The grammatical status of Romance pronominal clitics has long been the object of intense debate. Are they syntactically-independent arguments or are they affixal agreement markers? This dissertation addresses this question with respect to Québec Colloquial French (QCF). It treats the morphophonological and morphosyntactic dimensions as two independent dimensions, thus allowing either for affixes to have argument status and prohibiting them from cooccurring with an overt, lexical argument, or for non-affixal elements to behave like agreement markers and not count as syntactic arguments. The analysis reveals that all the clitics of QCF are affixes at the morphological level, since they demonstrate numerous patterns which are too idiosyncratic to be handled by syntactic rules. Only subject clitics, however, function as agreement markers, since they occur in all...

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In this paper I will present and defend an analysis of (a sample of) the English modal auxiliary verbs using a relevance-theoretic semantic and pragmatic framework. I will start by discussing previous analyses of modality in English with an eye to explaining how a cluster of related meanings- epistemic, root, and other- is expressed by the same set of lexical items. I will then go on to develop a unitary semantic approach to the English toodais, treating them as (mostly) incomplete propositional operators. After defending the details of my semantic account, I will show how the proposed semantics can give rise to the range of root interpretations modal verbs can receive in context. Epistemic interpretations require some further theoretical machinery, which will make crucial use of the notion of metarepresentation. Finally, I will sketch the differences between natural-language interpretations of modal operators and their alethic/logical uses.

From a synchronic viewpoint, reinterpretation is a `creative' or `dynamic ' aspect of natural language, which is to be described and integrated in a formal description of natural language semantics. But reinterpretation phenomena can also be regarded as a gateway for linguistic change, since they may get conventionalized and thus enlarge the domain of compositional semantics. Analyzing reinterpretation will therefore also provide insights into mechanisms of linguistic change. We propose the following account of reinterpretation. Semantic construction yields ambiguous structures for reinterpretation cases, which are then monotonically enriched with information from extralinguistic sources (in particular, world knowledge). Semantic ambiguities are described in the framework of underspecification. This account of reinterpretation allows a straightforward modelling of its synchronic and diachronic aspects.

Krifka and others have recently developed modal accounts of the GEN operator that allows multiple readings of a generic sentence to be represented. These modal accounts do not satisfactorily deal with the observation that the truth of a generic sentence may be relative to a particular context. This problem is addressed using a model of generics based on Barwise and Seligman's Channel Theory, a recently-developed mathematical model of information-flow that accounts for context and exceptions. The Channel Theoretic model possesses several important properties, which allow an analysis of some traditionally problematic issues in the semantics of generics. 1 Introduction We begin with a brief discussion of the existence of multiple readings for some generic sentences, showing how Krifka (1995) represents the semantics of such sentences, using the quantificational account of generics developed by Wilkinson (1986, 1991), Kratzer (1995) and Diesing (1988) and a modal account of the semanti...

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this paper is to examine some differences between English and Romance languages in the way definite and determinerless noun phrases can be used in generic contexts. As is well known, English and other Germanic languages can use determinerless plural count and singular mass noun phrases (henceforth bare nouns) to express a generic meaning

Objects Finally, no discussion of linguistic description could be complete without a discussion of the range of further abstract objects that grammar implicates, such as STATES, POSSIBILITIES, FACTS and PROPOSITIONS. But there is perhaps one notable difference between these abstractions and the individuals we have already considered. A specification or system may be equipped with an inventory of concrete individuals to describe, by listing the objects or places in its environment, the meaningfully different quantities it can reason about, and even the events in some history or plan. But to describe abstract individuals in interesting ways, a system needs a generative understanding of them, and needs to create representations of them by inference, on the fly. Such inference in turn requires a more sophisticated implementation. At the same time, the linguistic expressions that describe abstractions are more rarefied. This gives two reasons why knowledge representation does not approach abstractions with the same urgency as other individuals. Of course, abstract individuals remain quite intriguing, as we shall now discover.

Terms like ‘wisdom ’ are commonly held to refer to abstract objects that are properties. On the basis of a greater range of linguistic data and with the support of some ancient and medieval philosophical views, I argue that such terms do not stand for objects, but rather for kinds of tropes, entities that do not have the status of objects, but only play a role as semantic values of terms and as arguments of predicates. Such ‘non-objects ’ crucially differ from objects in that they are not potential bearers of properties. 1.

In the experimentally oriented literature on concepts, one often runs across discussions which include language to the following effect: The concept ‘dog ’ is characterized (in part) by ‘has four legs’ ‘Eats meat ’ is a feature of LION