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“Won’t you?” reverse-polarity question tags in American English as a window into the semantics-pragmatics interface
We model the conventional meaning of utterances that combine two distinct clause types: a (positive) declarative or imperative (in rare cases,...
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Pointing to communicate: the discourse function and semantics of rich demonstration
Deictic (or pointing) gestures are traditionally known to have a simple function: to supply something as the referent of a demonstrative linguistic...
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A semantics-aware approach for multilingual natural language inference
This paper introduces a semantics-aware approach to natural language inference which allows neural network models to perform better on natural...
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Update rules and semantic universals
We discuss a well-known puzzle about the lexicalization of logical operators in natural language, in particular connectives and quantifiers. Of the...
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A semantics of face emoji in discourse
This paper presents an analysis of face emoji (disc-shaped pictograms with stylized facial expressions) that accompany written text. We propose that...
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You Hoboken! Semantics of an expressive label maker
‘You bastard’ is insulting because ‘bastard’ is an expletive, but what’s wrong with ‘You Hoboken’ or ‘You big wet noodle’? This paper explores the...
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The Semantics and Pragmatics of Names and Naming
Since at least the time of Apollonius Dyscolus (The syntax of Apollonius Dyscolus, Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1981), On Syntax I: 78 it has been...
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Being pragmatic about biscuits
In this paper we argue for a unified semantics for hypothetical conditionals, hc s, e.g. if it rains, we’ll cancel the picnic , and biscuit...
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Presuppositions in Indirect Reports: A Window into the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface
The present work explores the interpretation of indirect reports such as “John said that his brother is a genius” in relation to the propositional...
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No tense: temporality in the grammar of Paraguayan Guarani
Paraguayan Guarani does not overtly mark tense in its inflectional system. Prior accounts of languages without obligatory morphological tense have...
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Deriving presupposition projection in coordinations of polar questions: a reply to Enguehard 2021
This paper is a response to Enguehard (Natural Language Semantics 29(4):527–578,
2021 ), who observes that presuppositions project in the same way... -
Scalar implicatures with discourse referents: a case study on plurality inferences
This paper explores the idea that scalar implicatures are computed with respect to discourse referents . Given the general consensus that a proper...
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Pictorial free perception
Pictorial free perception reports are sequences in comics or film of one unit that depicts an agent who is looking, and a following unit that depicts...
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A Compositional Pluralist Semantics for Extensional and Attitude Verbs
We propose a new account of linguistic contentLinguistic content that reconciles content-pluralismContent pluralism / pluralism about linguistic...
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The indexical character of epistemic modality
We assume a central thesis about modal auxiliaries due to Angelika Kratzer, the modal base presupposition: natural language expressions that contain...
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Language games and their types
One of the success stories of formal semantics is explicating responsive moves like answers to questions. There is, however, a significant lacune...
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Direct evidentiality and discourse in Southern Aymara
This paper discusses the discourse contrasts that arise in connection to direct evidentiality in Southern Aymara (henceforth, Aymara), an...
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Ignorance and concession with superlative modifiers: a cross-linguistic perspective
Superlative modifiers (SMs) are known to demonstrate an ambiguity between an epistemic reading (EPI) conveying speaker ignorance and a concessive...
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Counterfactuals, hyperintensionality and Hurford disjunctions
This paper investigates propositional hyperintensionality in counterfactuals. It starts with a scenario describing two children playing on a seesaw...
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Witnesses
The meaning of definite descriptions is a central topic in philosophy and linguistics. Indefinites have been relatively neglected by philosophers,...
