Adrian Brasoveanu
Assistant Professor, Linguistics
Department, UC
Santa Cruz
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Linguistics, UCSC, Stevenson Faculty Services,
1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 |
email: abrsvn at gmail.com
web page: http://abrsvn.googlepages.com/index.html
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PAPERS & SELECTED PRESENTATIONS ¤¤ SEMANTICS & PRAGMATICS:The
empirical goal of the paper is to establish that there are comparative
correlatives that are not comparative conditionals, against what much
of the previous literature assumes. This is shown by the Romanian
comparative correlative in (1) and is further supported by the equative
correlative in (2). No conditional paraphrase is possible for (1) or
(2) – as, for example, Beck (1997) ("On the Semantics of
Comparative Conditionals", L&P
20) would have it – since they are statements about what is
actually the case. In contrast, the comparative correlative in (3) can
be paraphrased by a conditional, e.g. (on one of its readings): if a
lawyer x is more aggressive than a lawyer y by a certain amount, then x is more efficient than y by a corresponding amount.
The main proposal is that a unified analysis should be given for such non-conditional, differential-based comparative (and equative) correlatives and the more familiar, conditional-like comparative correlatives in terms of a relation (possibly the identity relation) between differentials. In particular, the Romanian atît (that much) is anaphoric to differential intervals, i.e. atît is a proform in the degree domain – and the wh-differential cît (how much) is an indefinite introducing a non-empty interval, anaphorically retrieved by atît. (1) Cu cît e mai înalt frate-le decît sora, cu atît e mai înalt tată-l decît mama. With how much is more tall brother-the than sister.the, with that much is more tall father-the than mother.the The brother is taller than the sister by a certain amount and the father is taller than the mother by the same amount. (2) Pe cît e Irina de frumoasă, pe atît e de deşteaptă. PE how much is Irina DE beautiful, PE that much is DE smart Irina is beautiful to a certain, significant extent and she is smart to the same, equally significant extent. (3) Cu cît e un avocat mai agresiv, cu atît e mai eficient. With how much is a lawyer more aggressive, with that much is more efficient The more aggressive a lawyer is, the more efficient s/he is. The paper proposes the first unified account of deictic and sentence-internal readings of same/different
(a cross-linguistic survey provides motivation for such an account).
The main proposal is that distributive quantification temporarily makes
available two discourse referents within its nuclear scope, the values
of which are required by sentence-internal uses of same/differentto
be identical/distinct – much as their deictic uses require the
values of two discourse referents to be identical/distinct. The
analysis is executed in a stack-based dynamic system and it is fully
compositional because the system is couched in classical type logic.
The formal account is independently motivated by quantificational
subordination, the availability of both dependent and independent
readings for anaphora in the scope of each
and, finally, dependent indefinites in various languages. All these
phenomena provide support for the idea that natural language
quantification is a composite notion, to be decomposed/analyzed in
terms of discourse reference to dependencies that is multiply
constrained by the various components that make up a quantifier.
This paper focuses on the empirical aspects of the problem. The complete formal account is provided in Deictic and Sentence-Internal Readings of Same / Different as Anaphora: A Unified Compositional Account, to appear in the Proceedings of What Syntax Feeds Semantics? (ESSLLI 2008 Workshop) The paper proposes the first unified account of deictic and sentence-internal readings of same/different.
The analysis is executed in a stack-based dynamic system and it is
fully compositional because the system is couched in classical type
logic. The main proposal is
that distributive quantification temporarily makes available two discourse referents within its nuclear scope, the values of which are required by sentence-internal uses of same/different to be identical/distinct – much as their deictic uses require the values of two discourse referents to be identical/distinct. The system is independently motivated by quantificational subordination, the availability of both dependent and independent readings for anaphora in the scope of each and, finally, dependent indefinites in various languages. Thus, same and different provide further support for the idea that natural language quantification is a composite notion, to be analyzed in terms of discourse reference to dependencies that is multiply constrained by the various components that make up a quantifier. This paper focuses on the formal aspects of the problem. For a cross-linguistic survey and more discussion of the empirical issues, see Sentence-Internal Readings of Same / Different as Quantifier-Internal Anaphora, to appear in the Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
to appear in the Proceedings of the 38th Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (also presented at the Syntax and Semantics of Measurability Workshop, CASTL).
The two goals of this paper are: (i) to argue that, syntactically, the measure noun is the head of the extended projection in Romanian pseudopartitive constructions like (1) – much like the leftmost noun is the head of true partitive constructions like (2) (in Romanian, the preposition de appears only with pseudopartitives, while the preposition din/dintre appears only with true partitives); (ii) to propose a suitable semantics for pseudopartitives that accommodates this syntactic generalization. (1) zece grame de brînză (de capră) (2) zece grame din această brînză (de capră) ten grams of cheese (of goat) ten grams of this cheese (of goat) ten grams of (goat) cheese ten grams of this (goat) cheese (3) #zece grame din brînză (de capră) (4) #zece grame de această brînză (de capră)
One of the two main contributions is arguing that measure nouns are polysemous, i.e. they have two distinct, but
closely related senses: (i) a
degree-based one, present in comparatives like Linus is two pounds heavier than Gabby or (arguably) nominal
compounds like two pound stone, and (ii)
an individual-based sense, present in pseudopartitives like ten grams of cheese or true partitives
like ten grams of this cheese and their
Romanian counterparts in (1) and (2) above. Secondly, the polysemy proposal enables us to derive the observation
in Schwarzschild (2006) ("The Role of Dimensions in the Syntax of Noun
Phrases", Syntax 9.1) that measure expressions are
monotonic in pseudopartitives (I use (non-)monotonic in
the sense of Schwarzschild 2006). Syntactically and
semantically, the measure expression is the head of the pseudopartitive while
the other nominal expression is the non-head, in contrast to Schwarzschild (2006), where the head/non-head
categorization is reversed.
in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 12 (Oslo, 2007).
The
paper argues that the variability of the uniqueness effects exhibited
by Hindi and Romanian correlatives is due to their mixed referential
and quantificational nature. The account involves an articulated notion
of quantification, independently motivated by donkey anaphora and
quantificational subordination and consisting of both (discourse)
referential components and non-referential components (dynamic
operators over plural info states). The variable uniqueness effects
emerge out of the interaction between: (i) the semantics of wh-indefinites, singular anaphors and habitual morphology and (ii)
the pragmatics of quantification, which allows for the selection of
different levels of 'zoom-in' on the quantified-over objects.
Stanford University ms. that significantly revises and expands the Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Computation 14 paper.The paper proposes a novel analysis of quantificational subordination, e.g. Harvey courts a woman at every convention. {She is very pretty. vs. She always comes to the banquet with him.}
(Karttunen 1976), in particular of the fact that the indefinite in the
initial sentence can have wide or narrow scope, but the first discourse
as a whole allows only for the wide scope reading, while the second
discourse allows for both readings. The cross-sentential interaction
between scope and anaphora is captured in terms of structured anaphora
to quantifier domains, formalized in a new dynamic system couched in
classical type logic; given the underlying type logic, Montague-style
compositionality at sub-clausal level follows automatically. Modal
subordination (Roberts 1987) is analyzed in a parallel way, thereby
capturing the parallels between the individual and modal domains argued
for in Stone (1999). Several other phenomena are analyzed in terms of
structured anaphora: exceptional wide scope, weak / strong donkey
readings, anaphoric / uniqueness-implying definite descriptions and interactions between same / different and quantifier scope.
The two goals of this presentation are: (i)
to argue that quantificational subordination and exceptional
wide scope are just two aspects of the same phenomenon, namely anaphora
to quantificational dependencies, and (ii)
to provide a novel, unified account of the two phenomena in a
compositional dynamic system that makes crucial use of plural
information states (modeled as sets of variable assignments) to
incrementally encode information about quantificational dependencies
and pass it on across sentential boundaries.
in the Program Booklet of The 7th International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation, Tbilisi.
The paper proposes a
novel account to the problem of exceptional scope (ES) of
(in)definites, e.g. the widest and intermediate scope readings of the
sentence Every student of mine read every poem that a famous Romanian poet wrote before World War II.
We propose that ES readings are available when the sentence is
interpreted as anaphoric to quantificational domains and
quantificational dependencies introduced in the previous discourse. For
example, the two every quantifiers and the
indefinite elaborate on the sets of individuals and the
correlations between them
introduced by a previous sentence like Every student chose a poet and read every poem written by him (for the intermediate scope reading) or a sentence like Every student chose a poet - the same poet - and read every poem written by him
(for the widest scope reading). Our account, formulated within
a compositional dynamic system couched in classical type logic, relies
on two independently motivated assumptions: (a) the discourse context stores not only (sets of) individuals, but also quantificational dependencies between them, and (b)
quantifier domains are always contextually restricted. Under this
analysis, (in)definites are unambiguous and we do not resort to
movement or special storage mechanisms, nor do weposit special choice-functional variables.
Stanford University ms. that significantly revises and expands the Sinn und Bedeutung 11 paper.The paper argues that two distinct and independent notions
of plurality are involved in natural language anaphora and
quantification: plural reference (the usual non-atomic individuals) and plural discourse reference,
i.e. reference to a quantificational dependency between sets of objects
(e.g. atomic / non-atomic individuals) that is established and
subsequently elaborated upon in discourse. Following van den Berg
(1996), plural discourse reference is modeled as plural information
states (i.e. as sets of variable assignments) in a new dynamic system
couched in classical type logic that extends Compositional DRT (Muskens
1996). Given the underlying type logic, compositionality at sub-clausal
level follows automatically and standard techniques from Montague
semantics become available. The idea that plural info states are
semantically necessary (in addition to non-atomic individuals) is
motivated by relative-clause donkey sentences with multiple instances
of singular donkey anaphora that have mixed (weak and strong) readings.
At the same time, allowing for non-atomic individuals in addition to
plural info states enables us to capture the intuitive parallels
between singular and plural (donkey) anaphora, while deriving the
incompatibility between singular (donkey) anaphora and collective
predicates. The system also accounts for empirically unrelated
phenomena, e.g. the uniqueness effects associated with singular
(donkey) anaphora discussed in Kadmon (1990) and Heim (1990) among
others.
Here are some types of donkey sentences that are analyzed in this paper; many of the examples are (based on examples) from the previous literature -- see the paper for their sources. 1. Everyu person who buys au' book on amazon.com and has au'' credit card uses itu'' to pay for itu'. (mixed weak & strong donkey sentences) 2. #Everyu farmer who owns au'donkey gathers itu' around the fire at night. (singular donkey anaphora and collective predicates) 3. Everyu parent who gives au' balloon to twou'' boys expects themu'' to end up fighting (each other) for itu'. (multiple singular and plural donkey anaphora and collective predicates) 4. Everybodyu who bought twou' sage plants here bought sevenu'' others along with themu'. (plural sage plant examples) 5. Mostu house-elves who fall in love with au' witch buy heru' anu'' alligator purse. (proportions) 6. There is au doctor in London and heu is Welsh. (uniqueness effects in non-quantificational contexts) 7. Everyu man who has au' son wills himu' all his money. (uniqueness effects and donkey anaphora) 8. Nou man who had au' credit card failed to use itu'. (strong donkey readings with no) 9. Everyu person who had au' dime in his pocket refused to put itu' in the meter. (strong readings for 'dime' examples with nuclear scope negation) 10. Everyu company that hired au' Moldavian man, but nou'' company that hired au' Transylvanian man promoted himu' within two weeks of hiring. (mixed weak & strong donkey sentences with a single donkey pronoun) 11. Everyu''' man who introduced au friend to meu' thought weu+u'u'' had something in common. (plural donkey anaphora with split antecedents) 12. Everyu linguist who works on au' difficult problem is interested to read mostu'' papers that were written about itu'. (donkey anaphora and 'exceptional wide scope')
in Pitar Mos: A Building with a View. Papers in Honour of Alexandra Cornilescu, G. Alboiu, A. Avram, L. Avram & D. Isac (eds.), Bucharest: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti.
In this paper, we study the parameters that come into play when assessing the truth conditions of say reports and contrast them with belief attributions. We argue that these conditions are sensitive in intricate ways to the connection between the interpretation of the complement of say and the properties of the reported speech act. There are three general areas this exercise is relevant to, besides the immediate issue of understanding the meaning of say: (i) the discussion shows the need to go beyond the simplest view of propositional attitudes, which treats them as restricted quantifiers over worlds; (ii) the complex connections that must exist between the say report and its source speech act show that one has to be able to differentiate between various layers of meaning for the antecedent sentences; (iii) finally, this paper is a small step towards a typology of propositional attitudes that allows us to uncover the complex web of relationships that grammatical mood is sensitive to.
in the Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Computation , Rio de Janeiro.
The
paper proposes an account of the contrast (noticed in Karttunen 1976)
between the interpretations of the following two discourses: Harvey courts a girl at every convention. {She is very pretty. vs. She always comes to the banquet with him.}.
The initial sentence is ambiguous between two quantifier scopings, but
the first discourse as a whole allows only for the wide-scope
indefinite reading, while the second allows for both. This
cross-sentential interaction between quantifier scope and anaphora is
captured by means of a new dynamic system couched in classical type
logic, which extends Compositional DRT (Muskens 1996) with plural
information states (modeled, following van den Berg 1996, as sets of
variable assignments). Given the underlying type logic,
compositionality at sub-clausal level follows automatically and
standard techniques from Montague semantics become available. The paper
also shows that modal subordination (A wolf might come in. It would eat Harvey first)
can be analyzed in a parallel way, i.e. the system captures the
anaphoric and quantificational parallels between the individual and
modal domains argued for in Stone (1999) (among others). In the
process, we see that modal / individual-level quantifiers enter
anaphoric connections as a matter of course, usually functioning
simultaneously as both indefinites and pronouns.
in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 11,
Barcelona; also presented at the Dynamic
Semantics Workshop,
Institutt for filosofi, ide- og
kunsthistorie og klassiske (IFIKK), University of Oslo and in the
Linguistics Colloquium Series of the Linguistics Department, University
of Maryland (a new, visually enhanced version of the slides is
available here).
The paper argues that two distinct and
independent notions of plurality are involved in natural language anaphora and
quantification: plural reference,
i.e. the usual non-atomic individuals, e.g. the non-atomic individual megan+gaby that is the sum of the two atoms megan and gaby and that the
sentence Megan and Gaby are deskmates
is about, and plural discourse reference,
i.e. reference to a quantificational dependency between sets of objects (atomic
/ non-atomic individuals) that is established and subsequently elaborated upon
in discourse, e.g. the dependency between gifts and girls introduced in the
first conjunct and elaborated upon in the second conjunct of sentence (1)
below.
However, morphologically plural anaphora of the kind instantiated in (1) does not provide a clear-cut argument for distinguishing plural reference and plural discourse reference: both notions / either notion could be involved in the interpretation of (1). Therefore, I use sentences with multiple instances of singular donkey anaphora like (2) and (3) below to provide independent semantic motivation for plural discourse reference over and above plural reference. The final dynamic system (couched in classical type logic) will also be able to capture the intuitive parallels between singular and plural (donkey) anaphora, e.g. the parallel between the interpretations of (3) and (4) below, as well as the incompatibility between singular donkey anaphora and collective predicates exemplified in (5).
(1) John bought au gift for everyu'
girl in his class and asked theiru'
deskmates to wrap themu.
(2) Everyu person who buys au' book on amazon.com and has au'' credit card uses itu'' to pay for itu'. (3) Everyu boy who bought au' Christmas gift for au'' girl in his class asked heru'' deskmate to wrap itu'. (4) Everyu parent who gives au' balloon / threeu' balloons to twou'' boys expects themu'' to end up fighting (each other) for itu' / themu'. (based on an example due to Maria Bittner, p.c.) (5) #Everyu farmer who owns au' donkey gathers itu' around the fire at night. (based on an example in Kanazawa 2001)
The paper argues that discourse reference in natural language involves two equally important components with essentially the same interpretive dynamics, namely reference to values, i.e. (non-singleton) sets of individuals, and reference to structure, i.e. the correlation / dependency between such sets, which is introduced and incrementally elaborated upon in discourse. To define and investigate structured discourse reference, a new dynamic system couched in classical (many-sorted) type logic is introduced which extends Compositional DRT (Muskens 1996) with plural information states, i.e. information states are modeled as sets of variable assignments (following van den Berg 1996), which can be can be represented as matrices with assignments (sequences) as rows. A plural info state encodes both values (the columns of the matrix store sets of objects) and structure (each row of the matrix encodes a correlation / dependency between the objects stored in it). Given the underlying type logic, compositionality at sub-clausal level follows automatically and standard techniques from Montague semantics (e.g. type shifting) become available. The idea that plural info states are semantically necessary is motivated by relative-clause donkey sentences with multiple singular anaphors: (i) mixed reading (weak & strong) sentences: Every person who buys a book on amazon.com and has a credit card uses it to pay for it; (ii) sentences exemplifying donkey anaphora to structure: Every boy who bought a Christmas gift for a girl in his class asked her deskmate to wrap it.in the Proceedings of the Ninth Symposium on Logic and Language, B. Gyuris, L. Kalman, C. Pinon & K. Varasdi (eds.), Besenyőtelek, Hungary, August 24–26, 2006.The paper introduces a notion of structured discourse referents which, together with a possible worlds analysis of intensional phenomena, accounts for examples of modal subordination and entailment particles. The resulting compositional dynamic system – couched in classical type logic – captures the truth-conditions of and the modal and individual-level anaphoric connections established in discourses like: [A] man cannot live without joy. Therefore, when he is deprived of true spiritual joys, it is necessary that he become addicted to carnal pleasures. (Thomas Aquinas, attributed).
in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 10, published as ZASPIL (ZAS Papers in Linguistics), Volume 44, Ch. Ebert & C. Endriss (eds.), 2006.The paper investigates the interpretation of the Romanian subjunctive B (subjB) mood when it is embedded under the propositional attitude verb crede (believe). SubjB is analyzed as a single package of three distinct presuppositions: temporal de se, dissociation and propositional de se. I show that subjB is the temporal analogue of null PRO in the individual domain: it allows only for a de se reading. Dissociation enables us to show that subjB always takes scope over a negation embedded in a belief report. Propositional de se derives this empirical generalization. The introduction of centered propositions (generalizing centered worlds), together with propositional de se, dissociation and the belief 'introspection' principles, derives the fact that subjB belief reports (unlike their indicative counterparts) are infelicitous with embedded probabil.DIP Colloquium Series, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) & Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam.Graduiertenkolleg (GK) Colloquium, University of Frankfurt.
University of Bucharest Linguistics Conference.A basic analysis of how the form of a pronoun (in particular, null vs. overt) affects preferences in anaphora resolution; executed in a compositional dynamic system with elementary centering.
University of Bucharest Linguistics Conference. |
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