Crossing the appositive / at-issue meaning boundary

Abstract

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.

Presupposition and Implicature

“…In contrast, Potts (2005) and Horn (2007) (incorporating ideas from Frege 1892Frege /1980Frege , 1918Frege /1994 assume that conventional implicatures are distinguished from presuppositions in being new. Thus, where the conventional implicature is old, it takes on the status of evoked content (known information that the speaker brings to salience), but the unmarked case is for conventional implicatures to quietly impose their content on the common ground (Farkas & Bruce, 2010;AnderBois et al, 2010;AnderBois, 2010 …”

“…Indeed, following Bach (1999), I am forced to conclude that many of the items listed in Table 2 are just secondary at-issue entailments. This logical approach is explored further by Barker et al (2010), and related ideas are given a dynamic treatment by Nouwen (2007) and AnderBois et al (2010). Bach (2006b) and Horn (2007) argue that my formalization is not true to Grice's (1975) intentions, andMcCready (2010), Gutzmann (2008Gutzmann ( , 2012, and others have developed modifications of my original multidimensional logic that exist somewhere between Karttunen & Peters' and my own in the sense that they allow for some dimensional interactions (non-trivial projection) while still identifying the strongly projective cases as a natural class.…”

How and why conventional implicatures project

“…Crucially, the CI content contributes novel information that is backgrounded (i.e., not at-issue), and hence projects. Brasoveanu & Henderson 2010;Schlenker 2013;Koev 2014). AnderBois et al (2010), for instance, point out that the strong separation between at-issue content and CIs into different meaning dimensions is challenged by the observation that various semantic phenomena "cross the meaning boundary" between these different types of content.…”

“…Brasoveanu & Henderson 2010;Schlenker 2013;Koev 2014). AnderBois et al (2010), for instance, point out that the strong separation between at-issue content and CIs into different meaning dimensions is challenged by the observation that various semantic phenomena "cross the meaning boundary" between these different types of content. In particular, anaphoric dependencies, presuppositions, as well as ellipsis from the at-issue part of a sentence, can be resolved within the CI, as well as the other way around.…”

“…In particular, anaphoric dependencies, presuppositions, as well as ellipsis from the at-issue part of a sentence, can be resolved within the CI, as well as the other way around. This is illustrated in (3) (from AnderBois et al 2010).…”