Patrícia Amaral

We review Potts’ influential book on the semantics of conventional implicature (CI), offering an explication of his technical apparatus and drawing out the proposal’s implications, focusing on the class of CIs he calls supplements. While we applaud many facets of this work, we argue that careful considerations of the pragmatics of CIs will be required in order to yield an empirically and explanatorily adequate account.

One of the main communicative functions of subject personal pronouns (SPPs) in Spanish and European Portuguese (as well as other “pro”-drop languages) is to mark “contrast”. This function is recognized by nearly all grammars of these languages (eg Alarcos Llorach 1994; Butt & Benjamin 2000; Gili Gaya 1943; Cunha & Cintra 1987), and has been succinctly summarized recently by Luján:“[E] l uso explícito de un pronombre personal tónico en posiciones donde su omisión es normal obedece a razones de contraste o énfasis”(1999: 1277). 1 However, neither these works nor more specialized studies tend to be explicit about the OBLIGATORINESS OR OPTIONALITY of SPPs in contrastive contexts. Must SPPs appear in contrastive contexts or are they merely a POTENTIAL feature of such contexts? As a result of this inexplicitness, there is no consensus on the issue, and several different positions regarding the (non-) occurrence of contrastive SPPs can be found in the literature. On the one hand, there exists a number of studies where contrastive contexts (or a subset thereof) are considered to be obligatory contexts for subject pronouns. Examples of this approach in the study of Spanish can be found in Silva-Corvalán (1982, 1994, 2001, 2003), Cameron (1992, 1995, 1997), Bayley & Pease-Álvarez (1997), and Solomon (1999). The common bond that unites these studies is that they are all carried out within a variationist (socio) linguistic framework in the Labovian tradition (cf. Labov 1972). In this tradition, an important methodological step that serves as a necessary precursor to quantitative analysis is the identification of the so-called “envelope …

Pragmatic information is integral to language use for both adults and children. Children rely on contextually shared knowledge to communicate before they can talk: they make use of gesture to convey their first meanings and then add words to gestures. Like adults, they build on joint attention, physical copresence, and conversational copresence both as they acquire and as they use language. This can be seen in children’s early communication, in their first inferences about word and utterance meanings, and in their ability to make use of appropriate contextual information as they learn how to interpret and produce terms like big or long compared to full, almost and only, and all and some.

This dissertation presents an analysis of the semantic-pragmatic properties of adverbs like English'almost'and'barely'(“approximative adverbs”), both in a descriptive and in a theoretical perspective. In particular, it investigates to what extent the meaning distinctions encoded by the system of approximative adverbs in European Portuguese (EP) shed light on the characterization of these adverbs as a class and on the challenges raised by their semantic-pragmatic properties. The meaning of the EP adverbials' quase','mal'and'por pouco'is analyzed in detail. The focus is on the intuitive notion of closeness associated with the meaning of these adverbs and the related question of the asymmetry of their meaning components. It is argued that approximative adverbs are degree adverbs that contribute a comparison between properties along a scalar dimension. Their meaning makes reference to a standard value of comparison that is retrieved on the basis of both lexical and contextual information.

This paper focuses on the interpretation of the Italian approximative adverb quasi ‘almost’ by primarily looking at cases in which it modifies temporal connectives, a domain which, to our knowledge, has been largely unexplored thus far. Consideration of this domain supports the need for a scalar account of the semantics of quasi (close in spirit to Hitzeman’s semantic analysis of almost, in: Canakis et al. (eds) Papers from the 28th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 1992). When paired with suitable analyses of temporal connectives, such an account can provide a simple explanation of the patterns of implication that are observed when quasi modifies locational (e.g. quando ‘when’), directional (e.g. fino ‘until’ and da ‘since’), and event-sequencing temporal connectives (e.g. prima ‘before’ and dopo ‘after’). A challenging empirical phenomenon that is observed is a contrast between the …

Recent research on presupposition has aimed to use techniques of experimental semantics and pragmatics to cast light on the processes that underlie projection and information packaging. Relatively little attention has so far been paid to the relation between the diversity of presuppositions with respect to information packaging and their projection behaviour. In this paper, we argue that information backgrounding and projection can be seen as closely related phenomena, and we present an experimental study investigating the behaviour of a variety of presupposition triggers. We interpret the results as evidence for the psychological reality of at least one of the theoretical distinctions between presupposition types posited in the literature (lexical versus resolution presuppositions), and consider their implications for the competing accounts of presupposition projection.

The literature on almost has identified certain semantic restrictions that cut in a regular way across the different syntactic categories that almost can modify. In this paper, I will focus only on the co-occurrence restrictions of almost with adjectival and verbal predicates.

This chapter builds on previous work on the diversity of English presupposition triggers with respect to their projection behavior in an experimental setting (Amaral et al., Proceedings of ESSLLI 2011 Workshop on Projective Content, pp. 1–7, 2011; Cummins et al., Humana Mente 23:1–15, 2012, Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 17, pp. 201–218, 2013). Using the same methodology and similar materials, but in Spanish, we investigate the empirical validity of the distinction between two classes of presupposition triggers posited in the theoretical literature, namely that between lexical and resolution triggers (Zeevat, Journal of Semantics 9:379–412, 1992). The results of this study replicate our previous findings with English data. First, native speakers exhibit the same tendencies with respect to the addressability of foregrounded vs backgrounded content in coherent question-answer pairs. Second, the results …

The behaviour of presupposition triggers in human language has been extensively studied and given rise to many distinct theoretical proposals. One intuitively appealing way of characterising presupposition is to argue that it constitutes backgrounded meaning, which does not contribute to updating the conversational record, and consequently may not be challenged or refuted by discourse participants. However, there are a wide range of presupposition triggers, some of which can systematically be used to introduce new information. Is there, then, a clear psychological distinction between presupposition and assertion? Do certain expressions vacillate between presupposing and asserting information? And is information backgrounding a categorical or a gradient phenomenon? In this paper we argue for the value of experimental methods in addressing these questions, and present a pilot study demonstrating backgrounding effects of presupposition triggers, and suggesting their gradience in nature. We discuss the implications of these findings for theoretical categorisations of presupposition triggers.

In contemporary Portuguese, the Pretérito Perfeito Composto (henceforth PPC), formed by the Present of ter ‘to have’+ Past Participle, differs from other Romance Perfects in that it does not display the full range of interpretations that are attested for present perfects cross-linguistically (Campos 1986, Giorgi & Pianesi 1997, Schmitt 2001). In main clauses with the indicative, the PPC does not have a resultative interpretation1 and must receive an iterative interpretation, as exemplified in (1): 2

The precise nature of the distinction between asserted/foregrounded meaning and nonasserted/backgrounded meaning (eg presuppositions) is crucial to investigations of what types of meanings can project. We adopt the view that this distinction relies on discourse structure: backgrounded information does not contribute to updating the conversational record (Lewis 1979), whereas foregrounded information does (it addresses the ‘Question Under Discussion’, cf. Roberts 1996; Roberts, Simons, Beaver & Tonhauser 2009). As a consequence, foregrounded information may be challenged or refuted by conversational participants, whereas backgrounded information is harder to refute. This paper investigates the psychological validity of the distinction between these two types of meaning. Is this distinction relevant for native speakers as they use and comprehend language? And is information backgrounding a categorical or a gradient phenomenon? Results of rating and response-time data from a pilot study show that native speakers are sensitive to the difference between these types of information. Our results also provide evidence for an approach to backgrounded content as a heterogeneous phenomenon, corresponding to gradient felicity judgments from native speakers.This paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we discuss the theoretical distinction between foregrounded and backgrounded meaning and justify the types of backgrounded meaning that we will focus on in our study. In Section 3, we present the methodology of our experiment. In Sections 4 and 5, we present and discuss the results of the study. Section 6 provides concluding …

The development of periphrastic past constructions in Romance, including those that do not take a reflex of Latin habe re as an auxiliary, has been analyzed along a continuum from a resultative construction to a perfect, and in some cases to a perfective (see Harris 1982; Fleischman 1983). This paper argues that the development of the Pretérito Perfeito Composto (PPC) in Portuguese does not adhere to the proposed typologies of periphrastic past evolution in Romance. Using diachronic corpus data, we revisit the proposed resultative> perfect grammaticalization path (see Bybee et al. 1994) and contend that the developmental trajectory of the Portuguese PPC is distinct from other cases of periphrastic past evolution in Romance languages, specifically Spanish. We demonstrate that the iterative meaning unique to the PPC in contemporary Portuguese arises in morphosyntactically ambiguous contexts in which the ter+ Past Participle construction co-occurs with semantically plural complements.

This paper combines two strands of research:(i) the study of the discoursecontextual requirements on the use of non-canonical negative forms, and (ii) research on what has recently been termed the “permeable polar membrane”(Horn 2008) of approximative adverbs like English almost and barely. As regards the first, cross-linguistic studies have shown that non-canonical sentential negatives are licensed under particular discourse conditions that relate to information structure (Fretheim 1984, Espinal 1993, Zanuttini 1997, Kaiser 2006, Schwenter 2005, 2006). Regarding the second, it has been observed that the polar component of approximative adverbs is more open to contextual flexibility than their proximal component (see Li 1976, Horn 2002, Schwenter 2002, Amaral 2007 ao). In this paper, we focus on the negative readings of two approximative adverbs, Engl. hardly and European Portuguese (henceforth EP) mal ‘barely, hardly,’and argue that their “strengthened” negative interpretations can be fleshed out in terms of constraints on the discourse structure. In our proposal, we build both on the licensing conditions of non-canonical negatives and on the scalar meaning of approximative adverbs.The structure of the paper is as follows. In section 1, we present the Conjunctive Analysis of approximative adverbs and introduce the canonical and inverted readings of these forms. In section 2, we briefly review the literature on the licensing conditions of non-canonical negatives. Section 3 details the distribution of the inverted readings of Engl. hardly and EP mal and section 4 proposes the constraints on discourse structure effected by these inverted …

This article contributes to the study of approximative adverbs almost and barely by providing psycholinguistic evidence for the asymmetry of their meaning components. The experiments reported are discussed against the background of a set of tests targeting the theoretical status of the meaning components. The first experiment addresses the role played by each meaning component in textual coherence, whereas the second experiment addresses the interpretation in isolation of a sentence containing an approximative adverb. The results argue for a pragmatic difference in the role of the meaning components, along the lines of Horn's (Assertoric inertia and NPI licensing: 55–82, 2002) proposal, pertaining to the way in which the implications of approximative adverbs contribute to context update.

In this paper we analyse the uses of agora'now'and então'then'as deictic and anaphoric temporal adverbs, and as discourse markers. We argue that the semantic functioning of these units illustrates a process of grammaticalization in contemporary European Portuguese. Both cases involve a change from a referential or content meaning to the domains of reasoning and discourse structuring, thereby instantiating productive cognitive patterns that pervade linguistic structure.