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In this paper, we study the distribution and interpretation of a non-temporal use of the future tense in Italian, called 'presumptive' or 'epistemic', which we label here PF. We first distinguish PF from its closest modal relatives, namely epistemic necessity/possibility/likelihood modals, as well as weak necessity modals. We then propose an account of PF in declaratives and interrogatives that treats it as a special comparative subjective likelihood modal, and test its empirical predictions. A theoretical lesson drawn from this detailed study of the semantics of PF is that semantics needs sharpened theoretical tools to be able to capture the fine-grained distinctions languages make when it comes to signaling modulated epistemic commitment to a proposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces on the scene a new type of non-canonical question, dubbed non-intrusive , exemplified by interrogatives marked by the particle oare in Romanian. It does so by providing an account of the distribution and interpretation of this particle using an updated version of the context components in Fălăuş & Laca (2014) , and an elaboration of the general assumptions in Faller (2002). The intuition the account captures is that by marking an interrogative with oare , the speaker signals that she does not assume that the issue she raises will be resolved in a future state of the conversation. It is further argued that non-intrusive questions are empirically close to but not identical with conjectural questions , discussed most recently in Eckardt (2018) , and therefore have to be recognized as a separate category. The predictions and theoretical implications of the account are discussed relative to a general typology of canonical and non-canonical questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an account of the semantic content and conventional discourse effects of a range of sentence types in English, namely falling declaratives, polar interrogatives and certain kinds of rising declaratives and tag interrogatives. The account aims to divide the labor between compositional semantics and conventions of use in a principled way. We argue that falling declaratives and polar interrogatives are unmarked sentence types. On our account, differences in their conventional discourse effects follow from independently motivated semantic differences combined with a single convention of use, which applies uniformly to both sentence types. As a result, the Fregean 'illocutionary force operators' Assertion and Question become unnecessary. In contrast, we argue that rising declaratives and tag interrogatives are marked sentence types. On our account, their conventional discourse effects consist of the effects that are dictated by the basic convention of use that is common to all sentence types considered here, augmented with special effects that are systematically connected to their formal properties. Thus, a central feature of our approach is that it maintains a parallelism between unmarked and marked sentence types on the one hand, and basic and complex discourse effects on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of scope posed by natural language indefinites that captures both the difference in scopal freedom between indefinites and bona fide quantifiers and the syntactic sensitivity that the scope of indefinites does nevertheless exhibit. Following the main insight of choice functional approaches, we connect the special scopal properties of indefinites to the fact that their semantics can be stated in terms of choosing a suitable witness. This is in contrast to bona fide quantifiers, the semantics of which crucially involves relations between sets of entities. We provide empirical arguments that this insight should not be captured by adding choice/Skolem functions to classical first-order logic, but in a semantics that follows Independence-Friendly Logic, in which scopal relations involving existentials are part of the recursive definition of truth and satisfaction. These scopal relations are resolved automatically as part of the interpretation of existentials. Additional support for this approach is provided by dependent indefinites, a cross-linguistically common class of special indefinites that can be straightforwardly analyzed in our semantic framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to capture the similarities and differences between assertions and polar questions so as to be able to account for the systematic partial overlap that exists in reactions to these speech acts in English and beyond. We first discuss the discourse components we assume and then define default assertions and default polar questions in a way that allows us to characterize two types of responses to these speech acts, confirming and reversing reactions. The common characteristics of assertions and polar questions are responsible for the fact that both allow these reactions; the differences between the two speech acts explain the different contextual effects confirming and reversing moves have depending on whether they react to an assertion or a polar question. We then examine the distribution of a set of ‘polarity’ particles in Romanian in terms of the notions defined in the rest of the paper and end with a series of predictions concerning polarity particles across languages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The notion of specificity in linguistics is notoriously non‐specific. We consider here various distinctions within the realm of noun phrase semantics that are relevant to specificity. The common thread uniting these distinctions is the notion of variation in value assignments for the variable introduced by the noun phrase. The distinctions concern the nature of the variation involved. The first part of the paper (section 2) is devoted to the definite/indefinite divide and proposes a dynamic parameter of ‘determinacy of reference’ which attempts to capture what is common to uniqueness and familiarity approaches to definiteness. Section 3 is devoted to a typology of indefinites in terms of constraints imposed on evaluation properties of the variable they introduce. Based on properties of special indefinites discussed in the literature on Hungarian, Lillooet Salish and English, I argue that a constraint based account of special indefinites is to be preferred over ambiguity‐based approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper deals with an ambiguity of superlative noun phrases first noticed in Szabolcsi (1986) and discussed in Heim (1985), but which has not been studied in the subsequent literature. After discussing in detail the special properties of the comparative reading, we develop a semantics for both readings and show how it accounts for these properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have argued here that focused constituents in Hungarian must occur as sisters of S or VP and that the word order peculiarities of sentences containing focused constituents must be accounted for independently of the position of these constituents. Section 3 presented an account of sentences containing focused constituents in the GPSG framework. The theoretical implication of the above discussion is that Hungarian focusing does not provide evidence for the existence of 'downgrading movement'. Since no other evidence for such movement has been given in the literature so far, we can conclude that the generalization requiring the filler to dominate its gap is valid. The GPSG treatment of unbounded dependencies is superior to the GB treatment with respect to this generalization since the non-existence of downgrading movement follows from the former theory but not from the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]