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This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse,
through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate
structures. The theoretical breadth of the volume makes it the most
complete account of extraction from coordinate structures to date:
at first glance, it appears to be a syntactic matter, but the
survey raises theoretical and empirical questions not just for
syntax, but also across semantics, pragmatics, and discourse
structure. Rather than promoting a single analysis, Daniel
Altshuler and Robert Truswell outline reasonable hypotheses that
allow theoretical conclusions to be deducted from empirical facts.
The theoretical conclusions show that coordinate structures have
the potential to discriminate between current syntactic theories,
and to inform work on the interfaces between syntax, semantics,
pragmatics, and discourse. In many cases, however, the necessary
empirical work has not yet been carried out, and too much of the
literature revolves around the same handful of primarily English
examples. The volume offers a starting point for further research
on extraction from coordinate structures, particularly in
understudied languages, and provides a guide to how to tease out
the theoretical implications of empirical findings.
This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse,
through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate
structures. The theoretical breadth of the volume makes it the most
complete account of extraction from coordinate structures to date:
at first glance, it appears to be a syntactic matter, but the
survey raises theoretical and empirical questions not just for
syntax, but also across semantics, pragmatics, and discourse
structure. Rather than promoting a single analysis, Daniel
Altshuler and Robert Truswell outline reasonable hypotheses that
allow theoretical conclusions to be deducted from empirical facts.
The theoretical conclusions show that coordinate structures have
the potential to discriminate between current syntactic theories,
and to inform work on the interfaces between syntax, semantics,
pragmatics, and discourse. In many cases, however, the necessary
empirical work has not yet been carried out, and too much of the
literature revolves around the same handful of primarily English
examples. The volume offers a starting point for further research
on extraction from coordinate structures, particularly in
understudied languages, and provides a guide to how to tease out
the theoretical implications of empirical findings.
Linguistics and philosophy, while being two closely-related fields,
are often approached with very different methodologies and
frameworks. Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars,
this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between
the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both
fields, from both a historical and a current perspective. It
identifies a number of key phenomena at the cutting edge of
research within both fields, such as reporting and ascribing,
describing and referring, narrating and structuring, locating in
time and space, typologizing and ontologizing, determining and
questioning, arguing and rejecting, and implying and
(pre-)supposing. Each chapter takes on a phenomena and explores it
through a set of questions which are posed and answered at the
outset of each chapter. An accessible and engaging resource, it is
essential reading for researchers and students in both disciplines,
and will empower exciting and illuminating conversations for years
to come.
An introductory text in linguistic semantics, uniquely balancing
empirical coverage and formalism with development of intuition and
methodology. This introductory textbook in linguistic semantics for
undergraduates features a unique balance between empirical coverage
and formalism on the one hand and development of intuition and
methodology on the other. It will equip students to form intuitions
about a set of data, explain how well an analysis of the data
accords with their intuitions, and extend the analysis or seek an
alternative. No prior knowledge of linguistics is required. After
mastering the material, students will be able to tackle some of the
most difficult questions in the field even if they have never taken
a linguistics course before. After introducing such concepts as
truth conditions and compositionality, the book presents a basic
symbolic logic with negation, conjunction, and generalized
quantifiers, to serve as the basis for translation throughout the
book. It then develops a detailed compositional semantics, covering
quantification (scope and binding), adverbial modification,
relative clauses, event semantics, tense and aspect, as well as
pragmatic phenomena, notably deictic pronouns and narrative
progression. A Course in Semantics offers a large and diverse set
of exercises, interspersed throughout the text; those labeled
"Important practice and looking ahead" prepare students for
material to come; those labeled "Thinking about " invite students
to think beyond the content of the book.
This monograph investigates the temporal interpretation of
narrative discourse in two parts. The theme of the first part is
narrative progression. It begins with a case study of the adverb
'now' and its interaction with the meaning of tense. The case study
motivates an ontological distinction between events, states and
times and proposes that 'now' seeks a prominent state that holds
throughout the time described by the tense. Building on prior
research, prominence is shown to be influenced by principles of
discourse coherence and two coherence principles, NARRATION and
RESULT, are given a formally explicit characterization. The key
innovation is a new method for testing the definitional adequacy of
NARRATION and RESULT, namely by an abductive argument. This
contribution opens a new way of thinking about how eventive and
stative descriptions contribute to the perceived narrative
progression in a discourse. The theme of the second part of the
monograph is the semantics and pragmatics of tense. A key
innovation is that the present and past tenses are treated as
scalar alternatives, a view that is motivated by adopting a
particular hypothesis concerning stative predication. The proposed
analysis accounts for tense in both matrix clauses and in
complements of propositional attitudes, where the notorious double
access reading arises. This reading is explored as part of a corpus
study that provides a glimpse of how tense semantics interacts with
Gricean principles and at-issueness. Several cross-linguistic
predictions of the analysis are considered, including their
consequences for the Sequence of Tense phenomenon and the Upper
Limit Constraint. Finally, a hypothesis is provided about how tense
meanings compose with temporal adverbs and verb phrases. Two
influential analysis of viewpoint aspect are then compared in light
of the hypothesis. The monograph is directed at graduate students
and researchers in semantics, pragmatics and philosophy of
language. The analysis of narrative discourse that is developed in
the monograph synthesizes and builds on prior collaborative
research with Corien Bary, Valentine Hacquard, Thomas Roberts,
Roger Schwarzschild, Una Stojnic, Karoly Varasdi and Aaron White.
Daniel Altshuler is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the
School of Cognitive Science, Hampshire College and an Adjunct
Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst.
This volume is a tribute to Roger Schwarzschild's immense
contributions in the formal semantics of nouns, focus, degrees and
space, and tense and aspect. Collectively, the papers in the volume
reveal parallels across ontological domains, in particular in the
context of elements with internal structure, like plural sets,
alternative sets, degree intervals, temporal intervals, and
vectors. This research suggests that the structure of an entity
could inform the semantic behavior of that entity just as much (if
not more) than its semantic type or lexical category. And because
these structures dictate the formation of semantic alternatives, it
can help inform focus semantics and scalar implicature as well. Old
questions on plurals, focus and degree expressions get new answers
in this collection of papers in honor of Roger Schwarzchild. Roger
Schwarzschild is one of the leading scholars in semantics, and the
editors have been highly successful in requesting contributions by
his teachers, peers and former students. Some papers have
circulated in draft form for many years, and find their final home
in this edited volume, which well reflects the state of the art in
the field. Prof. dr. Henriette de Swart, Utrecht University, The
Netherlands
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