Stefan Hinterwimmer

The Interpretation of the German Specificity Markers Bestimmt and Gewiss

We closely investigate two specificity markers in German, namely, bestimmt and gewiss, by discussing their commonalities and differences w.r.t. matters of identification and scope-taking properties in connection with negation, nominal quantifiers, conditionals and intensional operators. Eventually we propose to analyse both markers as uniformly contributing the information that some salient agent is in possession of identifying knowledge of the referent that is introduced by the modified indefinite. The crucial differences between the two markers are that in case of gewiss, (1) this agent must be the speaker and (2) this information is contributed as a conventional implicature, whereas in the case of bestimmt, (1) the agent must not necessarily coincide with the speaker and (2) the information is contributed as at-issue meaning, which will allow for interaction of this meaning component with other operators in the sentence.

Different Kinds of Specificity Across Languages

Introduction by Cornelia Ebert and Stefan Hinterwimmer .- Specificity Markers and Nominal Exclamatives in French by Fabienne Martin .- The Interpretation of the German Specificity Markers bestimmt and gewiss by Christian Ebert, Cornelia Ebert and Stefan Hinterwimmer .- Pragmatic Variation among Specificity Markers by Tania Ionin .- Certain Presuppositions and some Intermediate Readings, and Vice Versa by Igor Yanovich .- Exceptional Scope: The Case of Spanish by Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Paula Menendez-Benito .- The Distribution of two Indefinite Articles - The Case of Uzbek by Klaus von Heusinger and Udo Klein .- Scenarios of Equivalence - The Case of quelque by Jacques Jayez and Lucia M. Tovena

Quantificational Variability Effects with Plural Definites: Quantification over Individuals or Situations?

In this paper, we discuss the fact that not only adverbially quantified sentences with singular indefinites or bare plurals but also ones containing plural definites show Quantificational Variability Effects (QVEs), that is, they receive readings according to which the quantificational force of the respective DP seems to depend on the quantificational force of the Q-adverb. We show that if the Q-adverb is a frequency adverb like usually, there is strong evidence that QVEs come about as indirect effects of a quantification over situations. This conclusion is based on the fact that in such cases the availability of QVEs is constrained in ways that have no parallel in sentences containing adverbs of quantity like for the most part or quantificational DPs instead of frequency adverbs. We show that these constraints can be derived from plausible assumptions about how the situations to be quantified over are constrained: they have to be located in time on the basis of the most specific locally available information, and their running times are not allowed to overlap.

Demonstrative Pronouns and Propositional Attitudes

In this paper we take a close look at the behaviour of German demonstrative pronouns (DPros) in the complement clauses of propositional attitude verbs. Building on and partially revising Hinterwimmer and Bosch (Demonstrative pronouns and perspective. In: Patel P, Patel-Grosz P (eds) The impact of pronominal form on interpretation, Studies in generative grammar. De Gruyter, Berlin/New York, 2016), we show that DPros are anti-logophoric pronouns whose behaviour is similar (though not identical) to that of epithets (Dubinsky and Hamilton, Ling Inq 29:685–693, 1998; Schlenker, Proc SuB 9:385–416, 2005; Patel-Grosz, Epithets as De re pronouns. In: Pinon C (ed) Empirical issues in syntax and semantics 10, 2014). In particular, we argue that while Hinterwimmer and Bosch (Demonstrative pronouns and perspective. In: Patel P, Patel-Grosz P (eds) The impact of pronominal form on interpretation, Studies in generative grammar. De Gruyter, Berlin/New York, 2016) were right in assuming that DPros are prohibited from being bound by or co-referring with the currently most prominent perspective holder, they were wrong in assuming that the subjects of propositional attitude verbs are necessarily the most prominent perspective holders with respect to the DPros contained in their complement clauses. Evidence for this comes from two sources: First, in cases where a sentence with a propositional attitude verb is the complement of another propositional attitude verb in the matrix clause, a DPro contained in the complement clause of the lower propositional attitude verb can be bound by the subject of that verb, but not by the subject of the higher one. Secondly, if the speaker makes her own perspective particularly prominent by using an evaluative expression in referring to (the individual denoted by) the subject of a propositional attitude verb α, a DPro contained in the complement clause of α can at least for some speakers be interpreted as bound by the subject of α. We therefore now propose a pragmatic strategy that determines the most prominent perspective holder not only for the novel data discussed in this paper, but also for the data discussed in Hinterwimmer and Bosch (Demonstrative pronouns and perspective. In: Patel P, Patel-Grosz P (eds) The impact of pronominal form on interpretation, Studies in generative grammar. De Gruyter, Berlin/New York, 2016). Finally, we argue that the allergy of DPros against (maximally prominent) perspective holders is related to their status as demonstrative items which as such require an external reference point.

Requantification, Underquantification and Partial Focus in Indefinites

Based on an intricate pattern concerning the interpretation of indefinites in both monoand biclausal sentences with adverbial quantifiers, we propose an analysis which combines the idea that restrictorand nucleus situations/events of adverbial quantifiers are related via initially underspecified matching functions (Rothstein 1995) with pragmatic assumptions concerning preferences for the specification of these matching functions as well as the independently motivated pragmatic principle Maximize Presuppositions! (MP, Heim 1991). We show that neither the traditional situation semantics approach to adverbial quantification which assumes both restrictorand scope minimization (von Fintel 1994) nor a revision of this picture using neo-Davidsonian events (Herburger 2001) is able to account for the full pattern in a uniform manner. Finally, we provide additional evidence that the Novelty Condition (Heim 1982) does not exist as an independent principle and that its putative effects, where they occur, can be derived from MP (cf. Singh 2011).