Towards a Dynamic Semantics Account of Weak Islands

Honcoop, Martin

doi:10.3765/salt.v0i0.2773

Cited by 5 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Szabolcsi & Zwarts (1993) proposed an explanation which Honcoop (1998) revises and fleshes out. Honcoop's theory of weak islands rests on the observation that the interveners that induce weak islands (negation, quantifiers and so on) are generally the same as those that block cross-sentential anaphora (he) to an indefinite (a man): (35) a. John saw a man i .…”

Section: Dynamic Excursionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Honcoop makes use of this observation by arguing that extraction of expressions sensitive to weak islands crucially involves a semantic operation (Existential Disclosure of Dekker 1993) whose mechanics has such an anaphoric component. When this operation is blocked, so is extraction; see Honcoop (1998) for elaboration, and Szabolcsi (2006) for a brief summary.…”

Section: Dynamic Excursionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To sum up, Honcoop (1998) attempted to equate weak islands with constraints on interclausal binding of indefinites in dynamic semantics. Ultimately, this is a semantic account.…”

Section: 1)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The question is why presuppositional verbs induce weak islands. To answer this, I will invoke the account proposed in Honcoop (1998) and show how it builds directly on the syntactic scaffolding given above.…”

Section: The Factsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(1) Non-presuppositional (non- Honcoop (1998). Honcoop argues that a number of islandhood constructions can be explained through semantic well-formedness constraints within a dynamic semantics framework.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Factivity mirrors interpretation: The selectional requirements of presuppositional verbs

Kastner

2015

Lingua

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Different verbs can take different kinds of arguments. Factive verbs such as remember and forget take clausal complements which are presupposed to be true. In contrast, verbs such as say and think do not presuppose the truth of their complements. I suggest that the complements of presuppositional verbs like remember, forget, admit and deny are actually definite DPs, picking out a discourse referent in the Common Ground. Under this view, factive verbs turn out to be subset of presuppositional verbs, verbs which presuppose the existence of their complement as a proposition in the Common Ground. Factive verbs further require that this proposition be true. It has been established that certain effects arise in clauses embedded by presuppositional verbs: only complements can be extracted from them and argument fronting inside of them is not allowed. I also note that these clauses can have DP pro-forms (which). This stands in opposition to non-presuppositional clauses, where extraction and fronting are possible, and only CP pro-forms (as, so) are allowed. The DP view allows for a uniform solution to these puzzles; the crucial distinction is whether the matrix verb selects for a definite entity (presuppositional) or for a proposition (non-presuppositional). Going further, I introduce crosslinguistic data showing that the entity/proposition split parallels a split in interpretation between DP and CP complements: a presuppositional DP complement is interpreted like a presupposed entity, while a non-presuppositional CP complement has the semantics of a novel proposition. This way of looking at clausal complements also allows us to account for the behavior of sentential subjects, which have been argued to be both nominal and factive. I flesh out these generalizations and show that they emerge as a natural result in our framework. With sentential subjects as with clausal complements, factivity and presupposition correlate with the syntactic category of the argument. I take this to imply a form-meaning isomorphism in the syntax and semantics with regard to what a verb licenses (DP or CP).

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Section: Dynamic Excursionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Dynamic Excursionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To sum up, Honcoop (1998) attempted to equate weak islands with constraints on interclausal binding of indefinites in dynamic semantics. Ultimately, this is a semantic account.…”

Section: 1)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Factsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Factivity mirrors interpretation: The selectional requirements of presuppositional verbs

Kastner

2015

Lingua

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Intervention Effects

Mayr¹

2020

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics

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NOMINALIZED CLAUSES AND DISCOURSE‐GIVENNESS: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM RUSSIAN^*

Knyazev,

Rudaleva

2024

Studia Linguistica

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In a seminal paper, Kiparsky & Kiparsky (1970) proposed a two‐way correspondence between presuppositionality of clauses and nominal structure. The proposal remains highly relevant to current research (a.o. Kastner 2015, Bochnak & Hanink 2022), despite the existence of counterexamples in both directions. In this paper, we examine Russian nominalized clauses to show that presuppositionality is indeed neither necessary nor sufficient for nominalization. However, instead of completely discarding the correspondence between presuppositionality and nominalization, we argue for a weaker “preference” hypothesis, whereby presuppositional, or discourse‐given, contexts are associated with a higher likelihood of nominalization compared to discourse‐new contexts. We provide support for the preference hypothesis based on four experimental studies, a forced‐choice and a givenness‐rating study using matrix negation as a proxy for givenness and a forced‐choice and a sentence completion study directly manipulating the discourse context. We suggest a tentative explanation for the preference hypothesis in terms of definiteness/familiarity marking.

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Towards a Dynamic Semantics Account of Weak Islands

Abstract: No abstract.

Cited by 5 publications

References 6 publications

Factivity mirrors interpretation: The selectional requirements of presuppositional verbs

Factivity mirrors interpretation: The selectional requirements of presuppositional verbs

Intervention Effects

NOMINALIZED CLAUSES AND DISCOURSE‐GIVENNESS: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM RUSSIAN^*

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Towards a Dynamic Semantics Account of Weak Islands

Abstract: No abstract.

Cited by 5 publications

References 6 publications

Factivity mirrors interpretation: The selectional requirements of presuppositional verbs

Factivity mirrors interpretation: The selectional requirements of presuppositional verbs

Intervention Effects

NOMINALIZED CLAUSES AND DISCOURSE‐GIVENNESS: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM RUSSIAN*

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

NOMINALIZED CLAUSES AND DISCOURSE‐GIVENNESS: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM RUSSIAN^*