovalle Rajesh Bhatt Christopher Davis Angelika Kratzer Tom Roeper Martin Walkow Müller, Gereon. 2004. Verb-second as vP-first. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 7:179–234. Nilsen, Øystein. 2003. Eliminating positions. Doctoral dissertation, OTS, Utrecht. Pafel, Jürgen. 1998. Skopus und logische Struktur. Arbeitspapiere des Sonderforschungsbereichs 340, Bericht 129. Tübingen/Stuttgart: University of Tübingen/University of Stuttgart. Reinhart, Tanya. 1983. Anaphora and semantic interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sauerland, Uli, and Paul Elbourne. 2002. Total reconstruction, PF movement, and derivational order. Linguistic Inquiry 33: 283–319. Thiersch, Craig. 1985. Some notes on scrambling in the German Mittelfeld, VP and X-bar theory. Ms., University of Connecticut, Storrs, and University of Cologne.

Were, Would, Might and a Compositional Account of Counterfactuals

This paper has two purposes. We first give a new dynamic account of epistemic modal operators that account for both their test-like behaviour with respect to whole information states and their capacity to induce quantificational dependencies across worlds (modal subordination). We then use this theory, together with an analysis of conditionals and irrealis moods, to give a fully compositional semantics of indicative and counterfactual conditionals. In our analysis, the distinction between counterfactual and indicative conditionals follows directly from the interaction between the semantics of the conditional and irrealis operators and the semantics of the particular modals involved in the conditional consequent. We indicate some theoretical and logical consequences of our approach.

Reliability in pragmatics

1. Introduction PART I - REPUTATION AND COOPERATION 2. Cooperation 3. Trust and reputations 4. Hedging beyond truth 5. Deriving hedged interpretations PART II - EVIDENTIALS AND RELIABILITY 6. The nature of evidentials 7. Evidentials and reliability 8. Using priorities 9. Testimonial evidence 10. Conclusion Appendix: Formal system References Index

What is Evidence in Natural Language

This chapter tries to understand the proper notion of evidence to use in the semantic analysis of natural language evidentials. I review various notions of justification from the epistemological literature, and consider how they relate to the use of evidentials and related constructions. I then consider how (some) evidentials behave under Gettier scenarios. The conclusion is that the required notion of evidence is one which is weaker than (many accounts of) knowledge, involves increase of speaker credence, but which is necessarily first-person. I thus settle on a view based on a self-ascription of probability increase due to knowledge of propositions that increase credence after conditionalization.

Winning strategies in politeness

This paper proposes a strategic analysis of politeness strategies stated in terms of game theory. After reviewing some facts about lexical strategies for linguistic politeness, we turn to our game-theoretic account, which involves treating polite and impolite acts as action choices in an indefinitely repeated game. We show that such games have winning strategies and that these strategies can be of differing degrees of complexity in a mathematical sense. Finally, we outline some avenues for future work.

Rational Belief and Evidence-Based Update

Abstract The question of when it is rational to believe some piece of content is a perennial problem in epistemology, and, to a lesser extent, moral philosophy and the theory of value. The goal of this chapter is to contribute to this debate by approaching it from the perspective of linguistics and the philosophy of language.

Against Lexical Self-Reference

This squib discusses a problem that arises when a standard degree-based semantics for intensifiers is combined with a second-order contextualist semantics for the predicate average on its concrete reading. In a nutshell, the combination requires that the argument of totally average be simultaneously average in every respect and not average at all in one particular respect. This problem is claimed to arise from allowing (in a sense) the denotation of average to refer to itself; the problem is then solved by prohibiting (by a combination of semantic and pragmatic means) self-reference at the lexical level.

CI via DTS

It has been observed that conventionally implicated content interacts with at-issue content in a number of different ways. This paper focuses on the existence of anaphoric links between content of these two types, something disallowed by the system of Potts (2005), the original locus of work on these issues. The problem of characterizing this interaction has been considered by a number of authors. This paper proposes a new system for understanding it in the framework of Dependent Type Semantics. It is shown that the resulting system provides a good characterization of how “cross-dimensional” anaphoric links can be supported from a proof-theoretic perspective.

Discourse-Level Politeness and Implicature

This paper considers politeness at the discourse level in terms of strategic choice. We begin with a discussion of the nature and levels of linguistic politeness from semantic and pragmatic perspectives, then turning to the way in which such strategies can be realized in natural language. A distinction is drawn between formal and polite linguistic behavior. We then provide a formal analysis in terms of the topological analysis of game strategies in an infinitely repeated game. This analysis extends that of [2]. It improves on that earlier work in three ways: (i) by considering a wider range of player ‘types’, (ii) by implementing the distinction between formality and politeness, and (iii) by analyzing a much wider range of kinds of politeness strategies, together with their positions in the Borel hierarchy [8].

Created Objects, Coherence and Anaphora

This paper considers the possibility of anaphoric dependencies to the objects of creation verbs in progressive aspect. It is shown that such dependencies are possible in the right circumstances and a classification of the felicitous cases is proposed. A formal analysis making use of pragmatic information and discourse structure is given. Finally, some broader implications of the analysis are discussed.