Signalling games, sociolinguistic variation and the construction of style Abstract This paper develops a formal model of the subtle meaning differences that exist between grammatical alternatives in socially conditioned variation (called variants) and how these variants can be used by speakers as resources for constructing personal linguistic styles. More specifically, this paper introduces a new formal system, called social meaning games (SMGs), which allows for the unification of variationist sociolinguistics and game-theoretic pragmatics, two fields that have had very little interaction in the past. Although remarks have been made concerning the possible usefulness of game-theoretic tools in the analysis of certain kinds of socially conditioned linguistic phenomena (Goffman in Encounters: Two studies in the sociology of interaction, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1961; in Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face interaction, Aldine, Oxford, 1967; in Strategic interaction, vol 1, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1970; Bourdieu in Soc Sci Inf 16(6):645–668, 1977; Dror et al. in Lang Linguist Compass 7(11):561–579, 2013; in Lang Linguist Compass 8(6):230–242, 2014; Clark in Meaningful games: Exploring language with game theory, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014, among others), a general framework uniting game-theoretic pragmatics and quantitative sociolinguistics has yet to be developed. This paper constructs such a framework through giving a formalization of the Third Wave approach to the meaning of variation (see Eckert in Ann Rev Anthropol 41:87–100, 2012, for an overview) using signalling games (Lewis in Convention, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1969) and a probabilistic approach to speaker/listener beliefs of the kind commonly used in the Bayesian game-theoretic pragmatics framework (see Goodman and Lassiter in Probabilistic semantics and pragmatics: Uncertainty in language and thought. Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, Wiley, Hoboken, 2014; Franke and Jäger in Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 35(1):3–44, 2016, for recent overviews).

Attitudes and ascriptions in Stalnaker models Abstract What role, if any, should centered possible worlds play in characterizing the attitudes? Lewis (Philos Rev 88(4):513–543, 1979) argued (in effect) that, in order to account for the phenomena of self-location (Perry in Philos Rev 86(4):474–497, 1977, Noûs 13(1):3–21, 1979), the contents of the attitudes should be taken to be centered propositions (i.e. sets of centered worlds). Stalnaker (Our knowledge of the internal world, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008, in: Brown, Cappelen (eds) Assertion: New philosophical essays, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011, Context, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014), however, has argued that while centered worlds are needed to characterize e.g. belief states, the contents of such states should be understood as ordinary, uncentered propositions (cf. Hintikka in Knowledge and belief, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1962). But Stalnaker does not, as is common, provide a semantics of attitude ascriptions based on the models he develops of the attitudinal states themselves. This paper begins to explore the prospects for doing so. It argues that a simple but well-motivated approach does not yield the principles of knowledge and belief Stalnaker endorses; and that a modification which does brings with it worries of its own surrounding communication and learnability. A technical appendix contains novel and pertinent results in doxastic/epistemic logic.

Manifest validity and beyond: an inquiry into the nature of coordination and the identity of guises and propositional-attitude states Abstract This manuscript focuses on a problem for Millian Russellianism raised by Fine (Semantic relationism, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007: 82): “[Assuming] that we are in possession of the information that a Fs and the information that a Gs, it appears that we are sometimes justified in putting this information ‘together’ and inferring that a both Fs and Gs. But how?” It will be my goal to determine a Millian-Russellian solution to this problem. I will first examine Nathan Salmon’s (“Recurrence”, Philos Stud 159:407–441, 2012) Millian-Russellian solution, which appeals to a non-semantic and subjective notion of coordination defined in terms of guises. I will object that in order to convincingly solve a specific version of Fine’s problem (the “Bruce” case), identity conditions for guises must be provided. On the other hand, the most plausible way to individuate guises is by means of the equivalence classes (if any) of coordination itself. But, if so, the guise-based strategy to solve Fine’s problem risks being circular; in addition, there are serious doubts that coordination is transitive. An alternative Millian-Russellian solution to Fine’s problem will then be explored, which gives up guises and employs, instead, a non-semantic and subjective relation of coordination not defined in terms of guises, along with occurrences of Russellian propositions of a special sort, for which identity conditions will be provided and via which token attitude states intuitively more fine-grained than guises will be individuated.

Occasion-sensitive semantics for objective predicates Abstract In this paper I propose a partition semantics (Groenendijk and Stokhof in Studies on the semantics of questions and the pragmatics of answers, Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam, 1984) for sentences containing objective predicates that takes into account the phenomenon of occasion-sensitivity associated with so-called Travis cases (Travis in Occasion-sensitivity: Selected essays, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008). The key idea is that the set of worlds in which a sentence is true has a more complex structure as a result of different ways in which it is made true. Different ways may have different capacities to support the attainment of a contextually salient domain goal. I suggest that goal-conduciveness decides whether some utterance of a sentence is accepted as true on a particular occasion at a given world. The utterance will not be accepted as true at a world which belongs to a truth-maker which is less conducive to a contextually salient goal than other truth-makers. Finally, the proposed occasion-sensitive semantics is applied to some cases of disagreement and cancellability.

Reference to ad hoc kinds Abstract Although there is no consensus about what kinds are, there is a common understanding that kinds can be regarded as collections of objects that share certain properties. What these properties exactly are is often left unspecified. This paper explores the semantics of ad hoc kind-referring terms, where the determination of the relevant set of shared properties does not rely on “natural” properties or world knowledge. Rather, information provided by a nominal modifier, typically a relative clause, is used to impute the required regular behavior on the kind-referring NP. Building on Carlson’s (Reference to kinds in English, Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1977b) disjointness condition, I show that we can not only account for the ubiquity of these expressions, but we can also extend the analysis to other constructions that have traditionally not been taken to be kind referring, such as Amount and Degree Relative constructions.

Pronominal typology and the de se/de re distinction Abstract This paper investigates how regular pronominal typology interfaces with de se and de re interpretations, and highlights a correlation between strong pronouns (descriptively speaking) and de re interpretations, and weak pronouns and de se interpretations. In order to illustrate this correlation, I contrast different pronominal forms within a single language, null versus overt pronouns in Kutchi Gujarati, and clitic versus full pronouns in Austrian Bavarian. I argue that the data presented here provide cross-linguistic comparative support for the idea of a dedicated de se LF as argued for by Percus and Sauerland.

A plea for inexact truthmaking Abstract Kit Fine (2017) distinguishes between inexact and exact truthmaking. He argues that the former can be defined from the latter, but not vice versa, and so concludes that truthmaker semanticists should treat the exact variety of truthmaking as primitive. I argue that this gets things backwards. We can define exact truthmaking in terms of inexact truthmaking and we can’t define inexact truthmaking in terms of exact truthmaking. I conclude that it’s inexact truthmaking, rather than exact truthmaking, that truthmaker semanticists should treat as the primitive semantic relation.

We’ve discovered that projection across conjunction is asymmetric (and it is!) Abstract Is the mechanism behind presupposition projection and filtering fundamentally asymmetric or symmetric? This is a foundational question for the theory of presupposition which has been at the centre of attention in recent literature (Schlenker in Theor Linguist 38(3):287–316, 2008b. https://doi.org/10.1515/THLI.2008.021, Semant Pragmat 2(3):1–78, 2009. https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.2.3; Rothschild in Semant Pragmat 4(3):1–43, 2011/2015. https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.4.3 a.o.). It also bears on broader issues concerning the source of asymmetries observed in natural language: are these simply rooted in superficial asymmetries of language use (language use happens in time, which we experience as fundamentally asymmetric); or are they, at least in part, directly encoded in linguistic knowledge and representations? In this paper we aim to make progress on these questions by exploring presupposition projection across conjunction, which has traditionally been taken as a central piece of evidence that presupposition filtering is asymmetric in general. As a number of authors have recently pointed out, however, the evidence which has typically been used to support this conclusion is muddied by independent issues concerning redundancy; additional concerns have to do with the possibility of local accommodation. We report on a series of experiments, building on previous work by Chemla and Schlenker (Nat Lang Semant 20(2):177–226, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-012-9080-7) and Schwarz (in: Schwarz (ed) Experimental perspectives on presuppositions, Springer, Cham, 2015), using inference and acceptability tasks, which aim to control for both of these potential confounds. In our results, we find strong evidence for left-to-right filtering across conjunctions, but no evidence for right-to-left filtering—even when right-to-left filtering would, if available, rescue an otherwise unacceptable sentence. These results suggest that presupposition filtering across conjunction is asymmetric, contra suggestions in the recent literature (Schlenker in Theor Linguist 34(3):157–212, 2008a. https://doi.org/10.1515/THLI.2008.013, 2009 a.o.), and pave the way for the investigation of further questions about the nature of this asymmetry and presupposition projection more generally. Our results also have broader implications for the study of presupposition: we find important differences in the verdicts of acceptability versus inference tasks in testing for projected content, which has both methodological ramifications for the question of how to distinguish presupposed content, and theoretical repercussions for understanding the nature of projection and presuppositions more generally.

The scope of alternatives: indefiniteness and islands Abstract 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. Unlike all in situ (pseudo-scope) treatments of indefinites, relying on a true scope mechanism prevents over-generation when an operator binds into an indefinite. My account relies only on function application, some mechanism for scope-taking, and two freely-applying type-shifters: the first is Karttunen’s (Linguist Philos 1(1):3–44, 1977. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00351935) proto-question operator, aka Partee’s (in: Groenendijk, de Jongh, Stokhof (eds) Studies in discourse representation theory and the theory of generalized quantifiers, Foris, Dordrecht, 1986) IDENT, and the second can be factored out of extant approaches to the semantics of questions in the tradition of Karttunen (1977). These type-shifters form a decomposition of LIFT, the familiar function mapping values into scope-takers. Exceptional scope of alternative-generating expressions arises via (snowballing) scopal pied-piping: indefinites take scope over their island, which then itself takes scope.

Almost at-a-distance Abstract We claim that the meaning of the adverbial almost contains both a scalar proximity measure and a modal that allows it to work sometimes when proximity fails, what we call the at-a-distance reading. Essentially, almost can hold if the proposition follows from the normal uninterrupted outcomes of adding a small enough number of premises to a selection of relevant facts. Almost at-a-distance is blocked when the temporal properties of the topic time and Davidsonian event prevent normal outcomes from coming true when they need to. This approach to almost differs from the two general approaches that have emerged in the literature, by replacing the negative polar condition (not p) with a positive antecedent condition that entails not p while avoiding the numerous well-documented complications of employing a polar condition. Since this approach to almost involves a circumstantial base with a non-interrupting ordering source, almost behaves in certain ways like the progressive, and shows contextual variability of the same kinds that we see with premise sets.