Journal of Semantics - current issue

Decisions, Dynamics and the Japanese Particle yo

Davis, C. — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:30:03 PST

I provide an account of the Japanese sentence-final particle yo within a dynamic semantics framework. I argue that yo is used with one of two intonational morphemes, corresponding to sentence-final rising or falling tunes. These intonational morphemes modify a sentence's illocutionary force head, adding an addressee-directed update semantics to the utterance. The different intonational contours specify whether this update is monotonic or non-monotonic. The use of yo is then argued to contribute a pragmatic presupposition to the utterance saying that the post-update discourse context is one in which the addressee's contextual decision problem is resolved. This proposal is shown to account for a range of constraints on the felicitous use of yo, including its restriction to addressee-new and addressee-relevant information in assertions, as well as its behaviour in imperatives and interrogatives.

Branching Quantification v. Two-way Quantification

Gierasimczuk, N., Szymanik, J. — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:30:03 PST

We discuss the thesis formulated by Hintikka (1973) that certain natural language sentences require non-linear quantification to express their meaning. We investigate sentences with combinations of quantifiers similar to Hintikka's examples and propose a novel alternative reading expressible by linear formulae. This interpretation is based on linguistic and logical observations. We report on our experiments showing that people tend to interpret sentences similar to Hintikka sentence in a way consistent with our interpretation.

A Formal Semantic Analysis of Gesture

Lascarides, A., Stone, M. — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:30:03 PST

The gestures that speakers use in tandem with speech include not only conventionalized actions with identifiable meanings (so-called narrow gloss gestures or emblems) but also productive iconic and deictic gestures whose form and meanings seem largely improvised in context. In this paper, we bridge the descriptive tradition with formal models of reference and discourse structure so as to articulate an approach to the interpretation of these productive gestures. Our model captures gestures' partial and incomplete meanings as derived from form and accounts for the more specific interpretations they derive in context. Our work emphasizes the commonality of the pragmatic mechanisms for interpreting both language and gesture, and the place of formal methods in discovering the principles and knowledge that those mechanisms rely on.