DOCSLIB.ORG

Tense and Aspect in Indo-Aryan Languages: Variation and Diachrony

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Tense and Aspect in Indo-Aryan Languages: Variation and Diachrony TENSE AND ASPECT IN INDO-ARYAN LANGUAGES: VARIATION AND DIACHRONY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Ashwini Deo September 2006 c Copyright by Ashwini Deo 2007 All Rights Reserved ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Paul Kiparsky Principal Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Cleo Condoravdi I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Beth Levin I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Peter Sells Approved for the University Committee on Graduate Studies. iii iv Acknowledgements There are several people involved in the writing of this dissertation who must have collec- tively contributed more to it than I did and I am grateful for their generosity in letting me be the sole author of this work for whatever it is worth. During the writing of this dissertation and more generally, I have been lucky to have a committee that was an incredible source of ideas, constructive comments, and criticism. Paul Kiparsky has been the best mentor and guide that I could have had. I have learned from Paul about the intricacies of Paninian grammar, the beauty and elegance of metrical verse and its generative analysis, morphology, the importance of doing “amphichronic lin- guistics”, and much more. This project was directly inspired by his conception of the role of historical linguistics in linguistic theory, and Paul’s encouragement and engagement have been instrumental to its development. I can safely say that Cleo Condoravdi has taught me all the tense/aspect semantics that I know (or think I know). When my historical data showed me that I needed a semantic analysis and that one wasn’t readily available, Cleo came to my help and patiently helped me sort through both the semantics literature and my empirical data. She has treated my ideas with just the right amount of respect and im- patience and been extremely generous with her ideas to get the analysis to come to where it stands now. Beth Levin taught me lexical semantics and how to appreciate the differences between shades of meaning too subtle for me to grasp. Several times, she has countered the gross classifications and categorizations I came up with and forced me to look for more nuanced explanatory generalizations. I am grateful to her for her careful commenting on several drafts and her insistence on clarity of presentation and content. Peter Sells is a great person to try out analyses on and to work out what the properties of a desirable analysis should be. Meetings with him have always led to a much more clear-headed idea of where I wanted to go with my projects. Beyond my committee, I thank David Beaver, Ivan Sag, and Elizabeth Traugott for v several discussions and comments as this work developed. The Stanford Linguistics De- partment has been a very congenial and intellectually stimulating environment to work and grow in and I am fortunate to have had a chance to spend several years here. I also thank Joan Bresnan and Arnold Zwicky, who contributed a lot to my intellectual development in my first few years here. I am also grateful to Dr. S.D. Joshi who taught me through Panini how linguistics should really be done. For companionship and interesting discussions I thank Luc Baronian, Luis Casillas, John Beavers, Brady Clark, Cathryn Donhue, Andrew Koontz-Garboden, Dmitry Levinson, Mary Rose, Devyani Sharma, Judith Tonhauser, and Shiao Wei Tham. I am grateful to Veronica Gerassimova and Itamar Francez for their friendship, which has made graduate school much more meaningful. Itamar I particularly thank for making the task of filing long-distance easier and for constantly leaving his Yahoo Chat window open, a practice that has done wonders for our linguistic growth, among other things. This dissertation was supposed to be about morphosyntactic variation in Indo-Aryan. Somewhere along the way, it changed its mind and decided to take the semantics route. A key factor in this turn was Judith Tonhauser, who in a conversation during a Friday Social, convinced me to switch, and got me to ‘discover’ formal semantics. I am glad she did. My informants and friends, scattered over several villages in Northern Maharashtra, are directly responsible for one of the main empirical claim made in this dissertation — the loss of the past-present distinction in Middle Indo-Aryan. Their patience and their interest in my work has been crucial to developing the empirical basis of this work. I would especially like to thank Chamulal Rathwa and Alka Padwi (Dehawali Bhili), Gulabsingh Pawra, Bhaisingh Pawra, and Barfi Pawra (Pawri), Suresh Bacchav, Gayatri Bacchav, and Krishna Mohan (Ahirani), and Bhaskar Gangurde (Konkana) for sharing their language, culture, and life with me and their careful efforts to teach me aspects of their languages. The Linguistics department at Konstanz has been like a long-distance linguistic family. Miriam Butt has been constantly encouraging, ever since I first came to Stanford. She has been critical to building both my confidence and my skills as a linguist and has seen the insights I was struggling to express through the murk of incoherent writing. Her comments, both as a South-Asianist and as a theoretical linguist, have contributed significantly to this and other work. I am grateful to Miriam and to Aditi Lahiri for inviting me several times to Konstanz for workshops and research projects. vi I am grateful to the American Institute of Indian Studies for a Junior Research Fel- lowship to do fieldwork in India during 2003-2004 and to the National Science Foundation for a Dissertation Improvement Grant between 2003-2005 (BCS 0318478) for field support. The write-up of this dissertation was greatly facilitated by the Geballe dissertation writing fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center for 2005-2006. Ashish Chadha convinced me to make the move from India to the United States to pursue a Linguistics Ph.D way back in 1999. Among other things, I have to thank him for lengthy arguments over breakfast that stretched beyond lunch, the best sambar and maa ki dal in the world, the constant supply of international cinema and in-home LCD projector arrangements, and for never failing to remind me that, in the larger scheme of things, everything one does is pointless, but nevertheless one has to continue doing it wholeheartedly. Ashish is the only karmayogi I know from close and it has been a privilege learning from him. Iravati, I have to thank for several joys and discoveries. I discovered through her that a three month old, placed in the right position, is capable of ripping out keys from a G4 laptop, that an underspecified coronal feature might be acquired before manner features are acquired, the “Primacy of Aspect” hypothesis, and that a baby is an extremely useful prop to have around during fieldwork sessions. I also thank my parents- in-law, Lalit and Urmil Chadha for being great supports and for being much more proud of me than I deserve. I thank Aditi for being there at all times, and Pawan, Meghana, Maya, and Reviel for their friendship. To my parents, Chhaya and Sharad Deo, I owe more than I can express. In addition to doing all the wonderful things that only parents can do, they typed out the text of the Old Marathi text Dny¯ane´swari in electronic form for me so that I could run searches through it and cheerfully took care of their granddaughter for several months while their daughter was struggling to write her dissertation. I would like to thank my mother for helping me search through Old and Middle Marathi texts for data that I wanted and for spending six months in the US taking care her granddaughter. This dissertation is dedicated to both of them. vii Abbreviations 1 = First Person 2 = Second Person 3 = Third person abl = Ablative Case acc = Accusative Case aor = OIA Aorist dat = Dative Case caus = Causative Morpheme erg = Ergative Case emph = Emphatic clitic f = Feminine Gender fut = Future Tense gen = Genitive Case ger = Gerund impf = OIA Present paradigm (and cognates) impf = Imperfective Aspect (for crosslinguistic data) impf = OIA Imperfective Participle (and cognates) viii impfct = OIA Imperfect imp = Imperative Mood inf = Infinitival ins = Instrumental Case loc = Locative Case MIA = Middle Indo Aryan m = Masculine Gender NIA = New Indo Aryan n = Neuter Gender nom = Nominative Case neg = Negative Particle/ Inflection OIA = Old Indo Aryan pass = Passive Voice perf = OIA resultative stative participle (and cognates) pst = Past Tense pfct = OIA Perfect pl = Plural pres = Present Tense prog = Progressive aspect quot = Quotative Marker sg = Singular voc = Vocative Case ix Contents Acknowledgements v Abbreviations viii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Goals ....................................... 1 1.2 Unifying semantic and grammaticalization approaches . ........... 3 1.2.1 Describing aspectual categories . .... 5 1.2.2 Markedness, privative opposition, and blocking . ........ 10 1.3 Theoreticalproposal .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 12 1.4 Linguisticscope................................. 14 1.4.1 Loss of tense distinctions in Indo-Aryan . ..... 14 1.4.2 Thediachronicdata ........................... 15 1.4.3 Thesynchronicdata ..........................
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Making Inferences: the Case of Scalar Implicature Processing Judith Degen ([email protected]) Michael K
    Making Inferences: The Case of Scalar Implicature Processing Judith Degen ([email protected]) Michael K. Tanenhaus ([email protected]) Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester Rochester, NY 14627-0268, USA Abstract ten). Under the assumption that a speaker is being as informa- tive as possible, a weak implicature, that the speaker doesn’t Scalar implicature has served as a test case for investigating the nature of inference processes in language comprehension. know whether all of the sections are written, is licensed. If Specifically, the question of whether or not scalar implicatures the hearer further assumes that the speaker is competent with are computed by default has been extensively investigated in respect to the truth of the stronger statement, the implicature recent years. We argue that the question of default is overly simplistic and propose instead to think of scalar implicature that the speaker believes that some, but not all of the sections computation as a problem of optimal cue combination within a are written, is licensed. constraint-based framework. We provide evidence from three In recent years the representation and processing of scalar experiments supporting the view that multiple constraints of differing strength operate in parallel to provide probabilistic implicatures has emerged as perhaps the defining problem in support for or against an implicature. experimental pragmatics – a subfield of cognitive science that Keywords: experimental pragmatics; scalar implicature; eye- seeks to combine theoretical proposals from linguistics, com- tracking; subitizing puter science and philosophy with state-of-the-art experimen- tal methods. Introduction Importantly for the experimental investigation of the phe- Successful communication requires comprehenders to infer a nomenon, scalar implicatures are cancelable, that is, they are speaker’s intended meaning from an underspecified utterance.
    [Show full text]
  • Some Principles of the Use of Macro-Areas Language Dynamics &A
    Online Appendix for Harald Hammarstr¨om& Mark Donohue (2014) Some Principles of the Use of Macro-Areas Language Dynamics & Change Harald Hammarstr¨om& Mark Donohue The following document lists the languages of the world and their as- signment to the macro-areas described in the main body of the paper as well as the WALS macro-area for languages featured in the WALS 2005 edi- tion. 7160 languages are included, which represent all languages for which we had coordinates available1. Every language is given with its ISO-639-3 code (if it has one) for proper identification. The mapping between WALS languages and ISO-codes was done by using the mapping downloadable from the 2011 online WALS edition2 (because a number of errors in the mapping were corrected for the 2011 edition). 38 WALS languages are not given an ISO-code in the 2011 mapping, 36 of these have been assigned their appropri- ate iso-code based on the sources the WALS lists for the respective language. This was not possible for Tasmanian (WALS-code: tsm) because the WALS mixes data from very different Tasmanian languages and for Kualan (WALS- code: kua) because no source is given. 17 WALS-languages were assigned ISO-codes which have subsequently been retired { these have been assigned their appropriate updated ISO-code. In many cases, a WALS-language is mapped to several ISO-codes. As this has no bearing for the assignment to macro-areas, multiple mappings have been retained. 1There are another couple of hundred languages which are attested but for which our database currently lacks coordinates.
    [Show full text]
  • Conditional Tenses: -Nge-, -Ngali- and -Ki- Tenses and Their Negations
    Chapter 32 Conditional Tenses: -nge-, -ngali- and -ki- Tenses and Their Negations n this chapter, we will learn how to use conditional tenses: the -nge-, I-ngali- and -ki- tenses. These tenses indicate a condition, hypothesis or an assumption. The -nge- tense shows a condition in the present tense eg: If I were to study, etc. while the -ngali- tense shows a condition in the past tense eg: If I had studied, etc. We will also discuss the -ki- tense which shows a condition in the present tense which has future implica- tions eg: If I study, etc. Also, the word kama can be used with both the affirmative and negative conditional tenses to emphasize the conditional- ity. In addition, the -ki- tense can also be used as a present participle tense which will also be discussed in this chapter. Note that in conditional clauses, past tense shows a present condi- tion, a past perfect tense shows a past condition while a present tense shows a future condition. Section A: -nge- Tense The -nge- tense is used to show a hypothesis in the present tense. Similar to other tense markers, sentences using -nge- tense markers are con- structed in the following manner. Subject Prefix + -nge- Tense Marker + Verb Copyright © 2014. UPA. All rights reserved. © 2014. UPA. All rights Copyright Example: Ningesoma vizuri, ningefaulu. If I were to study well, I would pass. Almasi, Oswald, et al. <i>Swahili Grammar for Introductory and Intermediate Levels : Sarufi ya Kiswahili cha Ngazi ya Kwanza na Kati</i>, UPA, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/hselibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1810394.
    [Show full text]
  • Conditional Strengthening [A Case Study in Implicature]
    Draft • Version from 9/13/01 1:08 PM Conditional Strengthening [A Case Study in Implicature] Kai von Fintel MIT Introduction Hearers can extract from an asserted sentence a good amount of information that goes beyond the grammatically encoded truth-conditions of the sentence. There are inferences of at least two kinds: (i) Inferences from the (assumed) truth of the asserted sentence. Hearers may have conditional beliefs (if p, q) and upon hearing p asserted they can infer q by Modus Ponens (with suitable caveats about the reliability of their initial conditional belief and the new information that p). (ii) Inferences from the fact that the sentence was asserted. Hearers may have conditional beliefs of the following nature: if q were the case, p would not have been asserted. This together with the information that p was in fact asserted leads via Modus Tollens to the conclusion that q cannot have been the case. For both of these kinds of inferences, we can ask whether the speaker bears (some) responsibility for them. If the speaker is (or should be) well aware of the relevant conditional beliefs on the part of the hearer, he or she may be partly responsible for the inference. Many authors argue that such inferences are part of the utterance meaning if the underlying assumptions are mutual beliefs of speaker and hearer. It may often be much easier to decide whether speaker bears some responsibility for an inference than to decide whether the inference is part of the meaning of the utterance. I will not worry about these issues of responsibility.
    [Show full text]
  • 1. Introduction
    MICHELA IPPOLITO PRESUPPOSITIONS AND IMPLICATURES IN COUNTERFACTUALS In this article, I propose a pragmatic account of temporally mismatched subjunctive past counterfactuals. The proposal consists of the following parts. First, I show that in cases of temporal mismatch, Past cannot be interpreted inside the proposition where it occurs at surface structure. Instead, it must be interpreted as constraining the time variable of the accessibility relation. This has the effect of shifting the time of the evaluation of the conditional to some contextually salient past time. Second, I will propose specific Felicity Conditions (presuppositions) for subjunctive conditionals and I will argue that there is a strict correspondence between the time of evaluation in the truth-conditions of a conditional and the time relevant for the felicity conditions. In other words, if the time relevant for the accessibility relation has been shifted to the past, then the conditional’s presupposition will make reference to the speaker’s past epistemic states. On the other hand, if no past is constraining the time argument of the accessibility relation, the conditional’s felicity will make reference to the speaker’s epistemic state at the time of the utterance. Third, I will argue that the intuition that the antecedent of mismatched counterfactuals is not true is a scalar implicature arising not from a competition between assertions but between presuppositions. Finally, I will investigate the general repercussions of my proposal on the problem of presupposition projection. 1. Introduction Past subjunctive conditionals do not always talk about the past. Sometimes they may talk about the future, despite the overt past verbal morphology.
    [Show full text]
  • The Acquisition of Scalar Implicatures
    Wer bei „scalar implicatures“ an eine exotische Zierfischart denkt und vor seinem geistigen Auge bunte Segelflosser majestätisch zwischen Steinen und Grünpflanzen dahinschweben sieht, der irrt sich sehr: Stefanie Röhrig Scalar implicatures bezeichnen keine Buntbarschart, sondern gehören in den Bereich der Pragmatik. Diese Disziplin der Linguistik untersucht sprachliches Handeln, also sprachliche Äußerungen und die Entstehung von Bedeutung. Insbesondere logische Schlussfolgerungen sind von wissenschaftlichem The Acquisition of Interesse. Wer auf die Frage „Have you read Shakespeare‘s works?“ mit „I have read some of them“ antwortet, der bejaht einerseits die Frage, schränkt aber - ohne dies ausdrücklich zu sagen - zugleich die Zustimmung ein: some of them heißt nicht all of them. Implikaturen müssen ‚zwischen den Zeilen‘ Scalar Implicatures verstanden werden. Gewöhnlich wird davon ausgegangen, dass Kinder erst mit etwa 6 Jahren Implikaturen wirklich verstehen und für sich nutzen können. Stefanie Röhrig zeigt in ihrer als Feldstudie angelegten Göttinger Schriften zur Englischen Philologie Staatsarbeit, dass diese Lehrmeinung dringend der Überarbeitung bedarf. Denn Kinder, so decken ihre Untersuchungen auf, verfügen sogar über eine ihnen eigene Art der Implikatur. Band 3 2010 Stefanie Röhrig The Acquisition of Scalar Implicatures Scalar of Acquisition The Röhrig Stefanie ISBN: 978-3-941875-49-4 ISSN: 1868-3878 Universitätsdrucke Göttingen Universitätsdrucke Göttingen Stefanie Röhrig The Acquisition of Scalar Implicatures This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License 3.0 “by-nd”, allowing you to download, distribute and print the document in a few copies for private or educational use, given that the document stays unchanged and the creator is mentioned. You are not allowed to sell copies of the free version.
    [Show full text]
  • Nature Redacted September 7,2017 Certified By
    The Universality of Concord by Isa Kerem Bayirli BA, Middle East Technical University (2010) MA, Bogazigi University (2012) Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY September 2017 2017 Isa Kerem Bayirli. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature redacted Author......................... ...... ............................. Departmeyf)/Linguistics and Philosophy Sic ;nature redacted September 7,2017 Certified by...... David Pesetsky Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Linguistics g nThesis Supervisor redacted Accepted by.................. Signature ...................................... David Pesetsky Lead, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SEP 2 6 2017 LIBRARIES ARCHiVES The Universality of Concord by Isa Kerem Bayirh Submitted to the Deparment of Linguistics and Philosophy on September 7, 2017 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics Abstract In this dissertation, we develop and defend a universal theory of concord (i.e. feature sharing between a head noun and the modifying adjectives). When adjectives in a language show concord with the noun they modify, concord morphology usually involves the full set of features of that noun (e.g. gender, number and case). However, there are also languages in which concord targets only a subset of morphosyntactic features of the head noun. We first observe that feature combinations that enter into concord in such languages are not random.
    [Show full text]
  • Conversational Implicatures (And How to Spot Them)
    Conversational Implicatures (and How to Spot Them) Michael Blome-Tillmann McGill University Abstract In everyday conversations we often convey information that goes above and beyond what we strictly speaking say: exaggeration and irony are obvious examples. H.P. Grice intro- duced the technical notion of a conversational implicature in systematizing the phenom- enon of meaning one thing by saying something else. In introducing the notion, Grice drew a line between what is said, which he understood as being closely related to the conventional meaning of the words uttered, and what is conversationally implicated, which can be inferred from the fact that an utterance has been made in context. Since Grice’s seminal work, conversational implicatures have become one of the major re- search areas in pragmatics. This article introduces the notion of a conversational implica- ture, discusses some of the key issues that lie at the heart of the recent debate, and expli- cates tests that allow us to reliably distinguish between semantic entailments and conven- tional implicatures on the one hand and conversational implicatures on the other.1 Conversational Implicatures and their Cancellability In everyday conversations our utterances often convey information that goes above and beyond the contents that we explicitly assert or—as Grice puts it—beyond what is said by our utterances. Consider the following examples:2 (1) A: Can I get petrol somewhere around here? B: There’s a garage around the corner. [A can get petrol at the garage around the corner.] (2) A: Is Karl a good philosopher? B: He’s got a beautiful handwriting.
    [Show full text]
  • Map by Steve Huffman; Data from World Language Mapping System
    Svalbard Greenland Jan Mayen Norwegian Norwegian Icelandic Iceland Finland Norway Swedish Sweden Swedish Faroese FaroeseFaroese Faroese Faroese Norwegian Russia Swedish Swedish Swedish Estonia Scottish Gaelic Russian Scottish Gaelic Scottish Gaelic Latvia Latvian Scots Denmark Scottish Gaelic Danish Scottish Gaelic Scottish Gaelic Danish Danish Lithuania Lithuanian Standard German Swedish Irish Gaelic Northern Frisian English Danish Isle of Man Northern FrisianNorthern Frisian Irish Gaelic English United Kingdom Kashubian Irish Gaelic English Belarusan Irish Gaelic Belarus Welsh English Western FrisianGronings Ireland DrentsEastern Frisian Dutch Sallands Irish Gaelic VeluwsTwents Poland Polish Irish Gaelic Welsh Achterhoeks Irish Gaelic Zeeuws Dutch Upper Sorbian Russian Zeeuws Netherlands Vlaams Upper Sorbian Vlaams Dutch Germany Standard German Vlaams Limburgish Limburgish PicardBelgium Standard German Standard German WalloonFrench Standard German Picard Picard Polish FrenchLuxembourgeois Russian French Czech Republic Czech Ukrainian Polish French Luxembourgeois Polish Polish Luxembourgeois Polish Ukrainian French Rusyn Ukraine Swiss German Czech Slovakia Slovak Ukrainian Slovak Rusyn Breton Croatian Romanian Carpathian Romani Kazakhstan Balkan Romani Ukrainian Croatian Moldova Standard German Hungary Switzerland Standard German Romanian Austria Greek Swiss GermanWalser CroatianStandard German Mongolia RomanschWalser Standard German Bulgarian Russian France French Slovene Bulgarian Russian French LombardRomansch Ladin Slovene Standard
    [Show full text]
  • Information to Users
    INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfihn master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter fece, while others may be from any type o f computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely afreet reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back o f the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zed) Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 A WORD-AND-PARADIGM APPROACH TO REDUPUCATION DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University by Andrew D.
    [Show full text]
  • Bare Numerals and Scalar Implicatures
    Language and Linguistics Compass 7/5 (2013): 273–294, 10.1111/lnc3.12018 Bare Numerals and Scalar Implicatures Benjamin Spector* CNRS-ENS-EHESS, Institut Jean Nicod, École Normale Supérieure Abstract Bare numerals present an interesting challenge to formal semantics and pragmatics: they seem to be compatible between various readings (‘at least’, ‘exactly’, and ‘at most’ readings), and the choice of a particular reading seems to depend on complex interactions between contextual factors and linguistic structure. The goal of this article is to present and discuss some of the current approaches to the interpretation of bare numerals in formal semantics and pragmatics. It discusses four approaches to the interpretation of bare numerals, which can be summarized as follows: 1. In the neo-Gricean view, the basic, literal meaning of numerals amounts to an ‘at least interpreta- tion’, and the ‘exactly n’ reading results from a pragmatic enrichment of the literal reading, i.e. it is accounted for in terms of scalar implicatures. 2. In the underspecification view, the interpretation of numerals is ‘underspecified’, with the result that they can freely receive the ‘at least’, ‘exactly’,or‘at most’ reading, depending on which of these three construals is contextually the most relevant. 3. In the ‘exactly’-only view, the numerals’ basic, literal meaning corresponds to the ‘exactly’ reading, and the ‘at least’ and ‘fewer than n’ readings result from the interaction of this literal meaning with background, non-linguistic knowledge. 4. In the ambiguity view, numerals are ambiguous between two readings, the ‘at least’ and ‘exactly’ readings.The article argues that in order to account for all the relevant data, one needs to adopt a certain version of the ambiguity view.
    [Show full text]
  • Scalar Implicatures Vs. Presuppositions – the View from Acquisition
    Scalar Implicatures vs. Presuppositions – The view from Acquisition Cory Bill, Jacopo Romoli, Florian Schwarz, and Stephen Crain To appear in TOPOI, special issue “Presuppositions: Philosophy, Linguistics, and Psychology.” This paper reports an experimental investigation of presuppositions and scalar implicatures in language acquisition. Recent proposals (Chemla 2009; Romoli 2012, 2014) posit the same mechanisms for generating both types of inferences, in contrast to the traditional view. We used a Covered Box picture selection task to compare the interpretations assigned by two groups of children (4/5 and 7 year olds) and by adults, in response to sentences with presuppositions and ones with either ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ scalar implicatures. The main finding was that the behavior of children and adults differed across inference types. This asymmetry is consistent with the traditional perspective, but poses a challenge for the more recent uniform accounts. We discuss how the latter could be amended to account for these findings, and also relate the findings to previous results on presupposition processing. Finally, we discuss an unexpected difference found between direct and indirect scalar implicatures. Keywords: Presuppositions, Scalar Implicatures, Pragmatics, Child Language Acquisition. 1 Introduction As the sentences in (1a)-(3a) illustrate, scalar implicatures like those in (1b) and (2b), and presuppositions such as (3b) are central features of the overall meaning that is conveyed when speakers make certain utterances. (1) a. Some of the giraffes have scarves b. Not all of the giraffes have scarves (2) a. Not all of the giraffes have scarves b. Some of the giraffes have scarves (3) a. The bear didn’t win the race b.
    [Show full text]