Louise McNally

Existential Sentences without Existential Quantification

The analysis to be proposed has two notable consequences. First, it indicates that while presupposition may play a role in accounting for the so-called definiteness restriction associated with the construction, presupposition cannot account for all of the definiteness restriction facts-in fact, on the view defended here, the definiteness restriction facts cannot be explained by a single generalization. Second, it supports the view that the notions weak and strong should be redefined as suggested in Ladusaw 1994, where “weak” is essentially equated with “nonparticular-denoting”.

Color, context, and compositionality

Color adjectives have played a central role in work on language typology and variation, but there has been relatively little investigation of their meanings by researchers in formal semantics. This is surprising given the fact that color terms have been at the center of debates in the philosophy of language over foundational questions, in particular whether the idea of a compositional, truth-conditional theory of natural language semantics is even coherent. The challenge presented by color terms is articulated in detail in the work of Charles Travis. Travis argues that structurally isomorphic sentences containing color adjectives can shift truth value from context to context depending on how they are used and in the absence of effects of vagueness or ambiguity/polysemy, and concludes that a deterministic mapping from structures to truth conditions is impossible. The goal of this paper is to provide a linguistic perspective on this issue, which we believe defuses Travis’ challenge. We provide empirical arguments that color adjectives are in fact ambiguous between gradable and nongradable interpretations, and that this simple ambiguity, together with independently motivated options concerning scalar dimension within the gradable reading accounts for the Travis facts in a simpler, more constrained, and thus ultimately more successful fashion than recent contextualist analyses such as those in Szabó (Perspectives on semantics, pragmatics and discourse: A festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer, 2001) or Rothschild and Segal (Mind Lang, 2009).

Bare nominals and incorporating verbs in Spanish and Catalan

This paper presents an analysis of bare nominals unmarked for number (BNs) occurring in object position in Spanish and Catalan, on which the BN is a syntactic complement to the verb, but not a semantic argument. After describing the properties that distinguish BNs from other indefinite expressions (bare plurals, indefinite singulars preceded by un ‘a’, and bare mass terms), we argue that these BNs occur in a monadic syntactic configuration in the sense of Hale & Keyser ( 1998 ), that they denote first-order properties, and that they are combined with the verb via a modified version of Dayals ( 2003 ) semantics for pseudo-incorporation. Specifically, the proposal consists of a lexical rule that generates the class of verbs that productively accept BN objects, plus a composition rule that treats the BN as modifier of the verb. We point out the advantages of this analysis over three other well-known semantic analyses for combining verbs with property-type nominals. Finally, we show how the analysis can be naturally extended to existential sentences, which combine with BNs although, prima facie, they do not appear to meet the lexical conditions for doing so.

Stativity and Theticity

One popular way1 of classifying utterances involves intuitions about their “topichood,” or basic predicational structure. One often hears the suggestion that some utterances are “about an individual,” or have a clear predicational structure; while others are neutral descriptions of eventualities, or lack a clear predicational structure. I will assume that this basic classification has some reality, and following one line of literature, I will refer to the former type of utterance as categorical, and the latter as thetic (notions originally due to Brentano and Marty; see e.g. Kuroda 1972, 1992; Sasse 1987; Ladusaw 1994). Although these terms originally referred to types of judgments, i.e. cognitive acts, I will also use them to describe the sentence forms and utterances (or statements) that represent these judgment types. Thus, e.g. “thetic sentence” should be understood as shorthand for “sentence used to represent a thetic judgment.”

Comitative coordination: A case study in group formation

This paper argues that in Russian a (singular) NP can combine with a comitative PP to form a complex plural NP, and that this NP denotes a group in the sense of Landman (1989). A single-headed GPSG analysis of the construction is proposed and argued for, and the implications of the analysis for number agreement are discussed. The semantic properties of the construction (and its counterpart in Polish) are subsequently detailed and are compared with those of ‘ordinary’ NP coordination; the preliminary conclusion is that the construction differs both in denotation and in conventional meaning from NP coordination.

The relative role of property type and scale structure in explaining the behavior of gradable adjectives

Kennedy [9] proposes a semantics for positive form adjectives on which the standard for ascribing an adjective A makes the individuals that are A stand out from those that are not. To account for the differences between absolute and relative adjectives, Kennedy posits that the maximal and minimal degrees on closed scales naturally make individuals stand out in a way that degrees found away from the endpoints of a scale cannot. I argue that the ability of a degree to make individuals stand out is due less to scale structure than to the nature of the property the adjective describes. Thus, degrees that are not endpoints can behave like absolute standards as long as the application criteria for the property are clear. I relate the identifiability of such criteria to whether the property ascription can be modeled in terms of rule- vs. similarity-based classification (see e.g. [5]).

A semantics for the English existential construction

Proposes a new semantics for English statements beginning with there, which adopts the generally rejected characterization of them as subject-predicate prepositions in which the subject is a property or description of an individual and the predicate affirms the instantiation of the property of des

DP-Internal Only, Amount Relatives, and Relatives out of Existentials

L’A. propose une discussion autour des relatives de quantite et des relatives provenant des existentielles. Il presente leurs similitudes et leurs differences. Enfin, il aborde le probleme de « only » en tant que modificateur interne au DP.

Conceptual Versus Referential Affordance in Concept Composition

One of the defining traits of language is its capacity to mediate between concepts in our mind, which encapsulate generalizations, and the things they refer to in a given communicative act, with all their idiosyncratic properties. This article examines precisely this interplay between conceptual and referential aspects of meaning, and proposes that concept composition (or concept combination, a term more commonly used in Psychology) exploits both: Conceptually afforded composition is at play when a modifier and its head fit as could be expected given the properties of the two concepts involved, whereas in referentially afforded composition the result of the composition depends on specific, independently available properties of the referent. For instance, red box tends to be applied to boxes whose surface is red, but, given the appropriate context, it can also be applied to e.g. a brown box that contains red objects. We support our proposal with data from nominal modification, and explore a way to formally distinguish the two kinds of composition and integrate them into a more general framework for semantic analysis. Along the way, we recover the classically Fregean notion of sense as including conceptual information, and show the potential of distributional semantics , a framework that has become very influential in Cognitive Science and Computational Linguistics , to address research questions from a theoretical linguistic perspective.

Degree vs. Manner Well : A Case Study in Selective Binding

We present a semantic analysis of the adverb well that captures its degree and manner readings in a principled fashion via the Generative Lexicon Selective Binding composition rule. The analysis integrates Kennedy and McNally’s (Language, 81:345–381, 2005) treatment of scale structure with Generative Lexicon theory, and embeds the resulting semantics in HPSG.