Two-dimensional Semantics: Clausal Adjuncts and Complements

Description

This book argues that in order to account for the compositional behavior of many near-synonymous items, semantic analyses need to pay close attention to at least two semantic dimensions: standard assertions and conventional implicatures, which express additional side comments. The discussed phenomena are clausal adjuncts and complements in German. The new analysis of ‘weil’ and ‘denn’ (‘because’) shows that both contribute the same semantic operator, but one as an assertion, the other as a conventional implicature. This explains why only ‘denn’ can have speech-act modifying uses. This novel two-dimensional analysis is extended to other sentence adjuncts such as regular vs. relevance conditionals, although-clauses, and sentence adverbs. Further, the book investigates certain complement clauses. It analyzes sliftings as evidential-like parentheticals which contribute their meaning on the conventional implicature dimension. In contrast, German embedded verb-second clauses are shown to be truly embedded and analyzed as operating in the assertion dimension. The verb-second syntax is shown to contribute an additional epistemic component on the conventional implicature dimension. 1 Introduction 2 Two-Dimensional Semantics 2.1 Conventional Implicature 2.2 Conventional Implicatures vs. Presuppositions 2.2.1 A Discourse Logic 3 Sentence Adverbs 3.1 Types of Sentence Adverbs 3.2 Semantic Unembeddability 3.2.1 Antecedent of Conditionals 3.2.2 Questions 3.2.3 Negation 3.2.4 Denial 3.2.5 Attitude Verbs 3.2.6 Semantic (Un)embeddability of Sentence Adverbs 3.3 Properties of German Sentence Adverbs 3.3.1 The probably Type 3.3.2 The unfortunately Type 3.3.3 The frankly Type 3.3.4 Frankly Speaking 3.3.5 Properties of Three Types of Sentence Adverbs 3.4 Sentence Adverbs on Two Semantic Dimensions 3.5 Syntax/Semantics Mismatch 3.5.1 An Anaphoric Approach to Utterance Modification 3.6 Summary 4 Denn and Weil – Causal Connectives in Two Dimensions 4.1 Data 4.1.1 Two German Words for ‘Because’ 4.1.2 Epistemic and Speech Act Uses 4.1.3 Three Exceptions to the Use of Denn 4.2 Previous Work 4.2.1 The Performative Analysis 4.2.2 Denn and Antibackgrounding 4.3 Semantics of denn 4.3.1 Denn as a Conventional Implicature Item 4.3.2 Unembeddability of denn 4.3.3 Formalizing denn’s Semantics 4.4 Syntax of denn 4.5 The Distribution of denn vs. weil Explained 4.5.1 Denn in Epistemic and Speech Act Causal Sentences 4.5.2 Three Exceptions to the Use of denn 4.6 Further Issues 4.6.1 Epistemic and Speech Act Uses of weil 4.6.2 English because 4.6.3 Embedding under Non-Restrictive Relative Clauses 4.7 Summary 5 Relevance Conditionals – If on Another Dimension 5.1 Crucial Properties of Relevance Conditionals 5.1.1 Semantic Unembeddability 5.1.2 Illocutionary Status of the Consequent 5.1.3 Syntactic Unintegration 5.2 The Analysis: ‘If’ on Two Dimensions 5.2.1 Proposal 5.2.2 Net Effect of the If-Clause in RCs 5.2.3 Discussion 5.3 Previous Accounts 5.3.1 Conditional Assertion Accounts 5.3.2 Existential Quantification over Potential Literal Acts 5.3.3 Relevance Conditionals as Topics 5.4 Summary 6 A Paradigm of Adjuncts on Two Dimensions 6.1 Taking Stock 6.1.1 Syntactic Unintegration 6.1.2 Argument Types of CI Modifiers 6.2 Although 6.3 Modifiers on Different Dimensions 7 Complement Clauses 7.1 Attitude Verbs and Their Complements 7.1.1 V2 Embedding 7.1.2 Slifting 7.1.3 Properties of Slifting vs. V2 embedding 7.2 Verbs that Allow Slifting and V2 Complements 7.2.1 Which verbs allow V2 complements? 7.2.2 Which Verbs do Not Allow V2 Complements? 7.2.3 Slifting Verbs 7.2.4 Generalization: Epistemicity 7.3 Slifting as Evidentials 7.3.1 Analysis 7.3.2 Slifting and Verb Classes 7.3.3 Slifting and Semantic Embedding 7.3.4 Summary: Slifting 7.4 V2 Complement Clauses 7.4.1 Analysis 7.4.2 V2 Complement Clauses and Verb Classes 7.4.3 V2 Complement Clauses and Semantic Embedding 7.4.4 Summary: V2 Complement Clauses 7.5 Summary: V2 Complements & Slifting 8 Conclusion Bibliography Term Index Author Index