Regine Eckardt

Normal Objects, Normal Worlds and the Meaning of Generic Sentences

It has sometimes been proposed that generic sentences make statements about prototypic members of a category. In this paper I will elaborate this view and develop an account where generic sentences express quantification about the normal exemplars in a category - here and in counterfactual worlds sufficiently similar to our own. Comparing the account to the currently most widespread analysis which views generic sentences as universal quantifications in carefully chosen best-possible worlds, we find that an analysis that is based on the choice of normal objects does better justice to the data in question than an analysis that relies on a choice of normal worlds alone. A further conceptual advantage of an explicit separation of (a) a choice of best exemplars and (b) a modal component of generic quantification consists in the fact that it highlights that different generic sentences can rely on different kinds of choice of best exemplar. Comparing their logical behaviour, I will demonstrate that we should at least distinguish between normal-generic sentences and ideal-generic sentences. Finally, the paper proves that the account I propose is a modal variant of some recent purely extensional default logics, developed in AI.

Manner adverbs and information structure : evidence from the adverbial modification of verbs of creation

The paper investigates the pragmatic effects of word order variation in German, specifically concerning the ordering of adverb and nominal arguments. The behaviour of verbs of creation in combination with adverbs and indefinite object NPs proves that the allegedly neutral word order NP Adverb Verb is not really presupposition free. I claim that indefinite object NPs to the left of manner adverbs receive a special kind of partitive reading which presupposes that the referent of NP is already contextually present before the reported event takes place. This will offer an explanation for the fact that in a sentence like Bob hat ein Flugzeug stabil konstruiert (‘Bob has a plane solidly constructed’) the object NP cannot receive an existential (indefinite) reading while the sentence Bob hat ein Flugzeug kunstvoll bemalt (‘Bob has a plane artistically painted’) seems to be able to refer to a previously unmentioned plane.

APO : Avoid Pragmatic Overload

There are several proposals in the literature about how situations of this kind can arise. One very simple scenario really avoids all difficulties by claiming that new language stages typically come about by innovative acts by the speaker. The speaker can decide to use language in innovative ways, and to the extent that the hearer can make sense of an innovative utterance, and adopts the suggested underlying pattern, the hearer confirms and adopts the new language stage. This view is already inherent in traditional work in language history (von der Gabelentz 1891, Paul 1920) and it is moreover extremely plausible, because we can observe innovative utterances on a daily basis. Yet, when we think about the origin of the more routine

Words in Time: Diachronic Semantics From Different Points of View

Meanings of words are constantly changing, and the forces driving these changes are varied and diverse. The collection focuses on meaning change as a topic of interdisciplinary research. Distinguished scholars in diachronic semantics, general linguistics, classical philology, philosophy of language, anthropology and history offer in depth studies of language internal and external factors of meaning change. This broad range of perspectives, unprecedented in research publications of recent years, is a pioneering attempt to mirror the multi-facetteous nature of language as a formal, social, cognitive, cultural and historical entity. The contributions, each exploring the research issues, methods and techniques of their particular field, are directed towards a broader audience of interested readers, thus enhancing interdisciplinary exchange.

The Semantics of Free Indirect Discourse

1 Introduction 1.1 The Challenge of Free Indirect Discourse 1.2 Macro and Micro Level Indicators 1.3 A Little Bit of Grammar 1.4 Two Voices 1.5 Preview 2 The Contexts of Free Indirect Discourse 2.1 Kaplan on Context 2.2 Interpreting Free Indirect Discourse 2.3 Earlier Formal Approaches to Free Indirect Discourse 2.4 Where Does Inner Context Come From? 2.5 Advanced Issues: Recursion 2.6 Summary 3 Story Update 3.1 Information as Common Ground Update 3.2 Narration and Story Update 3.3 Updates by Assertion and Commentary 3.4 Advanced Issues: Expressive Content in Modal Contexts 3.5 Summary 4 Tense and Aspect 4.1 Events, Tense and Aspect 4.2 Forcing Free Indirect Discourse 4.3 Discourse and Free Indirect Discourse 4.4 Advanced Issues: Interface Considerations and Exceptions 4.5 Summary 5 Particles in Free Indirect Discourse 5.1 Speaker as a Parameter in Contexts of Thought 5.2 Speakers Attitude: leider 5.3 Speaker and Common Ground: ja 5.4 Speakers Agenda: also + Focus 5.5 Speakers Epistemic Background: wohl 5.6 Speakers Objections: doch 5.7 Advanced Issues: How Temporal and Speaker Oriented Indexicals Interact 5.8 Summary 147 6 Exclamatives 6.1 Exclamatives in Direct and Indirect Discourse 6.2 Retts Theory of Exclamatives 6.3 The Temporal Structure of Exclamatives 6.4 Exclamatives, Times, and Tensed Degrees 6.5 Derived Reference to Gradable Post-States 6.6 Advanced Issues: Dead Ends in the Analysis of Exclamatives 6.7 Summary 7 Predecessors and Alternatives 7.1 Banfield 7.2 Schlenker 7.3 Sharvit 7.4 Quotational Theories 8 More Tenses, More Moods 8.1 The Konjunktiv in Reported Speech and Thought 8.2 Advanced Issues: Fabricius-Hansen and Saebo 8.3 Free Indirect Speech in the Historical Present 9 Forbidden in Shifted Speech 9.1 Banned from Indirect Discourse 9.2 Vocatives 9.3 Imperatives 9.4 Summary 10 Final Panorama 10.1 Looking Back 10.2 New Horizons 10.3 Linguistics, Literature, and the Challenge of Fiction

Grammaticalization and Semantic Reanalysis

Research in grammaticalization was inspired by the question “where does grammar come from?”. While it is almost tautological that any communication system requires signals for entities, properties, relations (“content words”), grammatical structures don’t seem to be required by signalling systems as such. Nevertheless, practically all natural languages include grammatical structure of surprising complexity. Moreover, there is no correlation between the level of cultural achievements of a society and the level of grammatical complexity of the society’s language. These observations suggest that our universal linguistic abilities drive us to collectively enrich signalling systems of content words with grammatical infrastructure. The present article takes a closer look into the semantic processes involved in these developments. The prototypical instance of language change called ‘grammaticalization’ is a change where a word with independent content, preferably of one of the main lexical categories A, V or N, develops a new use with a comparatively more dependent, more abstract content, changed word class, typically of a functional nature, e.g. auxiliary, modal, functional word or even affix. The development of Latin and French future tense forms is often presented as a typical model case of grammaticalization.

A logic for easy linking semantics

I will define a logic with case-indexed variables and partial variable assignments for a lean syntax-semantics interface. Specifically, the syntax-semantics mapping does not require obligatory quantifier raising (as Heim+Kratzer, 1998) and does not require a fixed underlying order of arguments of the verb. The latter feature will facilitate semantic research on free word order languages and semantic research on languages where no specific syntactic claims about word order are as yet available.

Concept Priming in Language Change

Language change, according to Hermann Paul, is a natural part and e¤ect of ordinary language use. Even though this assumption is widely shared in the literature, scholars would still like to understand in more detail how ordinary talking and language change are tied together. Jäger and Rosenbach tackle this question by proposing an interesting link between psycholinguistic processes and language change. They point out the following parallels: Priming is an e¤ect where the use of one linguistic item activates another linguistic item. Language change is a process where the use of synchronically available linguistic items makes speakers receptive to invent and use other (new) linguistic items. Priming is provably unidirecitonal. Language changes of certain types are unidirectional. These parallels are illustrated convincingly with a series of studies that prove the unidirectionality of priming. Could priming be the mental process which gets languages into motion? The hypothesis is intriguing in that it promises testable hypotheses about language change. Unlike social or political background situations which are hard to simulate in the laboratory, priming e¤ects are well understood and easy to control. Linguistic innovation, spurred by priming, should be amendable to psycholinguistic investigation. In my comment, I will focus mainly on concept priming, distinguishing between priming within a closed linguistic system (synchronic priming) and priming with language change potential (diachronic priming). In a first step, I will review the patterns of meaning change that are predicted by the diachronic priming hypothesis (DPH). Next, I will try to establish the di¤erences between diachronic priming and other, more traditional modes of language change. The resulting picture will give reason to doubt whether priming e¤ects in the lab can simulate real language change in

Semantic Reanalysis and Language Change

Reanalysis is a well-known process of language change in morpho-syntax. However, the semantic composition of sentence meanings can also undergo reanalysis and lead to meaning changes for parts of the sentence. The article provides the basic notions of compositional semantics ⁄ pragmatics that underlie semantic reanalysis, surveys possible constellations and causes of reanalysis, and contrasts the process to other ways of semantic change. I will, moreover, illustrate semantic reanalysis on basis of a case study which highlights some of its typical features.

even in Horn Space

In the first part of the paper, I argue that current pragmatic theories of NPI licensing fail to capture the distinction between strong and weak NPIs. Specifically, I will show that an analysis in terms of covert even alone can not account for the limited distribution of strong NPIs. In the second part, I investigate the implicatures of even sentences in weak licensing contexts. I show that they give rise to a minimal-achievement implicature which can be used to derive the markedness of strong NPIs in weak licensing contexts.