Potts (2005) and many subsequent works have argued that the semantic content of appositive (non-restrictive) relative clauses, e.g., the underlined material in John, who nearly killed a woman with his car, visited her in the hospital, must be in some way separate from the content of the rest of the sentence, i.e., from at-issue content. At the same time, there is mounting evidence from various anaphoric processes that the two kinds of content must be integrated into a single, incrementally evolving semantic representation. The challenge is how to reconcile this informational separation with these pervasive anaphoric connections. We propose a dynamic semantic account that accomplishes this by taking appositive and at-issue content to involve two different kinds of updates to the Context Set (CS). Treating the context set as a distinguished propositional variable, p cs , we argue that appositives directly impose their content on the CS by eliminating possible values assigned to p cs. In contrast, we treat at-issue assertions as introducing a new propositional dref and proposing that p cs be updated with its content, subject to addressee's response. In addition to capturing the behavior of appositives in discourse, we show that the account can be extended to capture the projection of appositive content past various sentential operators.

Our goal is to provide systematic evidence from anaphora, presupposition and ellipsis that appositive meaning and at-issue meaning, e.g. as contributed by the relative appositive and the main clause in John, who nearly killed a woman with his car, visited HER in the hospital, have to be integrated into a single, incrementally evolving semantic representation. While previous literature has provided partial arguments to this effect (Nouwen 2007 for anaphora, Amaral et al 2007 and Potts 2009 for both anaphora and presupposition), the systematic nature of this evidence -in particular, the evidence from ellipsis we will introduce -has been previously unnoticed. We propose an analysis of these phenomena that integrates the dynamic account of anaphora and ellipsis as discourse reference to individuals and properties (respectively) with an account of at-issue meaning as a proposed update of the input Context Set (CS) that is to be negotiated and of appositive meaning as an actual / imposed update of the CS that is not up for negotiation.

One of the central questions in the study of evidentials cross-linguistically is to what extent (and in what ways) evidentials differ across languages and across evidence types. This paper examines one such instance of variation: the ability for a single speaker to deny the scope of a reportative evidential, an instance of what we dub 'Reportative Exceptionality' (RE). Empirically, we show that RE is widely attested across a diverse range of reportatives. Theoretically, we propose a pragmatic account treating RE as an instance of pragmatically-induced perspective shift. Having done so, we propose a semantics for illocutionary evidentials on which reportatives are given a treatment uniform to other evidence types.

A’ingae (also known as Cofán or Kofán) is a language isolate spoken by approximately 1,500 people in 13 communities in Ecuador and Colombia (Figure 1). Traditionally, the A’i (speakers of A’ingae) lived in the Andean foothills, but over the past century they have migrated down the Aguarico and San Miguel rivers, founding communities at Dureno and Zábalo, where the language is most widely spoken. This migration was spurred in large part by extensive oil contamination; an issue of great concern to the Foundation for the Survival of the Cofán People (FSC) and the community at large (Cepek 2012: 103; 2018: 1–15). Another concern in the Cofán community is the decreasing use of A’ingae, which, according to Ethnologue (Simons & Fennig 2017), is ‘endangered’ in Ecuador and ‘severely endangered’ in Colombia as a growing emphasis on Spanish disincentivizes the younger generation from learning A’ingae.

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Our goal is to provide systematic evidence from anaphora, presupposition and ellipsis that appositive meaning and at-issue meaning, e.g. as contributed by the relative appositive and the main clause in John, who nearly killed a woman with his car, visited HER in the hospital, have to be integrated into a single, incrementally evolving semantic representation. While previous literature has provided partial arguments to this effect (Nouwen 2007 for anaphora, Amaral et al 2007 and Potts 2009 for both anaphora and presupposition), the systematic nature of this evidence – in particular, the evidence from ellipsis we will introduce – has been previously unnoticed. We propose an analysis of these phenomena that integrates the dynamic account of anaphora and ellipsis as discourse reference to individuals and properties (respectively) with an account of at-issue meaning as a proposed update of the input Context Set (CS) that is to be negotiated and of appositive meaning as an actual / imposed update of the CS that is not up for negotiation.

Since Merchant 2001, it has been widely agreed that the licensing condition on sluicing is at least partially semantic in nature. This article argues that the semantics this condition operates on must include not only truth conditions, but also the issues introduced by existential quantification and disjunction. In the account presented here, the special role these elements play in antecedents for sluicing derives from the deep semantic connections between these elements and questions. In addition to accounting for well-known facts about sluicing in a natural way, this article also analyzes novel facts such as the interaction of sluicing with appositives and double negation, and handles recalcitrant cases such as disjunctive antecedents. The account can readily be extended to so-called ‘sprouting’ cases where the crucial material in the antecedent is an implicit argument or is missing altogether.

English attitude reports like "x thinks that p" can be used in two different types of contexts: ones where the Question Under Discussion (QUD) concerns whether or not p is true and ones where the QUD concerns x's mental state itself. Yucatec Maya (YM) has two different morphosyntactic forms differing superficially in the presence or absence of the morpheme -e', which serves as a topic marker elsewhere in the language. This paper argues that despite these two forms being truth-conditionally equivalent, their use is consistently correlated with which sort of QUD is present in the context. To account for these facts, I develop a particular conception of the relationships between QUDs, relevance, at-issueness, and assertion, building on the account of Simons et al. (2011). Given this theory, I propose a semantics where -e' encodes that the attitudinal predication is parenthetical -that is, not part of the at-issue proposal (similar to English sentences like "It's raining, I think") and instead contributes to what I dub the basis of the proposal. I show that this semantics, together with plausible general pragmatic reasoning, provides an account of the meaning of the two attitude constructions in YM and their distribution in discourse.