Paul Portner

The Progressive in Modal Semantics.

This article presents a semantic analysis of the English progressive as an intensional operator within the framework of modal semantics proposed by Kratzer. This treatment allows a combination of the central idea of Dowtys influential analysis, that the progressives meaning has a major modal component, with the insights of other scholars (Parsons, Vlach, and Landman). My claim is that using a more sophisticated background theory of modality allows natural solutions for the problems raised for the modal account.*

THE (TEMPORAL) SEMANTICS AND (MODAL) PRAGMATICS OF THE PERFECT

The English perfect involves two fundamental components of meaning: a truth-conditional one involving temporal notions and a current relevance presupposition best expressed in terms drawn from the analysis of modality. The proposal made here draws much for the Extended Now theory (McCoard 1978 and others), but improves on it by showing that many aspects of the perfects meaning may be factored out into independent semantic or pragmatic principles.

THE SEMANTICS OF MOOD, COMPLEMENTATION, AND CONVERSATIONAL FORCE

This paper presents a theory of mood which ties together its pragmatic and semantic significance. In the first two sections the subject matter and background assumptions of the study are specified. Section 3 outlines the syntactic distribution and conversational force of the indicative and subjective (in English and Italian), infinitives, and ‘mood-indicating’ modal may. Then section 4 gives a formal theory which predicts the operators under which each mood may be embedded. Finally, section 5 shows how the ideas developed thus far yield an improved understanding of non-assertive sentences.

Specific Indefinites and the Information Structure Theory of Topics

Concentrating on data from Japanese, this paper examines the relationship between topicality and the specificity of indefinites. We argue that in many instances specificity arises when the domain of quantification for an indefinite is both topical and extremely narrow. We also discuss instances where the domain of quantification varies with some other operator, analyzing these in terms of a topical domain function, that is a function given in the context which provides the indefinite with a domain of quantification relative to implicit arguments. Our view builds on two popular ideas about specific indefinites: that they are a kind of presuppositional indefinite and that they are referential elements analyzed via choice functions. We formalize our ideas in terms of the analysis of topicality put forth in Portner & Yabushita (1998).

Topicality and (Non‐)Specificity in Mandarin

This paper presents arguments based on data from Mandarin Chinese for the idea that specific interpretations of indefinites arise when the domain of quantification for the indefinite is a topic. In particular, when the sentence has a topic (overt or covert) which represents a small fixed set or function from contextual parameters to sets, and an indefinite quantifies over this set, the indefinite will seem to get a fixed reference and have wide scope. The Chinese distributive marker dou is especially helpful in developing this hypothesis because it shows various complex interactions with indefinites, topics, and specificity; these interactions allow us to uncover evidence for crucial components of the analysis of specificity.

Permission and Choice

This paper provides an analysis of two related properties of imperatives: (i) their variation in discourse function and (ii) their licensing of free choice inferences. With regard to (i), it is argued that imperatives are semantically uniform, and that their wide range of interpretations is explained by two factors: differences in the grounds for issuing a given imperative and the logical relationship between the imperative and other commitments of the addressee. Concerning (ii), the same ideas which are used to analyze permission, in combination with an “alternatives” semantics for disjunction and indefinites, are able to explain free choice and related phenomena, such as Ross’s Paradox and the licensing of any.

The Semantics of Nominal Exclamatives

(1) is a noun phrase, and thus contrasts syntactically with (2), which is a clause. Yet the two seem to be synonymous. We will argue that the noun phrase is not embedded in an elliptical structure; rather, the phrase we see is all there is. And furthermore we will argue that (1) is not just pragmatically equivalent to (2); the two are in fact semantically equivalent as well. This raises the question, of central concern to this volume, of how a noun phrase achieves such a clause-like function.

Quantification, Events, and Gerunds

In this paper I will argue that gerunds are amenable to a treatment that ascribes much of their semantic variability to various quantificational operators that may be present in a sentence. Such an analysis is in the spirit of the theories of indefinites of Kamp (1981) and Heim (1982). We will also be able to develop a new argument in favour of the Kamp/Heim framework, a result which has wider significance for understanding quantification in natural language. Furthermore, the treatment of gerunds requires a theory somewhat different from that needed for indefinites; in this way too we can gain in our study of quantification. Finally, these results are made precise when I put forward an explicit fragment that interprets many Logical Forms containing gerunds.