Jessica Rett

Degree modification in natural language

This dissertation is a study of the roles played by degree modifiers – functions from sets of degrees to sets of degrees – across different constructions and languages. The immediate goal of such a project is a better understanding of the distribution of these morphemes and how they contribute to the meaning of an expression. More broadly, a study of the semantics of degree modifiers is of interest because it helps demonstrate parallels between the degree and individual domains. Chapter 1 introduces the assumptions made and practices followed in the dissertation. Chapter 2 presents a first study of degree modification: ‘m-words,’ a term I use to refer to many, much, few, little, and their cross-linguistic counterparts. I argue that they are functions from a set of degrees to its measure. This characterization is based on accounts of m-words as differentials in comparatives; I extend it to other occurrences of m-words, e.g. as they occur pre-nominally and in quantity questions in Balkan languages. Chapter 3 broadens the study of degree modifiers to the semantic property ‘evaluativity’. A construction is evaluative if it refers to a degree that exceeds a standard, as in John is tall. I argue that evaluativity is encoded in the null degree modifier ‘EVAL,’ a function from a set of degrees to those which exceed a contextually-valued standard. Evidence for this approach is the occurrence of

The semantics of evaluativity

1. Introduction 2. The null morpheme POS 3. The null morpheme EVAL 4. Implicature: a brief review 5. Evaluativity as implicature 6. Extensions of the evaluativity implicature 7. Conclusion

The Acquisition of Syntactically Encoded Evidentiality.

This article presents several empirical studies of syntactically encoded evidentiality in English. The first part of our study consists of an adult online experiment that confirms claims in Asudeh & Toivonen (2012) that raised Perception Verb Similatives (PVSs; e.g. John looks like he is sick) encode direct evidentiality. We then present the results of an acquisition study based on an exhaustive examination of the corpora of 45 American English-speaking children in the CHILDES database (McWhinney & Snow 1985). These results are consistent with the hypothesis that children as young as two behave like adults in their ability to correlate the syntax of these constructions with the type of evidence they have. This claim is supplemented by a direct comparison of children’s and adults’ PVS constructions in the corpora. Together, the studies constitute preliminary indication of childrens ability to track and grammatically encode evidence source, even in “non-evidential” languages like English.

Measure Phrase Equatives and Modified Numerals

Journal of Semantics Advance Access published April 18, 2014 Journal of Semantics, 0, 2014: 1–51 doi:10.1093/jos/ffu004 Measure Phrase Equatives and Modified Numerals Abstract In English, equatives can be formed with a numeral or measure phrase (MP) standard (e.g. John can dive as deep as 500m; Rett, 2010). These ‘measure phrase equatives’ (MPEs) differ semantically from their clausal counterparts (e.g. John can dive as deep as Sue can) in two important ways. First, while clausal standards set lower bounds, resulting in an ‘at least’ interpretation of the equative, MP standards tend to set upper bounds, resulting in an ‘at most’ interpretation. Second, MPEs are restricted in their distribution relative to clausal equatives: they are only acceptable when the subject is associated with a range of values or when the value they’re associated with is signifi- cantly high (or both). The main goal of this paper is a unified analysis of the equative morpheme that accounts for these semantic and distributional differences between clausal and MP equatives. I attribute these differences to the fact that MPEs can trigger two different conversational implicatures: a quantity implicature (because they are less informative than MP comparatives); and a manner implicature, because they are more marked than MP constructions like John can dive 500m (deep). I end by suggesting an expansion of this account of MPEs to modified numerals generally, in particular to the differences between Class A and Class B modifiers (Geurts & Nouwen 2007; Nouwen INTRODUCTION In English, equatives can be formed with a numeral or measure phrase (MP) standard (e.g. John can dive as deep as 500m; Rett 2010). These measure phrase equatives (MPEs) are semantically different from clausal equatives in a number of different ways. I argue here that the difference is best attributed to the fact that MPEs trigger an additional manner implicature, in contrast to clausal equatives, as a result of their relation- ship to MP constructions like John dove 500m (deep). The analysis pro- vides insight into the semantic relevance of manner implicatures; I will argue that it can also inform the discussion of modified numerals (e.g. John read fewer than 3 books) generally. I’ll begin by describing the empirical challenge posed by these measure phrase equatives. Section 1.2 outlines the approach and the organization of the article. s The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Los Angeles on April 19, 2014 JESSICA RETT University of California, Los Angeles

Antonymy In Space And Other Strictly Ordered Domains

Antonymy in Space The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication December 2015 pages 1-33 Volume 10: Perspectives on Spatial Cognition DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4148/1944-3676.1095 J ESSICA R ETT UCLA A NTONYMY I N S PACE A ND O THER S TRICTLY O RDERED D OMAINS A BSTRACT : Natural language references different types of en- tities. Some of these entities (e.g. degrees, locations, times) are strictly ordered with respect to one another; others (e.g. individu- als, possible worlds) are not. The empirical goal of this paper is to show that some linguistically encoded relations across these do- mains (e.g. under, slower than) display a polar asymmetry, while others do not. The theoretical goal of this paper is to argue that this asymmetry – and its restriction to only certain relations – is due to intrinsic properties of strictly ordered domains, coupled with a bias in how language users perceive these domains. times (Partee 1973); and degrees (Cresswell 1976). The inclusion of these domains and the entities that form them allows the extension of formal semantics to less canonical data. For instance, the compara- tive morpheme more in e.g. Adam has more shoes than socks has been argued to be a degree quantifier, not an individual quantifier (Heim 2000, 2006), and the demonstrative yea arguably refers to a degree in the sentence John is yea tall. The goal of this paper is to present and explain data from English that demonstrate important parallels and one key difference in how two-place predicates in natural language relate entities across different domains. I will show that some two-place relations – like under and slower than – display what I call a ‘polar asymmetry’; they are inter- preted differently than their antonymic counterparts (in this case, above and faster than). I will further show that this polar asymmetry only ex- tends to two-place predicates that relate entities in a strictly ordered domain; consequently we do not find a similar asymmetry in two-place predicates of individuals like friend of or enemy of. The goal of this paper is to detail this polar asymmetry, and to ex- plain it and its distribution across lexical items. The account presented here relies on the intrinsic differences between domains whose entities are strictly ordered – e.g. the domains of degree, time, and space – and those that are not (e.g. the domain of individuals), as well as language users’ perception of these domains. I conclude by discussing the ram- ifications of the difference between strictly- and non-strictly-ordered domains for natural language semantics. 2. A PUZZLE IN DEGREE SEMANTICS 1. INTRODUCTION The goal of formal semantics is to model meaning in natural language. The logics they employ tend to map one sort of entity – individuals, either concrete or abstract – onto truth-values. In these formal sys- tems, common nouns like shoes denote sets of individuals, quantifiers like every relate sets of individuals, and proper names like Adam and demonstratives like this directly refer to individuals. Relatively recent innovations in semantics have involved the inclu- sion of other, distinct domains containing other, distinct entities: pos- sible worlds (Hintikka 1961; Kripke 1963); events (Davidson 1969); It’s been observed that comparatives formed with a possibility modal and a negative-antonym (e.g. slow) have an additional reading relative to those with a positive-antonym (e.g. fast) (Seuren 1973; Rullmann 1995; Meier 2002; Heim 2007; Buring 2007). The examples in (1) illustrate this claim. a. b. Lucinda is driving faster than allowed on this highway. Lucinda is driving slower than allowed on this highway. I will discuss these examples in two distinct contexts; the first presents Vol. 10: Perspectives on Spatial Cognition