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Quantification

New York: Cambridge University Press (2010)

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  1. Quantifying In from a Fregean Perspective.Seth Yalcin - 2015 - Philosophical Review 124 (2):207-253.
    As Quine observed, the following sentence has a reading which, if true, would be of special interest to the authorities: Ralph believes that someone is a spy. This is the reading where the quantifier is naturally understood as taking wide scope relative to the attitude verb and as binding a variable within the scope of the attitude verb. This essay is interested in addressing the question what the semantic analysis of this kind of reading should look like from a Fregean (...)
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  • Experimental investigations of ambiguity: the case of most.Hadas Kotek, Yasutada Sudo & Martin Hackl - 2015 - Natural Language Semantics 23 (2):119-156.
    In the study of natural language quantification, much recent attention has been devoted to the investigation of verification procedures associated with the proportional quantifier most. The aim of these studies is to go beyond the traditional characterization of the semantics of most, which is confined to explicating its truth-functional and presuppositional content as well as its combinatorial properties, as these aspects underdetermine the correct analysis of most. The present paper contributes to this effort by presenting new experimental evidence in support (...)
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  • Compositionality without word boundaries: (the) more and (the) most.Anna Szabolcsi - 2012 - Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 22.
    This paper seeks to illustrate the advantages of not treating phonological words as distinguished building blocks in compositional semantics. Following Bobaljik 2012, we derive the relative readings of amount superlatives in two steps, [[[d-many] comparative] superlative]. The existence of two comparative constructions is revealed, involving more vs. the more. Each builds a different superlative construction, explaining the conflicting intuitions about superlatives in the literature, as well as puzzles relating to the definite article in superlatives.
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  • Quantifier Words and Their Multifunctional(?) Parts.Anna Szabolcsi, James Doh Whang & Vera Zu - 2014 - Language and Linguistics 15 (1).
    Formal semantic analyses often take words to be minimal building blocks for the purposes of compositionality. But various recent theories of morphology and syntax have converged on the view that there is no demarcation line corresponding to the word level. The same conclusion has emerged from the compositional semantics of superlatives. In the spirit of extending compositionality below the word level, this paper explores how a small set of particles (Japanese KA and MO, Chinese DOU, and Hungarian VALA/VAGY, MIND, and (...)
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  • What do quantifier particles do?Anna Szabolcsi - 2015 - Linguistics and Philosophy 38 (2):159-204.
    In many languages, the same particles that form quantifier words also serve as connectives, additive and scalar particles, question markers, roots of existential verbs, and so on. Do these have a unified semantics, or do they merely bear a family resemblance? Are they aided by silent operators in their varied roles―if yes, what operators? I dub the particles “quantifier particles” and refer to them generically with capitalized versions of the Japanese morphemes. I argue that both MO and KA can be (...)
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  • Constraints on the lexicalization of logical operators.Roni Katzir & Raj Singh - 2013 - Linguistics and Philosophy 36 (1):1-29.
    We revisit a typological puzzle due to Horn (Doctoral Dissertation, UCLA, 1972) regarding the lexicalization of logical operators: in instantiations of the traditional square of opposition across categories and languages, the O corner, corresponding to ‘nand’ (= not and), ‘nevery’ (= not every), etc., is never lexicalized. We discuss Horn’s proposal, which involves the interaction of two economy conditions, one that relies on scalar implicatures and one that relies on markedness. We observe that in order to express markedness and to (...)
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  • Sentence-internal different as quantifier-internal anaphora.Adrian Brasoveanu - 2011 - Linguistics and Philosophy 34 (2):93-168.
    The paper proposes the first unified account of deictic/sentence-external and sentence-internal readings of singular different . The empirical motivation for such an account is provided by a cross-linguistic survey and an analysis of the differences in distribution and interpretation between singular different , plural different and same (singular or plural) in English. The main proposal is that distributive quantification temporarily makes available two discourse referents within its nuclear scope, the values of which are required by sentence-internal uses of singular different (...)
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  • Three kinds of ellipsis: Syntactic, semantic, pragmatic?Jason Merchant - 2010 - In François Récanati, Isidora Stojanovic & Neftalí Villanueva (eds.), Context Dependence, Perspective and Relativity. Mouton de Gruyter.
    The term ‘ellipsis’ can be used to refer to a variety of phenomena: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. In this article, I discuss the recent comprehensive survey by Stainton 2006 of these kinds of ellipsis with respect to the analysis of nonsententials and try to show that despite his trenchant criticisms and insightful proposal, some of the criticisms can be evaded and the insights incorporated into a semantic ellipsis analysis, making a ‘divide-and-conquer’ strategy to the properties of nonsententials feasible after all. (...)
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  • A (contingent) content–parthood analysis of indirect speech reports.Alex Davies - 2021 - Mind and Language 36 (4):533-553.
    This article presents a semantic analysis of indirect speech reports. The analysis aims to explain a combination of two phenomena. First, there are true utterances of sentences of the form α said that φ which are used to report an utterance u of a sentence wherein φ's content is not u's content. This implies that in uttering a single sentence, one can say several things. Second, when the complements of these reports (and indeed, these reports themselves) are placed in conjunctions, (...)
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  • The scope of alternatives: indefiniteness and islands.Simon Charlow - 2020 - Linguistics and Philosophy 43 (4):427-472.
    I argue that alternative-denoting expressions interact with their semantic context by taking scope. With an empirical focus on indefinites in English, I show how this approach improves on standard alternative-semantic architectures that use point-wise composition to subvert islands, as well as on in situ approaches to indefinites more generally. Unlike grammars based on point-wise composition, scope-based alternative management is thoroughly categorematic, doesn’t under-generate readings when multiple sources of alternatives occur on an island, and is compatible with standard treatments of binding. (...)
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  • Against ellipsis: arguments for the direct licensing of ‘noncanonical’ coordinations.Yusuke Kubota & Robert Levine - 2015 - Linguistics and Philosophy 38 (6):521-576.
    Categorial grammar is well-known for its elegant analysis of coordination enabled by the flexible notion of constituency it entertains. However, to date, no systematic study exists that examines whether this analysis has any obvious empirical advantage over alternative analyses of nonconstituent coordination available in phrase structure-based theories of syntax. This paper attempts precisely such a comparison. We compare the direct constituent coordination analysis of non-canonical coordinations in categorial grammar with an ellipsis-based analysis of the same phenomena in the recent HPSG (...)
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  • Overt Nominative Subjects in Infinitival Complements Cross-linguistically: Data, Diagnostics, and Preliminary Analyses.Anna Szabolcsi - 2009 - NYU WPL in Syntax, Spring 2009, Ed. By Irwin and Vázquez Rojas. 2009.
    The typical habitat of overt nominative subjects is in finite clauses. But infinitival complements and infinitival adjuncts are also known to have overt nominative subjects, e.g. in Italian (Rizzi 1982), European Portuguese (Raposo 1987), and Spanish (Torrego 1998, Mensching 2000). The analyses make crucial reference to the movement of Aux or Infl to Comp, and to overt or covert infinitival inflection. This working paper is concerned with a novel set of data that appear to be of a different sort, in (...)
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  • Certain Verbs Are Syntactically Explicit Quantifiers.Anna Szabolcsi - 2011 - The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 6:5.
    Quantification over individuals, times, and worlds can in principle be made explicit in the syntax of the object language, or left to the semantics and spelled out in the meta-language. The traditional view is that quantification over individuals is syntactically explicit, whereas quantification over times and worlds is not. But a growing body of literature proposes a uniform treatment. This paper examines the scopal interaction of aspectual raising verbs (begin), modals (can), and intensional raising verbs (threaten) with quantificational subjects in (...)
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  • The dynamics of negative concord.Jeremy Kuhn - 2021 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (1):153-198.
    Concord describes a natural language phenomenon in which a single logical meaning is expressed syntactically on multiple lexical items. The canonical example is negative concord, in which multiple negative expressions are used, but a single negation is interpreted. Formally similar phenomena have been observed for the redundant marking of distributivity and definiteness. Inspired by recent dynamic analyses of these latter two phenomena, we extend a similar dynamic analysis to negative concord. We propose that negative concord items introduce a discourse referent, (...)
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  • Negative polarity as scope marking.Chris Barker - 2018 - Linguistics and Philosophy 41 (5):483-510.
    What is the communicative value of negative polarity? That is, why do so many languages maintain a stock of special indefinites that occur only in a proper subset of the contexts in which ordinary indefinites can appear? Previous answers include: marking the validity of downward inferences; marking the invalidity of veridical inferences; or triggering strengthening implications. My starting point for exploring a new answer is the fact that an NPI must always take narrow scope with respect to its licensing context. (...)
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  • Noughty bits: the subatomic scope of negation.Barry Schein - 2016 - Linguistics and Philosophy 39 (6):459-540.
    Since Fodor 1970, negation has worn a Homogeneity Condition to the effect that homogeneous predicates, ) denote homogeneously—all or nothing —to characterize the meaning of – when uttered out-of-the blue, in contrast to –:The mirrors are smooth. The mirrors are not smooth. The mirrors circle the telescope’s reflector. The mirrors do not circle the telescope’s reflector. It has been a problem for philosophical logic and for the semantics of natural language that – appear to defy the Principle of Excluded Middle (...)
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  • Why indefinites can escape scope islands.Edgar Onea - 2015 - Linguistics and Philosophy 38 (3):237-267.
    One of the big questions about indefinites is why they can escape scope islands. In the recent approach of Brasoveanu and Farkas :1–55, 2011) scopal relations with syntactically dominating quantifiers are hard wired into the semantic definition of the existential quantifier, which immediately explains why the semantic scope of indefinites may exceed their syntactic scope. In this paper, I argue for the revival of an alternative approach which places the explanatory burden on the idea that indefinites are essentially referential expressions, (...)
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  • A semantic account of quantifier-induced intervention effects in Chinese why-questions.Dawei Jin - 2020 - Linguistics and Philosophy 43 (4):345-387.
    This paper revisits intervention effects in Mandarin Chinese why-questions. I present a novel empirical generalization, in which it is shown that the ability for quantifiers to induce intervention hinges upon their monotonicity and their ability to be interpreted as topics. I then propose a semantic account of intervention that correlates topicality with the monotone properties of intervening operators. A crucial assumption in this account is that why-questions in Chinese are idiosyncratic, in that the Chinese equivalent of why directly merges at (...)
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  • Some Properties of Iterated Languages.Shane Steinert-Threlkeld - 2016 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 25 (2):191-213.
    A special kind of substitution on languages called iteration is presented and studied. These languages arise in the application of semantic automata to iterations of generalized quantifiers. We show that each of the star-free, regular, and deterministic context-free languages are closed under iteration and that it is decidable whether a given regular or determinstic context-free language is an iteration of two such languages. This result can be read as saying that the van Benthem/Keenan ‘Frege Boundary’ is decidable for large subclasses (...)
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  • Natural language quantification is not polysemous.John Collins - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-26.
    The paper argues that natural language quantification, as expressed by determiner phrases, is not polysemous. The foil for this claim is Hofweber, who contends that natural language quantification is polysemous between a domain reading and an inferential reading. The thesis is intended to support a more general division between externalist and internalist positions in semantics. The paper, to the contrary, argues that there is no linguistic evidence for polysemous quantification, and Hofweber’s proposal proves to be non-compositional. Further, an approach at (...)
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  • The mental representation of universal quantifiers.Tyler Knowlton, Paul Pietroski, Justin Halberda & Jeffrey Lidz - 2022 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (4):911-941.
    A sentence like every circle is blue might be understood in terms of individuals and their properties or in terms of a relation between groups. Relatedly, theorists can specify the contents of universally quantified sentences in first-order or second-order terms. We offer new evidence that this logical first-order vs. second-order distinction corresponds to a psychologically robust individual vs. group distinction that has behavioral repercussions. Participants were shown displays of dots and asked to evaluate sentences with each, every, or all combined (...)
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  • Licensing of PPI indefinites: Movement or pseudoscope?Vincent Homer & Rajesh Bhatt - 2019 - Natural Language Semantics 27 (4):279-321.
    Positive Polarity indefinites, such as some in English, are licensed in simplex negative sentences as long as they take wide scope over negation. When it surfaces under a clausemate negation, some can in principle take wide scope either by movement or by some semantic mechanism; e.g., it can take pseudoscope if it is interpreted as a choice function variable. Therefore, there is some uncertainty regarding the way in which PPI indefinites get licensed: can pseudoscope suffice? In this article we show, (...)
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  • Iterating semantic automata.Shane Steinert-Threlkeld & I. I. I. Thomas F. Icard - 2013 - Linguistics and Philosophy 36 (2):151-173.
    The semantic automata framework, developed originally in the 1980s, provides computational interpretations of generalized quantifiers. While recent experimental results have associated structural features of these automata with neuroanatomical demands in processing sentences with quantifiers, the theoretical framework has remained largely unexplored. In this paper, after presenting some classic results on semantic automata in a modern style, we present the first application of semantic automata to polyadic quantification, exhibiting automata for iterated quantifiers. We also discuss the role of semantic automata in (...)
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  • Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 9.Emar Maier, Corien Bary & Janneke Huitink (eds.) - 2005 - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics.
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  • A choice function approach to null arguments.Takeo Kurafuji - 2019 - Linguistics and Philosophy 42 (1):3-44.
    Recently, null arguments have been treated as an ellipsis phenomenon, derived by PF-deletion or LF-copy under some kind of identity requirements. Focusing on Japanese null arguments, this paper argues that they are base-generated empty nominals which are interpreted via choice functions. The functional approach is supported by cases involving intermediate scope readings, missing antecedents, and implicational bridging. A less standard case of Japanese null arguments anteceded by QPs is also discussed and shown to be amenable to the choice functional analysis (...)
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  • Semantics with Dependent Types for Indefinites.Justyna Grudzińska - 2016 - Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 46 (1):173-192.
    The paper proposes a new semantics with dependent types for indefinites, encompassing both the data related to their exceptional scopal behavior and the data related to their anaphoric properties. The proposal builds on the formal system combining generalized quantifiers with dependent types in [Grudzińska & Zawadowski 2014] and [Grudzińska & Zawadowski 2016].
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  • Scopability and sluicing.Chris Barker - 2013 - Linguistics and Philosophy 36 (3):187-223.
    This paper analyzes sluicing as anaphora to an anti-constituent (a continuation), that is, to the semantic remnant of a clause from which a subconstituent has been removed. For instance, in Mary said that [John saw someone yesterday], but she didn’t say who, the antecedent clause is John saw someone yesterday, the subconstituent targeted for removal is someone, and the ellipsis site following who is anaphoric to the scope remnant John saw ___ yesterday. I provide a compositional syntax and semantics on (...)
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  • Overt distributivity in algebraic event semantics.Lucas Champollion - 2016 - Semantics and Pragmatics 9 (16):1-65.
    This is the second in a pair of papers that aim to provide a comprehensive analysis of the semantic phenomenon of distributivity in natural language. This paper describes and explains observable cross-linguistic differences in overt distributive items in the framework of Neo-Davidsonian algebraic event semantics. The previous paper, Champollion 2016, postulated two covert distributivity operators, D and Part, in the grammar, even though the semantic effects of D can be subsumed under the workings of Part. This paper motivates the split (...)
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  • Hidden in plain sight: Overt subjects in infinitival control and raising complements, 2007-2009.Anna Szabolcsi - manuscript
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