Manfred Krifka

The Origins of Telicity

The distinction between telic and atelic predicates has been described in terms of the algebraic properties of their meaning since the early days of model-theoretic semantics. This perspective was inspired by Aristotle’s discussion of types of actions that do or do not take time to be completed which was taken up and turned into a linguistic discussion of action-denoting predicates by Vendler (1957). The algebraic notion that seemed to be most conducive to express the Aristotelian distinction appeared to be the mereological notion of a part, applied to the time at which these predicates hold: atelic predicates, like push a cart, have the subinterval property, that is, whenever they are true at a time interval, then they are true at any part of that interval; this does not hold for telic predicates, like eat an apple, cf. Bennett & Partee (1972), Taylor (1977), and Dowty (1979)2. Bach (1986) integrated these insights into a semantics based on events.

A Compositional Semantics for Multiple Focus Constructions

The subject of this article is the semantics of focus, i.e. the development of a framework in which we can formulate the influence of focus on the semantic and pragmatic interpretation. In section (1), I will discuss such a framework, structured meanings. In section (2), I will point out some of its shortcomings, as it is currently worked out; they have to do with cases involving multiple foci. In (3), I develop a general representation format in which we can cope with these problematic cases. Finally, in (4) I will discuss some extensions and possible problems, among others a combined semantic treatment of focus and topic.

Scope Inversion under the Rise-Fall Contour in German

A well-known but ill-explained fact about German is scope inversion under a rise-fall accent contour. The scope inversion in this reading can be derived from general principles of scope assignment and focus marking in German. In particular, focus is assigned to preverbal constituents, leading to syntactic configurations that result in ambiguous interpretations. This explanation must be couched in a framework of derivational economy that favors shorter derivations. The relevant comparison class is defined with respect to phonological form, not, as has been suggested for English, with respect to identity of semantic interpretation; this may be a general property of free word order languages.

Focus and Presupposition in Dynamic Interpretation

Structured meanings have evolved as a well-suited tool to describe the semantics of focus constructions. In this paper, the A. will show how structured meanings can be combined with a framework of dynamic interpretation that allows for a cogent expression of anaphoric relations and presuppositions

The Semantics of Questions and the Focusation of Answers

In Krifka (2001) I argued that three distinct phenomena of question semantics – alternative questions like Did it rain or not?, multiple constituent questions with pair-list readings like Who bought what? and the focus patterns of answers to constituent questions – cannot be dealt with adequately within the framework of Alternative Semantics. In Krifka (to appear) I argue that Alternative Semantics also is problematic as a framework for focus semantics in general; in particular, it makes wrong predictions in case focus occurs in syntactic islands.

Negated Polarity Questions as Denegations of Assertions

The paper offers a new proposal for so-called high negation in questions like Isn’t there a vegetarian restaurant around here? It develops a theory of speech acts that allows for certain semantic operators, like negation, to scope over them. It is argued that high negation is negation over an assertion (here, ‘there is a vegetarian restaurant around here’), and that the question is a request by the speaker to refrain from asserting that proposition. In doing this, the speaker checks whether the addressee would exclude that there is a vegetarian restaurant around here. This rhetorical move is justified under certain circumstances, which explains the biases that have been observed with such questions, and also with questions with low negation such as Is there no vegetarian restaurant here? The paper also introduces a more fine-grained notion of polarity questions; in addition to the standardly assumed “bipolar” questions that present two propositions, one being the negation of the other, it also assumes “monopolar” questions that present just one proposition, and hence allow for the expression of a bias.

Embedding Illocutionary Acts

Speech acts have sometimes been considered as not embeddable, for principled reasons. In this paper, I argue that illocutionary acts can be embedded under certain circumstances. I provide for a semantic interpretation of illocutionary acts as functions from world/time indices to world/time indices, which provides them with a semantic type, and allows for operators that take them as arguments. I will illustrate this with three cases: First, with illocutionary acts as arguments of verbs like tell, second, as semantic objects modified by speech act adverbials like frankly and third, with Austinian conditionals. By these exemplary cases, I show that illocutionary acts (or rather, speech-act potentials) become part of the recursive structure of language.

Functional Similarities between Bimanual Coordination and Topic/Comment Structure

Human manual action exhibits a differential use of a non-dominant (typically, left) and a dominant (typically, right) hand. Human communication exhibits a pervasive structuring of utterances into topic and comment. I will point out striking similarities between the coordination of hands in bimanual actions, and the structuring of utterances in topics and comments. I will also show how principles of bimanual coordination influence the expression of topic/comment structure in sign languages and in gestures accompanying spoken language, and suggest that bimanual coordination might have been a preadaptation of the development of information structure in human communication.

The expression of information structure

The book reports on the present state of the theoretical presentation, empirical investigation, psycholinguistic aspects and acquisition of information structure, and computation. It also provides descriptions of the information structural encoding strategies of individual languages of different types. The book can be used as a textbook appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses.