Weak Island Semantics

Abrusán, Márta

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199639380.001.0001

Cited by 57 publications

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“…See Hartman 2012:36). The literature has mostly centered on factive verbs (Zubizarreta 1982;Adams 1985;Rooryck 1992;Abrusán 2011Abrusán , 2014, but the more informative class of verbs to consider is "referential" verbs (Haegeman & Ürögdi 2010a), or presuppositional in our terminology. This is the relevant breakdown, originally proposed to describe adjunct extraction patterns (Cattell 1978;Hegarty 1990): (7) a. non-stance (factive) : regret, know, remember, realize, notice, etc.…”

Section: Presuppositional and Non-presuppositional Verbsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…* Which relatives do you regret that you got this ring from ? It has thus been the general view that presuppositional verbs are weak islands and that weak islands are best analyzed as a semantic phenomenon rather than a syntactic one, as discussed in a number of works contrasting the two approaches (Szabolcsi & Zwarts 1993;Szabolcsi & den Dikken 1999;Szabolcsi 2006;Abrusán 2014). The question is why presuppositional verbs induce weak islands.…”

Section: The Factsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recently, Abrusán (2011Abrusán ( , 2014 has developed a system that seeks to explain presuppositional and negative islands in terms of the contradictions that might arise during interpretation. Take for example her treatment of "one-time-only" predicates like get.…”

Section: An Alternative: Contrary Islandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But if that were the case, then utterances like the following should be allowed, contrary to fact: (41) * How did Bill deny/admit/verify that John fixed the car? (Abrusán 2011:292) This issue arises because the system in Abrusán (2011Abrusán ( , 2014) needs a certain individual to project the presupposition. That allows for (40).…”

Section: An Alternative: Contrary Islandsmentioning

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: Presuppositional and Non-presuppositional Verbsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Factsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: An Alternative: Contrary Islandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: An Alternative: Contrary Islandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Factivity mirrors interpretation: The selectional requirements of presuppositional verbs

Kastner

2015

Lingua

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“…One of the most important recent hypothesis about the computational architecture of language is that it consists not only of (i) a structure building device (e.g., ‘Merge’ + the corresponding semantic operations), but also of (ii) a ‘natural logic’ or automatic deductive system. We shall call the view that (i) and (ii) work together to determine the set of acceptable expressions of natural languages, the ‘logicality of language’ (Fox ; Fox & Hackl ; Chierchia , ; Abrusán , ). The question explored in this paper is: What notion of logical form should we pair with the logicality of language?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Logicality of Language: A new take on Triviality, “Ungrammaticality”, and Logical Form*

Pinal

2017

Nous

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Recent work in formal semantics suggests that the language system includes not only a structure building device, as standardly assumed, but also a natural deductive system which can determine when expressions have trivial truth‐conditions (e.g., are logically true/false) and mark them as unacceptable. This hypothesis, called the ‘logicality of language’, accounts for many acceptability patterns, including systematic restrictions on the distribution of quantifiers. To deal with apparent counter‐examples consisting of acceptable tautologies and contradictions, the logicality of language is often paired with an additional assumption according to which logical forms are radically underspecified: i.e., the language system can see functional terms but is ‘blind’ to open class terms to the extent that different tokens of the same term are treated as if independent. This conception of logical form has profound implications: it suggests an extreme version of the modularity of language, and can only be paired with non‐classical—indeed quite exotic—kinds of deductive systems. The aim of this paper is to show that we can pair the logicality of language with a different and ultimately more traditional account of logical form. This framework accounts for the basic acceptability patterns which motivated the logicality of language, can explain why some tautologies and contradictions are acceptable, and makes better predictions in key cases. As a result, we can pursue versions of the logicality of language in frameworks compatible with the view that the language system is not radically modular vis‐á‐vis its open class terms and employs a deductive system that is basically classical.

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Intervention Effects

Mayr¹

2020

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics

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Weak Island Semantics

Cited by 57 publications

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Factivity mirrors interpretation: The selectional requirements of presuppositional verbs

Factivity mirrors interpretation: The selectional requirements of presuppositional verbs

The Logicality of Language: A new take on Triviality, “Ungrammaticality”, and Logical Form*

Intervention Effects

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