I.3.1 Reporting and Ascribing

Chapter 1 is about attitude ascriptions and speech reports, which were at the center of attention when philosophers and logicians began to see natural languages as formal systems. In this chapter, Angelika Kratzer looks at the history of formal semantics, not for its own sake, but for lessons about how to approach attitude ascriptions and speech reports today. She suggests that linguists and philosophers have taken a few wrong forks in the road. To solve the problem of logical equivalents, Kratzer suggests that we should have listened to Rudolf Carnap, who made it clear that, even if the truth of an attitude ascription or speech report may depend on the intensional structure of the embedded clause, this in no way forces the conclusion that propositions can’t be mere intensions. For de re ascriptions, Kratzer suggests that we should have listened to David Kaplan, who replaced names in the scope of attitude verbs with descriptions, rather than associating the individuals those names stand for with modes of presentation. What held linguists and philosophers back in both cases, according to Kratzer, was Fregean compositionality. Shedding that legacy, she presents prototypes for analyses of attitude verbs and verbs of speech within an intensional semantics where propositions are mere sets of possible worlds and de re ascriptions require no special technologies created just for them.

In Chapter 2, Yael Sharvit and Matt Moss defend an acquaintance-based semantics for de re attitude reports – an analysis that has recently been challenged by some philosophers, but has been widely adopted by linguists. Sharvit and Moss begin by surveying the philosophical literature on the logical form of de re, with particular attention to how acquaintance relations solve the problem posed by so-called double vision scenarios. Sharvit and Moss reject the view that cognitive contact with the ‘res’ requires causal interaction, arguing that the causal conception of acquaintance is inadequately motivated in the philosophical literature on de re. Subsequently, they turn to other linguistic data, showing that the de re analysis is needed to account for certain tense constructions. They argue that the success of this application provides a further reason to reject an exclusively causal conception of acquaintance, since the kind of cognitive contact relevant to de re attitudes towards times cannot plausibly be causal. Sharvit and Moss discuss objections to the de re analysis of tense, such as the apparent unavailability of double vision scenarios involving times. Subsequently, they consider various additional principles and constraints that further refine the theory’s predictions, and they conclude that while further research is needed to fully vindicate the de re analysis in this application, it offers the most unified and well-motivated account of embedded tense data currently on offer.

I.3.2 Describing and Referring

In Chapter 3, Hans Kamp explores the meaning of definite descriptions – a research topic with which linguistics and philosophy have been intimately intertwined as long as they have been acquainted. In particular, Kamp revisits Keith Donnellan’s highly influential referential–attributive distinction from a communication-theoretic perspective, which distinguishes between utterance production and utterance interpretation – in this case between the referential and the attributive use of definite descriptions and their referential and attributive interpretation. The framework is MSDRT (for ‘Mental State Discourse Representation Theory’), an extension of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) that provides mental state descriptions (MSDs) for utterance producers and recipients. MSDs consist of propositional attitude representations (PRs) and entity representations (ERs). ERs represent entities from the outside world (their referents), to which they are linked by causal relations and which they can contribute to the contents of the agent’s PRs. The referential use and interpretation of a description are analyzed as those which producer and interpreter take to refer to the referent of one of their ERs (while the attributive use and interpretation take it to refer to whatever satisfies its descriptive content). This approach differentiates more finely between different use scenarios than other approaches and throws new light on the question whether the referential and the attributive use are mutually exclusive and whether they are jointly exhaustive.

Chapter 4 explores the meaning of definite descriptions from a crosslinguistic perspective. In particular, Elizabeth Coppock considers what further philosophic insight could be provided on this topic in the modern era, when work on definite descriptions has become less focused on English. To that end, Coppock considers one unresolved, philosophic issue that persists even in this modern era of crosslinguistic comparison, pitting dynamic semantics against situation semantics. A prominent synthesis of these competing (though compatible) frameworks says that both are needed for so-called ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ articles, respectively. Indeed, this distinction has served as inspiration for much recent work on the crosslinguistic semantics of definiteness. Coppock shows that while this new development has led to a much richer and more well-rounded picture of definiteness as a phenomenon, the predictions of the two analyses overlap too much, leading to spurious debate when fieldworkers go to analyze a new language. The chapter aims to clarify what is at stake empirically in the choice among analyses and advocates for continued philosophical reflection as we operationalize our linguistic methods of discovery.

I.3.3 Narrating and Structuring

Chapter 5 focuses on the role that discourse relations and discourse structure play in semantic theorizing. This topic of inquiry was pioneered in AI research in the 1970s by Jerry Hobbs, and became of interest to linguists and philosophers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly with the development of Centering Theory and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. In this chapter, Julie Hunter and Kate Thompson provide an overview of how discourse relations not only add semantic content above and beyond the individual propositions expressed by the utterances in a discourse, but they, and the complex structures to which they give rise, can influence the interpretations of individual utterances, having an effect on the very propositions the utterances are understood to express. Subsequently, Hunter and Thompson look in detail at how theories of discourse structure can be brought to bear on current questions in formal semantics involving the distinction between so-called at-issue and non-at-issue content. The core data that they consider involves appositive relative clauses and discourse parenthetical reports. Hunter and Thompson also discuss recent efforts to use discourse structure to model conversational goals and capture the subjective nature of discourse interpretation. Finally, they consider a question that has not received proper attention in linguistics and philosophy: how to extend theories of discourse structure to multimodal discourse. Along the way, Hunter and Thompson emphasize the importance of corpus work in studying discursive phenomena and raise a series of large questions to be pursued in future work.

In Chapter 6, Pranav Anand and Maziar Toosarvandani examine a previously undiscussed interaction between tense and predicates of personal taste (PPTs) – two linguistic expressions which have independently been prominent in discussions amongst linguists and philosophers. While disagreements involving delicious or fun are generally considered faultless (i.e. they have no clear fact of the matter), Anand and Toosarvandani observe that, in joint oral narratives, this faultlessness varies with tense: if the narrative is told in the historical present, disagreements involving a PPT are not faultless. Drawing on narrative research in psychology and discourse analysis, they propose that this contrast reflects a pragmatic convention of the narrative genre in which participants construct a consensus version of what happened from a unitary perspective. To link this pragmatics with the semantics, Anand and Toosarvandani adopt a bicontextual semantics, where the perspectival parameters for both PPTs and tense are located in a context of assessment (and not context of utterance). They show that when these contextual parameters are constrained by the unitary perspective of narratives, the present tense leads to nonfaultless disagreements, as its semantics tightly binds the temporal location of an event to the parameter relevant for appraisal. The past tense, by contrast, enables both faultless and nonfaultless disagreements. Anand and Toosarvandani derive this flexibility by revising the existing semantics for past tense, engendering a new perspective on crosslinguistic variation in tense usage.

I.3.4 Locating and Inferring

Chapter 7 considers the meaning of tense in its own right – a topic that goes back to (at least) Aristotle, who discussed in his De Interpretatione whether or not sentences about the future have a truth value. While philosophers originally focused on the future tense, Corien Bary argues that the present tense poses many challenges as well – challenges that are interesting for linguists and philosophers alike. These arguments were fueled by research in formal semantics in the last decade. In particular, Bary focuses on two particularly complex present tense phenomena: the present tense in complements of indirect speech and attitude reports, and the historical present. She argues that while formal semantics has provided significant insight on these phenomena, a holistic understanding of the present tense requires broader conversations between formal semantics and other fields of language study, such as psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, philosophy of language, mind and fiction, literary studies, and narratology.

Chapter 8 is about evidentiality, a topic that – compared to many of the others in this volume – has only quite recently been featured in conversations between linguists and philosophers. In these conversations, evidentiality is usually equated with so-called propositional evidentiality, i.e. evidentials that scope over propositions. In this chapter, Diti Bhadra undertakes a crosslinguistic comparative study of propositional and nominal evidentiality, i.e. evidentials that scope over nominals, and are fused with the determiner/demonstrative systems or with nominal tense markers. Bhadra demonstrates that there are cohesive parallels in how flavors of both propositional and no-propositional evidentiality interact with verbal and nominal tense and aspect. She uses tools from modal logic to show that we can: (i) unify the subdomains of evidentiality using modal accessibility relations while also preserving important distinctions between them, (ii) use the same tools to compositionally capture the interaction between evidentials and tense and aspect, and (iii) have the representation of an agent’s certainty of belief be reflected in quantificational force. More concretely, Bhadra proposes to encode the subtype of evidence in the semantics of evidentials, with three distinct evidential flavors embodying three distinct spatio-temporal modal accessibility relations: direct (sensory) evidentials are temporally sensitive historical necessity relations (yielding the factive nature of perception); inferential evidentials of pure reasoning are epistemic accessibility relations; inferential evidentials of results are a combination of the above two.

I.3.5 Typologizing and Ontologizing

In Chapter 9, Jessica Rett explores the ontology of semantic theory – a highly controversial topic that was first taken up by philosophers and logicians who viewed natural languages as formal systems. The vast majority of formal theories employ individuals as a basic type; they represent quantification over, modification of, and reference to individuals. However, with the development of linguistic semantics, new views emerged about which basic semantic entities should be included in our formal semantic ontology, and on which principles we should include them. In this chapter, Rett explores these views in detail. She first considers various semantic theories that include additional types or entities, including possible worlds, but also less common ones like vectors. Subsequently, she considers two competing views that are currently featured in conversations between linguists and philosophers. According to the first view, types should be constrained or reduced. According to the second view, types should be proliferated. Rett presents some representative arguments on both sides and suggests a path forward in evaluating them against one another.

Chapter 10 is also about the ontology of semantic theory, but explores this topic from a different perspective. In this chapter, Gillian Ramchand argues that the ontological categories that linguists and philosophers require for understanding meaning and meaning composition in natural language cannot be exclusively proxied by external objects in the world or judgments of truth. In other words, Ramchand argues against a widely held view in formal semantics that a set of metaphysically justified ontological objects is required for natural language ontology; the latter field should be considered a distinct philosophical and analytical exercise, according to Ramchand. The chapter takes as its central empirical ground the meaning of ‘nonfinite’ verb forms in English. Paradoxes relating to the English progressive and passive constructions are examined to show that lexical conceptual content needs to be defined more essentially, and that the integration of such essentialist content into forms which ultimately have extensionalist import requires the reification of the symbol qua symbol and the explicit representation of the utterance situation.

I.3.6 Determining and Questioning

Chapter 11 is about vagueness in natural language, a topic that has brought linguists and philosophers together since the birth of formal semantics. In this chapter, Sam Carter offers a synoptic survey of vagueness, with a particular focus on the discourse dynamics of vague language. He starts by briefly introducing the traditional philosophical puzzles of vagueness that have to do with indeterminacy and tolerance. From there, Carter considers research in linguistics and philosophy which suggest that vague language exhibits nontrivial discourse dynamics. Different approaches to the discourse dynamics of vagueness are then taxonomized and critically evaluated. The chapter concludes with Carter considering the prospects of leveraging an account of the dynamics of vague language to provide a solution to the traditional puzzles of vagueness.

In Chapter 12, Matthijs Westera explores the notion of ‘alternative’, which has been central to analyzing core phenomena at the semantics–pragmatics interface such as disjunction, focus, discourse structure, questions, and implicature. Westera shows that some basic questions concerning the various notions of alternatives have not received the attention they deserve, e.g. what exactly these notions signify, or how they are supposed to interact. The chapter reflects on such questions, centering on appeals to alternatives in characterizations of focus, disjunction, discourse goals, and interrogatives. Westera criticizes the conflation of the set of focus alternatives with the meaning of an interrogative, discusses two conceptions of the alternatives introduced by disjunction (algebraic and attention-based), and departs from the predominant view of questions under discussion as, essentially, linguistic questions that represent discourse goals.

I.3.7 Arguing and Rejecting

Chapter 13 is about argumentative discourse, which has always played a central role within logic and philosophy, but much less so in linguistics. In this chapter, Carlotta Pavese shows the importance of a linguistic perspective. She begins with an overview of recent work on the meaning of argumentative discourse, with particular attention to work on the semantics of argument connectives such as ‘therefore’. Pavese considers several linguistic analyses of this connective, including those that adopt tools from discourse coherence theory, dynamic semantics and possible world semantics. Pavese argues in favor of a dynamic semantic analysis because it can account for the multiple uses of ‘therefore’, in categorical arguments, as well as in suppositional and complex arguments. In the final section, Pavese overviews some issues concerning the pragmatics of argumentative discourse, such as how we are to characterize the distinctive utterance force of arguments versus explanations.

Chapter 14 is about rejection and assertion, phenomena that are foundational to formal semantics and have been vital in the development of Speech Act Theory in linguistics and philosophy. In this chapter, Julian J. Schlöder points out that some utterances have identical conditions for their correct assertion, but differ in the conditions for their correct rejection. Rejection, Schlöder claims, deserves a closer look to help us make sense of such data. Schlöder argues against the widespread view that rejection can be reduced to assertion. Adapting an observation by Huw Price, Schlöder argues that rejection is best conceived of as the speech act that is used to register that some other speech act is (or would be) violating a rule of the conversation game. The core observation is that the concept of an ‘illegal move’ is intelligible, so a speech act can be an assertion, despite violating the essential norm of asserting. Schlöder proposes that rejection has the function of pointing out that a move is illegal. But registering rule violations is, according to Schlöder, a precondition of playing games with rules (it is part of the concept ‘game’), not itself a rule in a game. This, Schlöder concludes, means that rejection itself cannot be characterized by a norm. Instead, registering violations is a necessary condition for grasping the conversation game. Schlöder argues that a similar special role of rejection (that it is not explicable in the terms provided by a conceptual framework, but needed to grasp these terms) likely occurs in other frameworks as well, e.g. when one characterizes speech acts by commitments or their effect on a common ground.

I.3.8 Implying and (Pre-)supposing

In Chapter 15, Emma Borg revisits Paul Grice’s seminal contribution: his motivation of the so-called ‘total signification of an utterance’ (i.e. the complete content someone communicates by a linguistic signal), which he then used to distinguish between ‘what the speaker says’ versus ‘what the speaker implies’. This distinction has driven research at the semantics–pragmatics interface for the last 50-plus years, spurring fruitful conversations amongst linguists and philosophers. However, recent developments have served to throw doubt on Grice’s taxonomy, with both sides of his divide coming under fire. Borg examines these challenges to Grice’s framework and argues that they do not show that Grice’s notion of implicature is ill-founded, nor that his ‘favoured sense’ of what is said is unnecessary. What they do serve to highlight, according to Borg, is a peculiar tension in Grice’s original account. Borg suggests that Grice merged two distinct features when defining what the speaker says versus what the speaker implicates: the idea of a content dictated by word meaning and structure alone, on the one hand, and the idea of an asserted or directly expressed proposition on the other. Borg shows that once we resolve this tension, it is possible to deliver an account of the total signification of an utterance which is both (fairly) faithful to Grice’s original account and which is able to do a great deal of explanatory work.

Chapter 16 is about presupposition, a phenomenon that is intimately related to progress in twentieth-century philosophy of language, starting with Gottlob Frege’s semantic analysis (further developed by P. F. Strawson), and later with Robert Stalnaker’s groundbreaking pragmatic analysis. In this chapter, Márta Abrusán presents the most influential linguistic approaches to presupposition. Going beyond the traditional analyses of the problem of presupposition projection, Abrusán considers recent developments in linguistics that link the analysis of presuppositions to general processes of cognition and reasoning, such as attention, probabilistic reasoning, theory of mind, information structure, attitudes and perspectival structure. Abrusán discusses some outstanding questions: (i) whether presuppositions form one coherent group or whether they should be thought of as different types of phenomena, (ii) why we have presuppositions at all, and (iii) why we see the presuppositions that we see (aka the triggering problem). The take-away of the chapter is the need to consider the intricacies of the interaction of presuppositions with the broader discourse context.

Chapter 17 concludes the volume with Matthew Mandelkern’s exploration of modals and conditionals – expressions which have played a starring role in philosophical and linguistic research. The ability to think modally distal thoughts is central to the human capacity to plan and choose; and the ability to express such thoughts is central to the human capacity for collective action. Modals and conditionals have yielded a rich bounty of puzzles about logic, semantics, and pragmatics. In this chapter, Mandelkern considers three topics: the interpretation of epistemic modals, particularly how they interact with their local information; the interpretation of conditionals, with a focus on logical questions; and, finally, practical modality, with discussion of a potentially unified perspective on practical modality as essentially involving reference to actions.