Igor Yanovich

Russian Genitive of Negation Alternations: The Role of Verb Semantics

Genitive-nominative and genitive-accusative alternations exist to various degrees in Slavic and Baltic languages. In Russian the alternation of Gen-Nom and Gen-Acc in negative sentences is conditioned by a combination of syntactic, semantic, and morphological factors. A series of papers by Borschev and Partee and by the present set of authors has studied the semantic factors involved in the genitive of negation. Our recent work builds on the intuition that genitive NPs are “less referential” than their nominative or accusative counterparts; both we and Olga Kagan take that decreased referentiality to involve a “demotion”. We have formalized this demotion in terms of semantic types, arguing that Gen NPs in these alternations are of property type rather than entity type e. In this article we address how verb meanings shift along with the types of their arguments. We review the treatment of Borschev and Partee (1998) of the “bleaching” of the open class of intransitive verbs that appear in existential sentences with Subject Gen Neg, and compare it to the more heterogeneous class of shifts in verb meaning that occurs with Object Gen Neg. The resulting analysis helps to explain both the similarities and the differences between Subject Gen Neg and Object Gen Neg.

Expressive Power of Now and Then Operators

Natural language provides motivation for studying modal backwards-looking operators such as “now”, “then” and “actually” that evaluate their argument formula at some previously considered point instead of the current one. This paper investigates the expressive power over models of both propositional and first-order basic modal language enriched with such operators. Having defined an appropriate notion of bisimulation for first-order modal logic, I show that backwards-looking operators increase its expressive power quite mildly, contrary to beliefs widespread among philosophers of language and formal semanticists. That in turn presents a strong argument for the use of operator-based systems in the semantics of natural language, instead of systems with explicit quantification over worlds and times that have become a de-facto standard for such applications. The popularity of such explicit-quantification systems is shown to be based on the misinterpretation of a claim by Cresswell (Entities and indices, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1990), which led many philosophers and linguists to assume (wrongly) that introducing “now” and “then” is expressively equivalent to explicitly quantifying over worlds and times.

Certain Presuppositions and Some Intermediate Readings, and Vice Versa

The paper discusses intermediate out-of-island readings of some and a certain indefinites within the choice-functional (CF) framework. Chierchia (2001) showed that certain readings of sentences with indefinites in the CF framework require existential closure of CF variables in the immediate scope of negation rather than Kratzer-style Skolemization of the CF. However, Schwarz (2001) noticed that while some indefinites exhibit readings of that kind, a certain indefinites do not seem to. The current paper first shows how to account for Schwarz’s generalization using simple presuppositional CF analyses for the relevant indefinite determiners. Then it looks more closely at the data concerning a certain and concludes that Schwarz’s generalization is actually not as clear-cut. A more sophisticated analysis for a certain, motivated by its properties not directly connected to exceptional scope-taking, is proposed. A suggestion is made regarding how to explain both the ability of a certain indefinites to give rise to readings Schwarz claimed they cannot give rise to, and at the same time avoid overgeneration of such readings.

How much expressive power is needed for natural language temporal indexicality

The paper studies how much expressive power beyond the capabilities of the simple Priorean temporal language Kt is needed to give proper translation to natural language examples by Kamp and Vlach which are extensively used in the linguistic and philosophical literature as forcing the use of quite expressive languages, all the way up to full twosorted FOL. It turns out that when examined carefully, the examples in question only require a quite mild Kamp- and Cresswell-style system with now and then operators, or, equivalently, hybrid Kt + ↓ + @. The paper generalizes the earlier results showing that in the propositional case, now and then do not increase the power of Kt. For the first-order case, a notion of FOL path bisimulation for first-order KtFO with untensed quantification and equality is defined, and it is demonstrated how to prove that a particular NL sentence cannot be expressed in KtFO through non-preservation under FOL path bisimulation. It is also shown that KtFO plus now and then is still strictly less expressive than HL (↓, @), which is itself much less expressive than the strong systems that were claimed to be needed for NL translation. Thus the paper provides strict lower and upper bounds on the expressivity of the translation language forced by Kamp-Vlach NL sentences, and the upper bound turns out to be much lower than was widely believed in the linguistics community.

The effect of dictionary omissions on phylogenies computationally inferred from lexical data

Lexical datasets used for computational phylogenetic inference suffer a unique type of data error. Some words actually present in a language may be absent from the dataset at no fault of its curators: especially for lesser-studied languages, a word may be missing from all available sources such as dictionaries. It is thus important to be able to (i) check how robust one’s inferences are to dictionary omission errors, and (ii) incorporate the knowledge that such errors may be present into one’s inference. I introduce two simple techniques that work towards those goals, and study the possible effects of dictionary omission errors in two real-life case studies on the Lezgian and Uralic datasets from Kassian (2015) and Syrjanen et al. (2013), respectively. The effects of dictionary omission turn out to be moderate (Lezgian) to negligible (Uralic), and certainly far less significant than the possible effects of modeling choices, including priors, on the inferred phylogeny, as demonstrated in the Uralic case study. Assessing the possible effects of dictionary omissions is advisable, but severe problems are unlikely. Collecting significantly larger lexical datasets, in order to overcome sensitivity to priors, is likely more important than expending resources on verifying data against dictionary omissions.

Old English *motan , variable-force modality, and the presupposition of inevitable actualization

Old English <italic>*motan</italic> and Middle English <italic>*moten</italic>, the ancestors of modern <italic>must</italic>, are commonly described as ambiguous between a possibility and a necessity reading. I argue instead that in the Alfredian Old English prose, <italic>*motan</italic> was a nonambiguous ‘variable-force’ modal, with the modal force different from both possibility and necessity. I propose that <italic>*motan</italic>’s variable-force effect was due to the presupposition of a collapse between possibility and necessity. Informally, <italic>motan</italic>(<italic>p</italic>) presupposed ‘if <italic>p</italic> gets a chance to actualize, it will’. I then trace the development of <italic>*motan</italic> into a modal genuinely ambiguous between necessity and possibility in Early Middle English.

Corrections to ‘Standard Contextualism Strikes Back’

In this note, I make three corrections to my article Standard Contextualism Strikes Back, JoS, published online in January 2013, doi:10.1093/jos/ffs022. First, I acknowledge a very similar contextualist account proposed before mine by Janice Dowell (2011). Dowell’s and my accounts, developed independently, coincide on most issues, and seem to be complementary on the few remaining ones. Second, I scale down my claim that Cloudy Contextualism by von Fintel and Gillies is not able to account for scenarios with forgotten knowledge. In fact, there is potentially a way for Cloudy Contextualism to resolve the problem. Third, I correct a labelling mistake I made: my account of hidden-eavesdropper cases constitutes a relativist, not a contextualist proposal. However, Practical Relativism, which is a more proper label for my account of eavesdropping, shares most of its predictions with Practical Contextualism, and thus differs very significantly from the rest of the pack of current relativist analyses. A proper practical-contextualist account of hidden eavesdropping is also possible.

Handling equivalence classes of Optimality-Theoretic tableaux

Many Optimality-Theoretic tableaux contain exactly the same information, and equivalence-preserving operations on them have been an object of study for some two decades. This paper shows that several of the operations proposed in the earlier literature together are actually enough to express any possible equivalence-preserving transformation. Moreover, every equivalence class of comparative tableaux (equivalently, of sets of Elementary Ranking Conditions, or ERC sets) has a unique and computable normal form that can be derived using those elementary operations in polynomial time. Any equivalence-preserving operation on comparative tableaux (ERC sets) is thus computable, and normal form tableaux may therefore represent their equivalence classes without loss of generality.