Yael Sharvit

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Department Of Linguistics

We argue that copular constructions that relate two referring expressions are based on small clauses with an asymmetrical semantics. The small clauses in question are headed by a relational item that selects for an individual and an individual concept, along the lines proposed by Heycock (Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguist...

Linguistics and philosophy, while being two closely-related fields, are often approached with very different methodologies and frameworks. Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a histo...

We argue for a new inference-based analysis of belief attribution in which the embedded proposition is inferable from, but need not directly identify, an underlying belief of the subject’s. The analysis accounts for attributions of belief in necessary truths and falsities, overcoming a major difficulty facing Hintikka (1962), and goes beyond Cressw...

A central question in the study of presuppositions is how a presupposition trigger contributes to the meaning of a complex expression containing it. Two competing answers are found in the literature on quantificational expressions. According to the first, a quantificational expression presupposes that every member of its domain satisfies the presup...

Two approaches to embedded tense are discussed. One approach recognizes underlying representations with present‐in‐non‐present‐disguise; the other does not. Both approaches attempt to explain the fact that, often, a tense does not make the same semantic contribution in embedded and non‐embedded positions.

Ordinary superlative descriptions are well-known to provide safe harbor to negative polarity items (NPIs), as in the longest book anyone read. What is less well-known is that relative superlative descriptions also sometimes host NPIs, as in the loudest that anyone sang. We observe that this latter pattern is more general than has been previously de...

We argue for a new mode of interpretation for attributed attitudes, what we call de translato interpretation. De translato interpretation assigns a meaning to an expression based on the interpretation given to that expression by the attitude subject rather than that standardly given by the attributor (usually the speaker). We argue that this new mo...

A theory of embedded tense that derives SOT (Sequence of Tense) effects from an SOT rule is compared with a theory that derives SOT effects without appealing to an SOT rule, and an argument is provided in favor of the former. The argument relies mostly on examples where a tense is embedded under future-in-the-past. Such an argument was originally p...

It is argued that the notion of classical entailment faces two problems, the second argument projection problem and the P-to-Q problem, which arise because classical entailment is not designed to handle partial functions. It is shown that while the second argument projection problem can be solved either by flattening the syntactic tree or with naïv...

There are usually two grammatical ways to provide an answer to a question: a full clause reply and a fragment reply. Some fragment replies are well-formed as answers to some types of questions but not to others, and some full clause replies are well-formed as answers to some types of questions but not to others. We account for this fact with a vari...

Quoted indexicals and de se pronouns are often given an identical semantic analysis. However, on closer examination they differ subtly. While the former exhibit the form of the discourse being reported on, the latter place a more abstract constraint, settling what one might call its mode of presentation. We argue against those who have imprinted bo...

The functional analysis of wh-expressions (Engdahl (1986) , Groenendijk & Stokhof (1984), Chierchia (1991, 1993» provides a basis for explaining cases of Indirect Binding, where a quantified expression inside a relative clause triggers a bound interpretation of a variable which is outside its s-structure scope. I show that in these cases the variab...

An empirical argument is given in support of Percus & Sauerland's (2003) theory of 'de re' ascription, according to which the internal argument of "believe" is a function from concept-generators to propositions. The argument concerns pronouns in the scope of attitude verbs that are interpreted both 'de re' and as bound variables. It is argued that...

Languages that are classified as non-Sequence-of-Tense come in more than one variety (e.g., Arregui & Kusumoto 1998): some of these languages allow a past tense in before-clauses while others do not. We propose that some languages have quantificational (existential) tenses, while others have pronominal (referential/bound) tenses. The past tense in...

The English present tense does not exhibit a uniform behavior in all embedded environments. Its ability to receive a simultaneous reading in complement clauses of attitude verbs depends on the matrix tense. Likewise, in relative clauses, the present tense is capable of receiving a simultaneous reading if the matrix tense is future, but not if it is...

1. The Distributivity Problem and the Cut-off Problem We propose a unified semantics for singular and plural superlative expressions that makes use of the '**' ("double star") distributivity operator (an operator whose role is to pluralize 2-place predicates). The analysis aims to solve two problems: (a) the distributivity problem (the fact that a...

This paper investigates some semantic and syntactic properties of infinitival relative clauses in superlative expressions (“infinitival superlatives”). In the course of this investigation, more general theoretical issues pertaining to the syntax and semantics of relative clauses in general are addressed, as well as the semantics of superlatives and...

It is argued that binding theory (BT) must recognize two types of covaluation: the familiar type, which holds between two NPs when they have the same semantic value, and a new type, which holds between two NPs when one of them denotes an attitude holder and the other the 'self ' of the attitude holder. This is shown to account for the acceptability...

The existence of “local implicatures” has been the topic of much recent debate. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this debate by asking what we can learn from three puzzles, namely, the cancellation of such implicatures by or both, their behavior in the complement clauses of negative factive verbs such as sorry, and their behavior in ro...

The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the familiar puzzle of free indirect discourse (FID). FID shares some properties with standard indirect discourse and with direct discourse, but there is currently no known theory that can accommodate such a hybrid. Based on the observation that FID has ‘de se’ pronouns, I argue that it is a kind o...

We observe that the facts pertaining to the acceptability of negative polarity items (henceforth, NPIs) in interrogative environments complex than previously noted. Since Klima [Klima, E. (1964). In J. Fodor & J. Katz (Eds.), The structure of language. Prentice-Hall], it has been typically assumed that NPIs are grammatical in both matrix and embedd...

This book examines the hypothesis of "direct compositionality", which requires that semantic interpretation proceed in tandem with syntactic combination. Although associated with the dominant view in formal semantics of the 1970s and 1980s, the feasibility of direct compositionality remained unsettled, and more recently the discussion as to whether...

  We observe that superlative noun phrases are often not definite and may be headed by an indefinite determiner and other determiners. We attribute this fact to the semantics of the superlative morpheme which creates a (not necessarily singleton) set of individuals. A welcome prediction made by this proposal is that negative polarity items (NPIs) a...

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Languages that allows a vacuous past tense morpheme in complement clauses of attitude verbs are referred to as SOT (sequence-of-tense) languages, and languages that do not are referred to as non-SOT languages. This squib observes that quite generally, if in a given language the present tense morpheme obligatorily refers to the utterance time in pre...

The goal of this paper is to re-examine some aspects of the nature of specificational copular constructions by looking at the ways in which the semantics of tense interacts with the semantics of the copula in English. I propose that Tense Harmony (restrictions on the tense of a relative clause in the subject position of specificational copular cons...

Quelles sont les proprietes semantiques des operateurs de comparaison et comment interpreter le sens des expressions superlatives ? L'A. soutient que les superlatifs ne peuvent pas etre interpretes hors contexte et sans une prise en compte du mode de comparaison en lui-meme dans l'analyse semantique du fonctionnement des operateurs de comparaison....

It is argued, contra Beck and Rullmann (1999), and with Heim (1994), that the sources of strongly exhaustive interpretations and `de dicto' interpretations of wh-complements of veridical question-embedding verbs are one and the same. Beck and Rullmann's theory is shown to predict certain `de dicto' readings which do not exist, while a particular re...

This paper proposes a novel semantic analysis of the quantificational variability data discovered by Berman (1991). We suggest that the adverb of quantification in those data quantifies over semantic questions. Its domain is a division of the original question into subquestions, where a legitimate division into subquestions is one in which each mem...

It is a matter of considerable debate whether degree operators are interpreted in their base position or in some higher position. Kennedy (1997) has shown that degree operators (e.g., the comparative operator) do not interact scopally with quantified expressions. On the other hand, Heim (1999) and Stateva (to appear) have presented evidence that th...

This paper is concerned with the relationship between the semantics of specificational and predicational sentences and the Connectivity effects they display. It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of semantic and syntactic approaches to Connectivity (the unconstrained-be theory, the question-in-disguise theory, and the unclefting theory), co...

"Graduate Program in Linguistics." Includes abstract. Vita. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 1997. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 192-197).

This paper discusses the role of traces and resumptive pronouns as triggers of functional/pair-list readings of Hebrew restrictive relative clauses. It is claimed that the type of sentence which embeds the relative clause affects the binding options inside it. A relative clause formed of a chain that ends in a trace triggers functional/pair-list re...

This paper argues that de dicto reports of the form 'x believes [that ....[DetP the [NP...]] . . . . . ]' are de re reports where the res is the individual concept which corresponds to '[DetP the [NP . . . ]'. This claim is based on the observation that definite descriptions project existence from complement clauses of attitude reports, even in tho...

A binding theory in which locality is the divide between pronouns and reflexives (e.g., Chomsky, 1981), and which aims to explain contrasts such as (1), is immediately confronted with several types of counterexamples, which indicate that these two types of anaphoric expressions are not in complementary distribution (2): (1) a. [ LD1 He admires hims...

This paper is concerned with reconstruction theories of which-questions, and shows that one major limitation of these approaches lies in the way these theories derive de dicto readings of sentences such as Mary knows which children cried. Specifically, we show that when a wide range of de dicto facts is considered, an analysis where wh-phrases neve...

Some constructions exhibit what is known as "reconstruction effects". (1) Some student seems to be in the building. Here I discuss two cases which, I think, have the following in common: they have been misanalyzed as reconstruction effects.