Kai von Fintel | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (original) (raw)

Papers by Kai von Fintel

Abstract Epistemic modals are standardly taken to be context-dependent quantifiers over possibili... more Abstract Epistemic modals are standardly taken to be context-dependent quantifiers over possibilities. Thus sentences containing them get truth-values with respect to both a context and an index. But some insist that this relativization is not relative enough:might'-claims, they say, only get truth-values with respect to contexts, indices, and���the new wrinkle���points of assessment (hence, cia). Here we argue against such ���relativist��� semantics. We begin with a sketch of the motivation for such theories and a generic formulation of them.

Presupposition accommodation is the process by which the context is adjusted quietly and without ... more Presupposition accommodation is the process by which the context is adjusted quietly and without fuss to accept the utterance of a sentence that imposes certain requirements on the context in which it is processed. In this paper, I explore some questions about accommodation that are still often asked. There are complaints that the putative process involves mysterious magic and that it is posited only to save a superfluous or wrong theory of presupposition.

Page 1. Semantics & Pragmatics Volume 0, Article 2: 1–14, 2007 http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/ sp.0.2 ... more Page 1. Semantics & Pragmatics Volume 0, Article 2: 1–14, 2007 http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/ sp.0.2 Instructions for S&P authors using LATEX2ε ∗ Kai von Fintel Massachusetts Institute of Technology Christopher Potts University of Massachusetts Amherst Chung-chieh Shan Rutgers University First published 2007-11-27. Latest version: 2011-12-20.

Page 1. Epistemic Modals and Conditionals Revisited Kai von Fintel Massachusetts Institute of Tec... more Page 1. Epistemic Modals and Conditionals Revisited Kai von Fintel Massachusetts Institute of Technology UMass Linguistics Colloquium, December 12, 2003 Epistemic Modals and Conditionals Outline Outline of this Talk What I Learned in Grad School Complaints An Expressive Analysis of Epistemic Modals and Conditionals?

At first glance, this is an entirely unremarkable kind of sentence. It is easy to find naturally ... more At first glance, this is an entirely unremarkable kind of sentence. It is easy to find naturally occuring exponents. Its meaning is also clear: taking the A train is a necessary condition for going to Harlem. Hence the term “anankastic conditional”, Ananke being the Greek protogonos of inevitability, compulsion and necessity.

Languages can express the existence of an easy way of achieving a goal in a construction we call ... more Languages can express the existence of an easy way of achieving a goal in a construction we call the sufficiency modal construction (SMC), which combines a minimizing/exclusive operator like only or ne… que and a goal-oriented necessity modal like have to or need to, asin To get good cheese, you only have to go to the North End. We show that the morphosyntactic makeup of the SMC is crosslinguistically stable. We show that the semantics of the construction poses a severe compositionality problem.

Thanks to colleagues who over the last years talked with me about my work and theirs. Most import... more Thanks to colleagues who over the last years talked with me about my work and theirs. Most importantly, thanks to the three other members of the semantics circle of 1990-1992 at UMass: Hotze Rullmann, Paul Portner, and Veena Dwivedi. I first met Sabine Iatridou at NELS 22 in Delaware and since then we have been talking about conditionals. Ed Keenan at various conferences and during a visit to Amherst encouraged me to keep on working on exceptives and their semantics.

This article concerns a new constraint on the interaction of quantifier phrases and epistemic mod... more This article concerns a new constraint on the interaction of quantifier phrases and epistemic modals. It is argued that QPs cannot bind their traces across an epistemic modal, though it is shown that scoping mechanisms of a different nature are permitted to cross epistemic modals. The nature and source of this constraint are investigated.

Grammaticalization is the gradual historical development of function morphemes from content morph... more Grammaticalization is the gradual historical development of function morphemes from content morphemes. Among the commonly identified characteristics of this process is what is often called ���semantic bleaching���: while becoming more and more functional the morpheme loses most of its meaning. In this paper, I ask what sense we can make of ���semantic bleaching��� from a formal semantic perspective.

Page 1. 1/50 The Meanings of Epistemic Modality Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou Massachusetts ... more Page 1. 1/50 The Meanings of Epistemic Modality Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Department of Linguistics and Philosophy) email: fintel@mit.edu & iatridou@mit.edu Presentation at Sinn und Bedeutung 7, Universit��t Konstanz, October 5, 2002 Page 2. 2/50 Outline 1. The ECP 2. Ja 3. The No-Binding Effect 4. Epistemic Meanings Page 3. 3/50 The Epistemic Containment Principle A quantifier cannot have scope over an epistemic modal.

The original plan was to talk about existence presuppositions of various sorts of NPs. In the end... more The original plan was to talk about existence presuppositions of various sorts of NPs. In the end, what emerged was an extended commentary on recent research by Cleo Condoravdi and Veneeta Dayal. It is unclear to me what will happen to this work in the future. For comments, I thank the participants of an MIT semantics seminar, especially Danny Fox, Irene Heim, Orin Percus, Uli Sauerland, and Dag Wold.

Condoravdi's system (i) generates alternatives to the property inside the whatever definite descr... more Condoravdi's system (i) generates alternatives to the property inside the whatever definite description,(ii) puts them into a kind of storage, and then (iii) discharges them either rather locally (in which case we get indifference readings) or globally (in which case ignorance readings predominate).

Abstract It is a recurring matra that epistemic must creates a statement that is weaker than the ... more Abstract It is a recurring matra that epistemic must creates a statement that is weaker than the corresponding flat-footed assertion: It must be raining vs. It's raining. Contrary to classic discussions of the phenomenon such as by Karttunen, Kratzer, and Veltman, we argue that instead of having a weak semantics, must presupposes the presence of an indirect inference or deduction rather than of a direct observation. This is independent of the strength of the claim being made.

This article introduces the classic accounts of the meaning of conditionals (material implication... more This article introduces the classic accounts of the meaning of conditionals (material implication, strict implication, variably strict conditional) and discusses the difference between indicative and subjunctive/counterfactual conditionals. Then, the restrictor analysis of Lewis/Kratzer/Heim is introduced as a theory of how conditional meanings come about compositionally: if has no meaning other than serving to mark the restriction to an operator elsewhere in the conditional construction.

Hearers can extract from an asserted sentence a good amount of information that goes beyond the g... more 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.

Abstract The compositional semantics of sentences like Only mammals give live birth and The flag ... more Abstract The compositional semantics of sentences like Only mammals give live birth and The flag flies only if the Queen is home is a tough problem. Evidence is presented to show that only here is modifying an underlying proposition (its 'prejacent'). After discussing the semantics of only, the question of the proper interpretation of the prejacent is explored. It would be nice if the prejacent could be analyzed as having existential quantificational force.

Abstract This article surveys the state of the art in the field of semantic universals. We examin... more Abstract This article surveys the state of the art in the field of semantic universals. We examine potential semantic universals in three areas:(i) the lexicon,(ii) semantic “glue”(functional morphemes and composition principles), and (iii) pragmatics. At the level of the lexicon, we find remarkably few convincing semantic universals. At the level of functional morphemes and composition principles, we discuss a number of promising constraints, most of which require further empirical testing and/or refinement.

Epistemic modals are interesting in part because their semantics is bound up both with our inform... more Epistemic modals are interesting in part because their semantics is bound up both with our information about the world and with how that information changes as we share what we know. Given that epistemic modals are dependent in some way on the information available in the contexts in which they are used, it's not surprising that there is a minor but growing industry of work in semantics and the philosophy of language concerned with the precise nature of the context-dependency of epistemically modalized sentences.

Why are some conditionals subjunctive? It is often assumed that at least one crucial difference i... more Why are some conditionals subjunctive? It is often assumed that at least one crucial difference is that subjunctive conditionals presuppose that their antecedent is false, that they are counterfactual (Lakoff 1970). The traditional theory has apparently been refuted. Perhaps the clearest counter-example is one given by Alan Anderson (1951: 37): If Jones had taken arsenic, he would have shown just exactly those symptoms which he does in fact show.

The background for this squib is the ongoing debate about whether natural language quantifiers ca... more The background for this squib is the ongoing debate about whether natural language quantifiers carry existence presuppositions, a claim that was prominently introduced by Strawson (1952) and that has been very influential in recent work in the syntax/semantics-interface, in particular Diesing (1992).

Abstract Epistemic modals are standardly taken to be context-dependent quantifiers over possibili... more Abstract Epistemic modals are standardly taken to be context-dependent quantifiers over possibilities. Thus sentences containing them get truth-values with respect to both a context and an index. But some insist that this relativization is not relative enough:might'-claims, they say, only get truth-values with respect to contexts, indices, and���the new wrinkle���points of assessment (hence, cia). Here we argue against such ���relativist��� semantics. We begin with a sketch of the motivation for such theories and a generic formulation of them.

Presupposition accommodation is the process by which the context is adjusted quietly and without ... more Presupposition accommodation is the process by which the context is adjusted quietly and without fuss to accept the utterance of a sentence that imposes certain requirements on the context in which it is processed. In this paper, I explore some questions about accommodation that are still often asked. There are complaints that the putative process involves mysterious magic and that it is posited only to save a superfluous or wrong theory of presupposition.

Page 1. Semantics & Pragmatics Volume 0, Article 2: 1–14, 2007 http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/ sp.0.2 ... more Page 1. Semantics & Pragmatics Volume 0, Article 2: 1–14, 2007 http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/ sp.0.2 Instructions for S&P authors using LATEX2ε ∗ Kai von Fintel Massachusetts Institute of Technology Christopher Potts University of Massachusetts Amherst Chung-chieh Shan Rutgers University First published 2007-11-27. Latest version: 2011-12-20.

Page 1. Epistemic Modals and Conditionals Revisited Kai von Fintel Massachusetts Institute of Tec... more Page 1. Epistemic Modals and Conditionals Revisited Kai von Fintel Massachusetts Institute of Technology UMass Linguistics Colloquium, December 12, 2003 Epistemic Modals and Conditionals Outline Outline of this Talk What I Learned in Grad School Complaints An Expressive Analysis of Epistemic Modals and Conditionals?

At first glance, this is an entirely unremarkable kind of sentence. It is easy to find naturally ... more At first glance, this is an entirely unremarkable kind of sentence. It is easy to find naturally occuring exponents. Its meaning is also clear: taking the A train is a necessary condition for going to Harlem. Hence the term “anankastic conditional”, Ananke being the Greek protogonos of inevitability, compulsion and necessity.

Languages can express the existence of an easy way of achieving a goal in a construction we call ... more Languages can express the existence of an easy way of achieving a goal in a construction we call the sufficiency modal construction (SMC), which combines a minimizing/exclusive operator like only or ne… que and a goal-oriented necessity modal like have to or need to, asin To get good cheese, you only have to go to the North End. We show that the morphosyntactic makeup of the SMC is crosslinguistically stable. We show that the semantics of the construction poses a severe compositionality problem.

Thanks to colleagues who over the last years talked with me about my work and theirs. Most import... more Thanks to colleagues who over the last years talked with me about my work and theirs. Most importantly, thanks to the three other members of the semantics circle of 1990-1992 at UMass: Hotze Rullmann, Paul Portner, and Veena Dwivedi. I first met Sabine Iatridou at NELS 22 in Delaware and since then we have been talking about conditionals. Ed Keenan at various conferences and during a visit to Amherst encouraged me to keep on working on exceptives and their semantics.

This article concerns a new constraint on the interaction of quantifier phrases and epistemic mod... more This article concerns a new constraint on the interaction of quantifier phrases and epistemic modals. It is argued that QPs cannot bind their traces across an epistemic modal, though it is shown that scoping mechanisms of a different nature are permitted to cross epistemic modals. The nature and source of this constraint are investigated.

Grammaticalization is the gradual historical development of function morphemes from content morph... more Grammaticalization is the gradual historical development of function morphemes from content morphemes. Among the commonly identified characteristics of this process is what is often called ���semantic bleaching���: while becoming more and more functional the morpheme loses most of its meaning. In this paper, I ask what sense we can make of ���semantic bleaching��� from a formal semantic perspective.

Page 1. 1/50 The Meanings of Epistemic Modality Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou Massachusetts ... more Page 1. 1/50 The Meanings of Epistemic Modality Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Department of Linguistics and Philosophy) email: fintel@mit.edu & iatridou@mit.edu Presentation at Sinn und Bedeutung 7, Universit��t Konstanz, October 5, 2002 Page 2. 2/50 Outline 1. The ECP 2. Ja 3. The No-Binding Effect 4. Epistemic Meanings Page 3. 3/50 The Epistemic Containment Principle A quantifier cannot have scope over an epistemic modal.

The original plan was to talk about existence presuppositions of various sorts of NPs. In the end... more The original plan was to talk about existence presuppositions of various sorts of NPs. In the end, what emerged was an extended commentary on recent research by Cleo Condoravdi and Veneeta Dayal. It is unclear to me what will happen to this work in the future. For comments, I thank the participants of an MIT semantics seminar, especially Danny Fox, Irene Heim, Orin Percus, Uli Sauerland, and Dag Wold.

Condoravdi's system (i) generates alternatives to the property inside the whatever definite descr... more Condoravdi's system (i) generates alternatives to the property inside the whatever definite description,(ii) puts them into a kind of storage, and then (iii) discharges them either rather locally (in which case we get indifference readings) or globally (in which case ignorance readings predominate).

Abstract It is a recurring matra that epistemic must creates a statement that is weaker than the ... more Abstract It is a recurring matra that epistemic must creates a statement that is weaker than the corresponding flat-footed assertion: It must be raining vs. It's raining. Contrary to classic discussions of the phenomenon such as by Karttunen, Kratzer, and Veltman, we argue that instead of having a weak semantics, must presupposes the presence of an indirect inference or deduction rather than of a direct observation. This is independent of the strength of the claim being made.

This article introduces the classic accounts of the meaning of conditionals (material implication... more This article introduces the classic accounts of the meaning of conditionals (material implication, strict implication, variably strict conditional) and discusses the difference between indicative and subjunctive/counterfactual conditionals. Then, the restrictor analysis of Lewis/Kratzer/Heim is introduced as a theory of how conditional meanings come about compositionally: if has no meaning other than serving to mark the restriction to an operator elsewhere in the conditional construction.

Hearers can extract from an asserted sentence a good amount of information that goes beyond the g... more 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.

Abstract The compositional semantics of sentences like Only mammals give live birth and The flag ... more Abstract The compositional semantics of sentences like Only mammals give live birth and The flag flies only if the Queen is home is a tough problem. Evidence is presented to show that only here is modifying an underlying proposition (its 'prejacent'). After discussing the semantics of only, the question of the proper interpretation of the prejacent is explored. It would be nice if the prejacent could be analyzed as having existential quantificational force.

Abstract This article surveys the state of the art in the field of semantic universals. We examin... more Abstract This article surveys the state of the art in the field of semantic universals. We examine potential semantic universals in three areas:(i) the lexicon,(ii) semantic “glue”(functional morphemes and composition principles), and (iii) pragmatics. At the level of the lexicon, we find remarkably few convincing semantic universals. At the level of functional morphemes and composition principles, we discuss a number of promising constraints, most of which require further empirical testing and/or refinement.

Epistemic modals are interesting in part because their semantics is bound up both with our inform... more Epistemic modals are interesting in part because their semantics is bound up both with our information about the world and with how that information changes as we share what we know. Given that epistemic modals are dependent in some way on the information available in the contexts in which they are used, it's not surprising that there is a minor but growing industry of work in semantics and the philosophy of language concerned with the precise nature of the context-dependency of epistemically modalized sentences.

Why are some conditionals subjunctive? It is often assumed that at least one crucial difference i... more Why are some conditionals subjunctive? It is often assumed that at least one crucial difference is that subjunctive conditionals presuppose that their antecedent is false, that they are counterfactual (Lakoff 1970). The traditional theory has apparently been refuted. Perhaps the clearest counter-example is one given by Alan Anderson (1951: 37): If Jones had taken arsenic, he would have shown just exactly those symptoms which he does in fact show.

The background for this squib is the ongoing debate about whether natural language quantifiers ca... more The background for this squib is the ongoing debate about whether natural language quantifiers carry existence presuppositions, a claim that was prominently introduced by Strawson (1952) and that has been very influential in recent work in the syntax/semantics-interface, in particular Diesing (1992).