The authors outline a theory of conditionals of the form If A then C and If A then possibly C. The 2 sorts of conditional have separate core meanings that refer to sets of possibilities. Knowledge, pragmatics, and semantics can modulate these meanings. Modulation can add information about temporal and other relations between antecedent and consequent. It can also prevent the construction of possibilities to yield 10 distinct sets of possibilities to which conditionals can refer. The mental representation of a conditional normally makes explicit only the possibilities in which its antecedent is true, yielding other possibilities implicitly. Reasoners tend to focus on the explicit possibilities. The theory predicts the major phenomena of understanding and reasoning with conditionals. You reason about conditional relations because much of your knowledge is conditional. If you get caught speeding, then you pay a fine. If you have an operation, then you need time to recuperate. If you have money in the bank, then you can cash a check. Conditional reasoning is a central part of thinking, yet people do not always reason correctly. The lawyer Jan Schlictmann in a celebrated trial (see Harr, 1995, pp. 361–362) elicited the following information from an expert witness about the source of a chemical pollutant trichloroethylene (TCE):

This book deals with the semantics of natural language expressions that are commonly taken to refer to individuals: pronouns, definite descriptions and proper names. It claims, contrary to previous theorizing, that they all have a common syntax and semantics, roughly that which is currently associated by philosophers and linguists with definite descriptions as construed in the tradition of Frege. As well as advancing this proposal, I hope to achieve at least one other aim, that of urging semanticists dealing with pronoun interpretation, in particular donkey anaphora, to consider a wider range of theories at all times than is sometimes done at present. I am thinking particularly of the gulf that seems to have emerged between those who practice some version of dynamic semantics (including DRT) and those who eschew this approach and rely on some version of the E-type analysis for donkey anaphora (if they consider this phenomenon at all). In my opinion there is too little work directly comparing the claims of these two schools (for that is what they amount to) and testing them against the data in the way that any two rival theories might be tested. (Irene Heim’s 1990 article in Linguistics and Philosophy does this, and

Languages that have determiners often have a rich inventory of them. In English, indefinite determiners include a(n), some, a certain, this, one, another, cardinals, partitives, the zero determiner of bare plurals (in some analyses), and, according to Horn 1999 and Giannakidou 2001, any. Despite the attention indefinites have

In this paper, we argue that both modals and tense expressions are anaphoric, and can be handled by the same discourse mechanisms underlying the resolution of pronouns and other anaphoric devices. In support of this, we show that both modals and tense give rise to sloppy identity patterns. We explain this by assuming all anaphors, including tense and modals, can access dynamic discourse referents. By treating sloppy identity as a general feature of the resolution of anaphoric devices in discourse, we give a simple, unified treatment of the sloppy identity patterns observed with tense and modals.

Introduction As noted by Brown (1999), there is general agreement in the literature on Russian "genitive of negation" (GenNeg) that GenNeg occurs only when the NP in question is within the scope of sentential negation (NEG). The apparent optionality of GenNeg within the scope of negation is a point of difficulty, with authors divided about whether the choice between Genitive and Nominative or Accusative in such cases is accompanied by some difference in syntactic structure and/or in semantics or pragmatics. A typical illustration of the correlation of Gen/Nom with scope of negation (underlined), is the classic example (1a-b): (1) a. Moroz ne cuvstvovalsja . Frost-NOM.M.SG NEG be.felt-M.SG `The frost was not felt.' b. Moroza ne cuvstvovalos'. Frost- GEN.M.SG NEG be.felt-N.SG `No frost was felt (there was no frost).' (Babby 1980 p.59) We are grateful for valuable discussions and comments on the genitive of negation to Jurij Apresjan, Leonard Babby, John Bailyn, Wayles Browne,

Abstract. In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk & Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy’s (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of Groenenedijk & Stokhof’s (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij & Schulz (2004).

I wish to thank Bonnie Webber. Without her patience and her seemingly endless depths of insight, I might never have completed this thesis. I am enormously grateful for her guidance. I also owe many thanks to Ellen Prince. She is an intellectual leader at Penn who has helped many, including me, find a way through the jungle of discourse analysis. I am indebted to every professor who has taught me. Special thanks to Robin Clark for being a member of my dissertation committee. I am very lucky to have worked with Aravind Joshi. He is a continual source of knowledge in the DLTAG meetings. The field of computational linguistics has already benefited from his sentencelevel work; I fully expect he and Bonnie will produce similarly useful results with DLTAG. Also in DLTAG, Eleni Miltsakaki and Rashmi Prasad, and later Cassandre Creswell and Jason Teeple all provided stimulation and solace. Their great company and great effort on DLTAG projects taught me to appreciate how much can be done when minds work together. I look forward to the chance to work with them in the future. I am also thankful to Martha Palmer, Paul Kingsbury, and Scott Cotton for allowing me to work with them on the Propbank project and supplement both my income and my work in discourse. On a personal note, the Forbes, Finley, and Riley families deserve thanks for giving me love and diversion and balance and talking me through my education. Most of all, thanks to Enrico Riley, for being everything to me.

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. But that is difficult to maintain, since the prejacent structures when encountered on their own are naturally read as having a lawlike flavor, which in many analyses is attributed to the semantics of implicit operators alleged to be present in them. In the end, an analysis is presented which attributes some very particular properties to these operators and thereby succeeds in providing the target sentences with intuitively adequate interpretations. These complex constructions can therefore be used as a probe into the nature of implicit quantification in natural language.

This paper provides an update semantics for counterfactual conditionals. It does so by giving a dynamic twist to the ‘Premise Semantics ’ for counterfactuals developed in Veltman (1976) and Kratzer (1981). It also offers an alternative solution to the problems with naive Premise Semantics discussed by Angelika Kratzer in ‘Lumps of Thought ’ (Kratzer, 1989). Such an alternative is called for given the triviality results presented in Kanazawa et al. (2005, this issue). 1

We propose that the antecedent of a donkey pronoun takes scope over and binds the donkey pronoun, just like any other quantificational antecedent would bind a pronoun. We flesh out this idea in a grammar that compositionally derives the truth conditions of donkey sentences containing conditionals and relative clauses, including those involving modals and proportional quantifiers. For example, an indefinite in the antecedent of a conditional can bind a donkey pronoun in the consequent by taking scope over the entire conditional. Our grammar manages continuations using three independently motivated type-shifters, Lift, Lower, and Bind. Empirical support comes from donkey weak crossover (*He beats it if a farmer owns a donkey): in our system, a quantificational binder need not c-command a pronoun that it binds, but must be evaluated before it, so that donkey weak crossover is just a special case of weak crossover. We compare our approach to situation-based E-type pronoun analyses, as well as to dynamic accounts such as Dynamic Predicate Logic. A new ‘tower ’ notation makes derivations considerably easier to follow and manipulate than some previous grammars based on continuations.