Gennaro Chierchia

Reference to kinds across languages

This paper is devoted to the study of bare nominal arguments (i.e., determinerless NPs occurring in canonical argumental positions) from a crosslinguistic point of view. It is proposed that languages may vary in what they let their NPs denote. In some languages (like Chinese), NPs are argumental (names of kinds) and can thus occur freely without determiner in argument position; in others they are predicates (Romance), and this prevents NPs from occurring as arguments, unless the category D(eterminer) is projected. Finally, there are languages (like Germanic or Slavic) which allow both predicative and argumental NPs; these languages, being the ‘union’ of the previous two types, are expected to behave like Romance for certain aspects of their nominal system (the singular count portion) and like Chinese for others (the mass and plural portions). This hypothesis (the ‘Nominal Mapping Parameter’) is investigated not just through typological considerations, but also through a detailed contrastive analysis of bare arguments in Germanic (English) vs. Romance (Italian). Some general consequences of this view, which posits a limited variation in the mapping from syntax into semantics, for current theories of Universal Grammar and acquisition are considered.

Meaning and Grammar : An Introduction to Semantics

This self-contained introduction to natural language semantics addresses the major theoretical questions in the field. The authors introduce the systematic study of linguistic meaning through a sequence of formal tools and their linguistic applications. Starting with propositional connectives and truth conditions, the book moves to quantification and binding, intensionality and tense, and so on. To set their approach in a broader perspective, the authors also explore the interaction of meaning with context and use (the semantics-pragmatics interface) and address some of the foundational questions, especially in connection with cognition in general. They also introduce a few of the most accessible and interesting ideas from recent research to give the reader a bit of the flavor of current work in semantics. The organization of this new edition is modular; after the introductory chapters, the remaining material can be covered in flexible order. The book presupposes no background in formal logic (an appendix introduces the basic notions of set theory) and only a minimal acquaintance with linguistics. This edition includes a substantial amount of completely new material and has been not only updated but redesigned throughout to enhance its user-friendliness.

Plurality of Mass Nouns and the Notion of “Semantic Parameter”

The main thesis I would like to develop and defend in this paper is that mass nouns come out of the lexicon with plurality already built in and that that is the (only) way in which they differ from count nouns. On the basis of this hypothesis (let us dub it the Inherent Plurality Hypothesis), I will offer a new account of the distribution of mass and count quantifiers, one that takes into consideration possible crosslinguistic variations in such distribution. I will also address, in a preliminary and somewhat speculative way, the issue of languages (such as Chinese) that are said not to have count nouns. One conclusion that we will reach is that there is some limited variation in the way in which the syntactic structure of NPs is mapped onto its denotation across different languages. If crosslinguistic variation is to be accounted for in terms of parametric differences, then the mass/count distinction seems to provide evidence for a semantic parameter. In the rest of this introduction, I will first try to give in a highly informal way an idea of the main thesis to be defended. Then I will briefly review the main data to be accounted for. Looking ahead to the overall organization of the paper, in section 2 I give some background assumptions on the nature of plurality. In section 3 I will present in detail the Inherent Plurality Hypothesis and show how it accounts for the data presented below. In section 4, I will consider further empirical consequences of the Inherent Plurality Hypothesis and see how it compares to a sample of other current influential approaches. Finally, in section 5, I will tackle the issue of languages allegedly without count nouns.

Broaden Your Views: Implicatures of Domain Widening and the “Logicality” of Language

This article presents a unified theory of polarity-sensitive items (PSIs) based on the notion of domain widening. PSIs include negative polarity items (like Italian mai ever), universal free choice items (like Italian qualunque any/whatever), and existential free choice items (like Italian uno qualunque a whatever). The proposal is based on a recursive, grammatically driven approach to scalar implicatures that breaks with the traditional view that scalar implicatures arise via post- grammatical pragmatic processes. The main claim is that scalar items optionally activate scalar alternatives that, when activated, are then recursively factored into meaning via an alternative sensitive operator similar to only. PSIs obligatorily activate domain alternatives that are factored into meaning in much the same way.

Questions with quantifiers

This paper studies the distribution of ‘list readings’ in questions like who does everyone like? vs. who likes everyone?. More generally, it focuses on the interaction between wh-words and quantified NPs. It is argued that, contrary to widespread belief, the pattern of available readings of constituent questions can be explained as a consequence of Weak Crossover, a well-known property of grammar. In particular, list readings are claimed to be a special case of ‘functional readings’, rather than arising from quantifying into questions. Functional readings are argued to be encoded in the syntax as doubly indexed traces, which straightforwardly leads to a Crossover account of the absence of list readings in who likes everyone?. Empirical and theoretical consequences of this idea for the syntax and semantics of questions are considered.

Semantics and property theory

The nature of properties, relations and propositions has always been at the heart of philosophical debate. Among other things, they have played a central role in theories of intensionality, belief, universals and in the analysis of the attitudes. In fact, it does not seem unwarranted to claim that most of the entities that populate philosophical debates are ulti mately analyzable through constructs which crucially rely upon proper ties and propositions. The aim of this paper is to develop a theory of properties, relations and propositions which will support, in a strong sense, the semantics of natural language. By that we mean that a semantics built on such a theory of properties should mesh well with (what is known about) syntax, help explaining why predicative expressions in English and other lan guages behave the way they do, and constitute, on this score, an improvement over purely set-theoretic semantics (such as, e.g., Mon

Why children and adults sometimes (but not always) compute implicatures

Noveck (2001) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretation of weak scalar terms (some, might, or) (cf. Braine & Rumain, 1981; Smith, 1980). More recent studies suggest, however, that childrens apparent failures may depend on the experimental demands (Papafragou & Musolino, 2003). Although previous studies involved children of different ages as well as different tasks, and are thus not directly comparable, nevertheless a common finding is that children do not seem to derive scalar implicatures to the same extent as adults do. The present article describes a series of experiments that were conducted with Italian speaking subjects (children and adults), focusing mainly on the scalar term some. Our goal was to carefully examine the specific conditions that allow the computation of implicatures by children. In so doing, we demonstrate that children as young as 7 (the youngest age of the children who participated in the Noveck study) are able to compute implicatures in experimental conditions that properly satisfy certain contextual prerequisites for deriving such implicatures. We also present further results that have general consequences for the research methodology employed in this area of study. Our research indicates that certain tasks mask childrens understanding of scalar terms, not only including the task used by Noveck, but also tasks that employ certain explicit instructions, such as the training task used by Papafragou & Musolino (2003). Our findings indicate further that, although explicit training apparently improves childrens ability to draw implicatures, children nevertheless fail to achieve adult levels of performance for most scalar terms even in such tasks, and that the effects of instruction do not last beyond the training session itself for most children. Another relevant finding of the present study is that some of the manipulations of the experimental context have an effect on all subjects, whereas others produce effects on just a subset of children. Individual differences of this kind may have been concealed in previous research because performance by individual subjects was not reported. Our general conclusions are that even young children (7-year olds) have the prerequisites for deriving scalar implicatures, although these abilities are revealed only when the conversational background is natural.

Mass nouns, vagueness and semantic variation

The mass/count distinction attracts a lot of attention among cognitive scientists, possibly because it involves in fundamental ways the relation between language (i.e. grammar), thought (i.e. extralinguistic conceptual systems) and reality (i.e. the physical world). In the present paper, I explore the view that the mass/count distinction is a matter of vagueness. While every noun/concept may in a sense be vague, mass nouns/concepts are vague in a way that systematically impairs their use in counting. This idea has never been systematically pursued, to the best of my knowledge. I make it precise relying on supervaluations (more specifically, ‘data semantics’) to model it. I identify a number of universals pertaining to how the mass/count contrast is encoded in the languages of the world, along with some of the major dimensions along which languages may vary on this score. I argue that the vagueness based model developed here provides a useful perspective on both. The outcome (besides shedding light on semantic variation) seems to suggest that vagueness is not just an interface phenomenon that arises in the interaction of Universal Grammar (UG) with the Conceptual/Intentional System (to adopt Chomsky’s terminology), but it is actually part of the architecture of UG.

Logic in grammar : polarity, free choice, and intervention

Introduction 1. The Spontaneous Logicality of Language 2. Scalar Implicatures at the Interface Between Pragmatics and Syntax 3. Even Negative Polarity Items and Only Negative Polarity Items 4. Presuppositionality, Strength, and Concord in Polarity Systems 5. Existential Free Choice 6. Universal Free Choice 7. Intervention 8. Where We Stand References

Structured Meanings, Thematic Roles and Control

One of the salient features of current work in semantics has been the search for fine grainedness. The strategies that are most actively being explored can perhaps be classified in two groups. The first group of proposals tries to come up with a theory of logical space capable of weighting information content in subtle ways. Data semantics, for example, (Veltman (1983), Landman (1986)) and situation semantics (Barwise and Perry 1983) fall within this group. The second group of proposals centers around the idea that at some level propositional content must be represented in terms of sentence-like structures, as Frege and Russell suggested. The structured meaning approach (a variant of Carnap’s intensional isomorphism approach), developed in Cresswell (1985) and related work falls in this second group.