Program

Rami and Köpping (2024) present a semantics in which predicates can range over existent objects, nonexistent objects, or both types of objects. These predicates are existence entailing, nonexistence entailing, and neutral, respectively. One of their specific decisions involves treating a large set of predicates, such as "detective", as existence entailing, rather than as neutral and allowing existence entailments to emerge in semantic composition. In this talk I will defend a "neutral" semantics for such nouns and suggest instead that the notion of "(non)existence entailing predicate" is better defined in terms of the discourse (sub)domain in which a discourse referent is required to appear. This view maintains a distinction between existent and nonexistent objects, but greatly reduces the number and type of (non)existence entailing predicates, leaving most of the work of ensuring or defeating existence entailment to the larger linguistic context. I make this argument based on data from Spanish, which affords particular insights into the relation between modification, predication, discourse reference, and existence that English does not.

In this talk, I would like to explore the idea that "fictional" is ambiguous between a predicate analysis and an adverbial analysis. I will start with a brief presentation of some of the work that I did in my dissertation. Due to their inability to match the inference patterns of extensionality and intersectivity (Kamp&Partee 1995), adjectives like "skillful" have often been captured as intensional modifiers. However, I argue instead that an analysis of "skillful" as a complex predicate is intuitively more appropriate. The predicate analysis for these adjectives is achieved by employing a context-dependent parameter in their semantics. I further argue that also adjectives like "fake", originally dubbed privative and analyzed as non-subsective, may be captured as predicates by means of this parameter. I adopt Partee's (2010) approach of a subsective analysis of these adjectives plus coercing the modified noun into a widened meaning, and suggest that her approach can be taken one step further to an intersective analysis. Looking at the bigger picture, the analyses of adjectives such as "blonde", "tall", "skillful" and "fake" converge in that they can all be treated as predicates. However, such a treatment is not possible for all adjectives. Temporal and modal adjectives such as 'former' and 'alleged' behave different in crucial aspects. For instance, former and alleged cannot be used in the predicative position. A predicate analysis therefore neither seems feasible nor desirable for temporal and modal adjectives. Instead, I assume an adverbial analysis for these adjectives (Zimmermann 2022).

Having these two types of adjectival analyses at hand, I will finally turn to adjectives like "fictional". I would like to investigate the idea that "fictional" is ambiguous between a predicate interpretation and an adverbial interpretation. That is, I would like to suggest that "fictional" has one reading that can be captured analogous to the predicate analysis adopted for "fake", and another reading that can be captured analogous to the adverbial analysis adopted for "alleged". I will investigate this by looking at the behaviour of "fictional" in various contexts, and see whether it patterns with "fake" or with "alleged".

Special quantifiers are quantifiers and pronouns like "something", "everything", "what" and "that". What is special about them is that they can take the place of various sorts of nonreferential expressions, predicates, that-clauses, intensional NPs, measure phrases, without giving rise to problems of substitution. I myself have defended the view that special quantifiers are nominalizing quantifiers, which means that they range over the same sorts of things a relevant nominalization would stand for. Special quantifiers can also take the place of NPs not standing for actual objects: 

(i) a. There are things that do not exist.

    b. John thought about something that does not exist.

In this talk I will address the question whether and how the nominalization theory of special quantifiers can be extended such occurrences of special quantifiers.

In this paper, I aim provide a formal semantic analysis of fictional modifiers like “fictitious” and “fictional”. I will argue that unlike “fictitious”, “fictional” is a type-ambiguous expression. With respect to the first type it is a modifying adjective like “fictitious”; and relative to the second type it is a polysemous intersective adjective. Furthermore, I will show that the pair “mythical”/mythological” behave similar like the pair “ficticious/fictional”. The expression “imaginary” and “hallucinated” are modifying adjectives without intersective counterparts in English. I will provide intuitive tests and inferential patterns to distinguish the different kinds of predicates. Finally, I will show how the modifying meaning transform existence-entailing predicates into non-existence-entailing predicates.

Many sentences hosting definite descriptions with a modified head noun can receive different interpretations based on the interpretation of the modifier. The modifier can have a narrow scope, local interpretation within the DP or a wide scope, non-local interpretation, where the modifier is interpreted as a sentence adverbial. The two intepretations are rarely equally available, i.e., (1) only has a wide-scope interpretation of "occasional", while "alleged" in (2) is interpreted locally.

(1) The occasional sailor strolled by.

(2) The alleged murderer is blonde.

We want to show that the interpretation of a certain class of modifiers, namely the modifiers that are built from non-normal modal operators ("imaginary", "fictional", etc.) is constrained by the predicates their head nouns occupy. It is possible to demonstrate that these modifiers only then receive a wide-scope interpretation when the local interpretation would lead to a clash with the predicate's existence entailments. For example, if the local interpretation of a DP leads to a nonexistence entailment, the argument position of the hosting predicate it occupies must at least be existence neutral (as in (3)) if not nonexistence entailing to host it. With existence entailing predicates (as in (4)), a wide-scope interpretation is the only reading available:

(3) Mary's imaginary friend scares her.

(4) The merely fictional dog is pretty smart.

To make this more precise, we will introduce our distinction between existence entailing, nonexistence entailing and neutral argument positions amd our conception of non-normal modal operators. Finally, we'll show how a semantic system can be devised to derive the crucial examples.

Some predicates entail existence, some entail non-existence, and some are neutral. What explains this fact? That is, what do predicates do that ensures they behave in these ways. I argue that existence-entailing predicates ascribe properties and relations and that other predicates do not do so and I offer a picture of what such predicates do instead.

The English verb of absence "miss" in its (intransitive) present participle and (transitive) progressive form, as in (1) and (2) respectively, raises a series interesting problems. 

(1) My wallet is missing. 

(2) My bike is missing a pedal. 

One type of problem, mentioned in passing by Dowty (1985) and Higginbotham (1988) and taken on in Zimmermann (2010) and Saebo (2014), has to do with the opaque context created by "missing". Opacity poses difficulties  for a compositional analysis and attendant puzzles of nominal denotation and of modality and existence/reference. A less examined  issue, intertwined with the first, is the nature and status of the modal component in the lexical meaning of "missing": when something is missing, it should,  in a sense in need of elucidation, be there. Building on the insights of Zimmermann and Saebo, this talk attempts to characterize this component, adding to the set of descriptive generalizations to be explained, explaining some of them, and missing others. 

What does it mean to modify an expression with the word "zero", as in "Zero capybaras arrived"? One leading idea (Bylinina & Nouwen 2018) is that "zero" is like other numerals and that it introduces existential quantification over individuals whose cardinality is 0, i.e., null individuals. The aim of this talk is in part to bring crosslinguistic evidence to bear on this issue, investigating the grammar of zero in Cantonese and in Ktunaxa, an endangered language spoken in parts of Canada and the US. Strikingly, Ktunaxa expresses zero with a predicate of absence ("zero" is roughly "that which is absent"). This will lead to some reflections on predicating absence more generally as a species of negated existential.

Collaborative work with Hary Chow, Starr Sandoval, and Rose Underhill.

This talk is about our use of names that do or do not refer, and of which we assume (rightly or wrongly) that do or do not refer or about which do not make such assumptions. The framework I will use is that of MSDRT (Mental State Discourse Representation Theory, an extension of DRT designed for the description of mental states and their role in linguistic analysis. We will look both at the use of proper names inside and outside of attitude attributions, and focus on such examples as Vulcan, Frodo and Gilgamesh. Time permitting, I will relate conclusions from this exploration to concepts of non-existence.