Browsing by Author "Chierchia, Gennaro"
Now showing items 1-14 of 14
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Any Questions? Polarity as a Window into the Structure of Questions
Nicolae, Andreea Cristina (2013-09-30)This dissertation investigates the peculiar behavior of negative polarity items in questions and argues that a unified account of their distribution across declarative and interrogative constructions is feasible. These ... -
Broaden Your Views. Implications of Domain Widening and the "Logicality" of Language
Chierchia, Gennaro (MIT Press, 2006) -
Chinese Conditionals and the Theory of Conditionals
Chierchia, Gennaro (Springer Verlag, 2000)As is well known, in conditionals and, more generally, in structures involving adverbs of quantification, indefinite NPs like a cat display a variable quantificational force. Within DRT this phenomenon is analyzed by ... -
Formal Semantics and the Grammar of Predication
Chierchia, Gennaro (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985) -
Interpreting Questions with Non-Exhaustive Answers
Xiang, Yimei (2016-05-17)This dissertation investigates a variety of issues on question semantics, especially the interpretations of mention-some questions, multiple-wh questions, and questions with quantifiers. Chapter 1 discusses some basic ... -
Mass Nouns, Vagueness and Semantic Variation
Chierchia, Gennaro (Springer Verlag, 2009)The mass/count distinction attracts a lot of attention among cognitive scientists, possibly because it involves in fundamental ways the relation between language (i.e. grammar), thought (i.e. extralinguistic conceptual ... -
Naming of Nouns and Verbs in Aphasia: Preliminary Results of a Word Retrieval Task in a Sentence Context
Crepaldi, Davide; Aggujaroa, Silvia; Arduino, Lisa Saskia; Zonca, Giusy; Ghirardi, Graziella; Inzaghi, Mariagrazia; Colombo, Mariarosa; Chierchia, Gennaro; Luzzatti, Claudio (Elsevier, 2004) -
Nominal Arguments and Language Variation
Jiang, Li (2013-02-15)This dissertation investigates nominal arguments in classifier languages (ClLs). There are two main goals. The first is to explore what is constant and what varies in the way ClLs form nominal arguments. The second goal ... -
On the Role of Entailment Patterns and Scalar Implicatures in the Processing of Numerals
Panizza, Daniele; Chierchia, Gennaro; Clifton, Charles Jr. (Elsevier, 2009)There has been much debate, in both the linguistics and the psycholinguistics literature, concerning numbers and the interpretation of number denoting determiners (‘numerals’). Such debate concerns, in particular, the ... -
The Relevance of Polarity for the Online Interpretation of Scalar Terms
Panizza, Daniele; Chierchia, Gennaro; Huang, Yi Ting; Snedeker, Jesse (Cornell University Department of Linguistics, 2011)The interpretation of scalar terms (like, e.g., some vs. all; the numerals) has been at the center of much theoretical debate. Recently, this debate has focused on whether Scalar Implicature (SI) computation is grammatically ... -
The Semantics of Measurement
Scontras, Gregory Charles (2014-10-21)This thesis examines linguistic phenomena that implicate measurement in the nominal domain. The first is morphological number, as in one book vs. two books. Intuitively, the contrast between singular and plural forms of ... -
The Sense of Self: Topics in the Semantics of De Se Expressions
Pearson, Hazel Anne (2013-03-08)This work investigates a series of phenomena that shed light on the analysis of attitudes de se. We adopt Lewis’ (1979) proposal that attitudes de se involve self-ascription of a property, and investigate how this view of ... -
Soft but Strong. Neg-Raising, Soft Triggers, and Exhaustification
Romoli, Jacopo (2012-11-15)In this thesis, I focus on scalar implicatures, presuppositions and their connections. In chapter 2, I propose a scalar implicature-based account of neg-raising inferences, standardly analyzed as a presuppositional phenomenon ... -
Why Children and Adults Sometimes (But Not Always) Compute Implicatures
Guasti, Maria Teresa; Chierchia, Gennaro; Crain, Stephen; Foppolo, Francesca; Gualmini, Andrea; Meroni, Luisa (Taylor & Francis, 2005)Noveck (2001) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretation of weak scalar terms (some, might, or) (cf. Braine & Rumain, 1981; Smith, 1980). More recent studies suggest, however, ...