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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]

This article provides an account of the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles in responses, starting with yes and no in English, and then extending the coverage to their crosslinguistic kin. Polarity particles are used in responses to both declarative and interrogative sentences, and thus provide a window onto the semantics and discourse effects of such sentences. We argue that understanding the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles requires a characterization of declaratives and interrogatives that captures a series of challenging similarities and differences across these two sentence types. To meet this challenge we combine and extend insights from inquisitive semantics, dynamic semantics, and commitment-based models of discourse. We then provide a full account of the English data that leads to a typology of polarity particles and a series of crosslinguistic predictions. These predictions are checked against data from Romanian, Hungarian, French, and German, languages that contrast with English in that they have ternary polarity particle systems, and contrast with one another in further subtle ways.* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We discuss two groups of languages where article use contrasts in generic plural sentences but is otherwise essentially similar. The languages in the first group (English and Dutch) use bare plurals in the expression of kind reference (‘Dinosaurs are extinct’) and in generic generalizations (‘Dogs are intelligent’). The languages in the second group (French, Italian, Hungarian) use definite plurals in both cases (‘Les dinosaures ont disparu’, ‘Les chiens sont intelligents’ in French). We account for this contrast in terms of a competition between definite and indefinite forms formalized in terms of two O(ptimality) T(heoretic) syntactic constraints. The two language groups are given a uniform semantics. The contrast emerges in the interaction between the semantics of generic plural sentences and the relative weight assigned to the two constraints. Evidence in favor of the analysis comes from the otherwise unexpected neutralization of the contrast in pseudo-generics and anaphoric generics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]