In this article, I show that there are two kinds of numeral modifiers: (Class A) those that express the comparison of a certain cardinality with the value expressed by the numeral and (Class B) those ...that express a bound on a degree property. The goal is, first of all, to provide empirical evidence for this claim and second to account for these data within a framework that treats modified numerals as degree quantifiers. doi:10.3765/sp.3.3 BibTeX info
We discuss the semantics of prenominal “zero”, as in “I have zero new emails in my inbox”. We show that “zero” is not a quantifier like “no” and that giving “zero” a regular numeral semantics is ...possible and desirable. We formulate such an analysis and its consequences. We show that the existence of a zero numeral has profound consequences for linguistic semantics. We conclude that the fact that languages allow ascription of zero quantity to an entity provides evidence that linguistic semantics has access to what at first sight may seem like an ontological oddity: an entity with zero quantity. In other words, we will show that studying “zero” can inform us about the underlying semantic ontology of natural language.
Intensifiers (e.g. horribly in horribly warm) are usually deadjectival adverbs. I show that the lexical content of the adjectival base, and in particular its evaluative meaning, is directly relevant ...for the degree intensifying function of these adverbs. In particular, I highlight two generalisations that have remained unaccounted for so far. First, evaluative adjectives with a negative evaluative meaning tend to turn into deadjectival intensifiers expressing high degree, while adjectives with a positive meaning make intensifiers of medium degree. Second, negative modal adjectives can form deadjectival intensifiers, but positive ones cannot. I will argue that a relatively simple intersective semantics for evaluative and modal adverbs accounts for these observations, but that we can only show this if we supplement that semantic analysis with a probabilistic pragmatic component.
Numeral semantics Bylinina, Lisa; Nouwen, Rick
Language and linguistics compass,
August 2020, 2020-08-00, Letnik:
14, Številka:
8
Journal Article
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Words for numbers, numerals, are a special lexical class, halfway between natural and mathematical language. One would expect them to have a relatively straightforward semantics. However, during the ...last several decades, numerals proved to be a rich source of debate in linguistics, especially in semantics and pragmatics. The reason is that the study of numerals requires taking into account core issues such as plurality, quantification, implicature/exhaustivity, degree, modality, imprecision and cross‐linguistic variation. In this article, we provide a thorough introduction to the issues connected to numeral semantics and pragmatics. We gradually develop analyses of meanings of numerals in natural language using a multitude of analytical tools. We evaluate the competing proposals in terms of empirical coverage and predictions.
This squib discusses the semantics of ability modals in relation to the law of distribution over disjunction and free choice effects. Most current analyses of free choice need distribution over ...disjunction as a theorem for modals in order to correctly derive free choice inferences. Famously, however, ability modals have been argued to fail to meet distribution over disjunction (Kenny 1976). The squib explores to what extent free choice abilities are dependent on the distribution property.
On the naive account of scalar modifiers like more than and at least, At least three girls snored is synonymous with More than two girls snored, and both sentences mean that the number of snoring ...girls exceeded two (the same, mutatis mutandis, for sentences with at most and less/fewer than). We show that this is false and propose an alternative theory, according to which superlative modifiers (at least/most) are quite different from comparative ones (more/less/fewer than). Whereas the naive theory is basically right about comparative modifiers, it is wrong about superlative modifiers, which we claim have a modal meaning: an utterance of At least three girls snored conveys two things: first, that it is certain that there was a group of three snoring girls, and second, that more than four girls may have snored. We argue that this analysis explains various facts that are problematic for the naive view, which have to do with specificity, distributional differences between superlative and comparative modifiers, differential patterns of inference licensed by these expressions, and the way they interact with various operators, like modals and negation.
The general view in syntactic literature is that binding constraints can make antecedents syntactically inaccessible. However, several studies showed that antecedents which are ruled out by syntactic ...binding constraints still influence online processing of anaphora in some stages, suggesting that a cue-based retrieval mechanism plays a role during anaphora resolution. As in the syntactic literature, in semantic accounts like Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), formal constraints are formulated in terms of accessibility of the antecedent. We explore the discourse inaccessibility postulated in DRT by looking at its role in pronoun resolution of inter-sentential anaphoric relations in four off-line and two eye-tracking experiments. The results of the eye-tracking experiments suggest that accessibility has an effect on pronoun resolution from early on. The study quantifies evidence of inaccessible antecedents affecting pronoun resolution and shows that almost all evidence points to the conclusion that discourse-inaccessible antecedents are ruled out for pronoun resolution in processing. The only potential counter-example to this claim is also detected, but remains only as anecdotal evidence even after combining data from both eye-tracking studies. The findings in the study show that accessibility plays a significant role in the processing of pronoun resolution in a way which is potentially challenging for the cue-based retrieval mechanism. The paper argues that discourse accessibility can help expand the theories of retrieval beyond the syntactic and sentence-level domain and provides a window into the study of interference in discourse.
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