Abstract Definiteness covers a range of related meanings such as uniqueness and familiarity that are difficult to tease apart. The notion of bridging provides a testing ground for identifying the underlying mechanisms licensing definite expressions. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which Mandarin bare nouns and demonstratives license unique and relational bridging, exploring how these expressions carve up the definite space and differ from English definite expressions. Through comprehension and production studies, we show that Mandarin bare nouns and demonstratives readily allow unique and relational bridging, while English demonstratives are degraded. We further show that bare nouns license relational bridging only if the bridged noun is lexically relational, while demonstratives do not have such a restriction. We analyze Mandarin demonstrative na as a relationalizing operator that introduces an external index and a relational predicate in the restriction. This study has implications for existing analyses of Mandarin definite expressions and linguistic markings of definiteness, relationality, and anaphora.

Logophoric pronouns in West African languages occur in attitude environments and are anaphorically linked to an attitude holder in a superordinate clause. This has motivated theorists to treat logophoric pronouns semantically as an obligatorily bound variable (bound from the edge of an embedded complement clause). Culy (Linguistics 32:1055–1094, 1994) and Bimpeh and Sode (in Proceedings of TripleA, vol. 6 pp. 1–16, 2021), however, point out that logophoric pronouns in Ewe do not behave like obligatorily bound variables, allowing both sloppy (bound) and strict (non-bound) readings in focus contexts involving ‘only’ and ellipsis. We strengthen this line of criticism by providing novel cross-linguistic data that indicate that logophoric pronouns in Ewe, Igbo and Yoruba support strict readings. We offer an alternative formal account to existing approaches that builds on Bimpeh et al. (in Proceedings of the 40th WCCFL, pp. 1–10, 2024) and can capture both strict and sloppy interpretations, while preserving the requirement that a logophoric pronoun be anaphoric to an attitude holder. The main novelty involves decomposition of logophoric pronouns into two syntactic components at LF—a variable that can in principle be free and refer strictly, and a semantic presuppositional feature log that can be ignored in ellipsis and focus sites, following similar ideas in the literature on pronominal features (Sauerland in Proceedings of SALT 23, pp. 156–173, 2013). Our analysis implies that in terms of their syntactic and semantic make up, logophors are essentially no different from other pronouns, consisting of a referential index plus semantic features.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11050-025-09242-x.

This paper delves into the temporal interpretation of fronting constructions in English, a topic that has received limited attention in the literature on tense semantics. It presents new empirical findings revealing that specific fronting configurations, involving present tense morphology in a complement CP under a matrix past tense, can yield a theoretically unexpected simultaneous interpretation. A novel theoretical framework for understanding English tense is proposed, which accounts for the temporal interpretation of both fronting and non-fronting versions of attitude reports. The framework introduces a null simultaneous tense as a replacement for the conventional indexical present and the Sequence-of-Tense (SOT) de se tense. It is argued that in complement CPs the null simultaneous tense, as well as past tense, can be anchored either to the attitude time or to the utterance time. In either case, each tense receives a de re interpretation. Moreover, the paper contends that evidence from fronting constructions supports Kratzer’s (Proceedings of semantics and linguistic theory 8, pp. 92–110, 1998) proposal that the transmission of temporal features (as part of the mechanism of SOT) occurs at PF. Finally, the proposed revision of the English tense system contributes to a more unified cross-linguistic perspective on tense. It is demonstrated how the temporal readings of attitude reports arising in such non-SOT languages as Russian, Japanese, and Hebrew can be captured within the system developed for English, with known contrasts attributed to the absence of Feature Transmission in those languages. Further known and new data from English, Modern Greek, and German are examined, revealing variations in SOT effects across SOT languages. These data are used as additional evidence supporting the claim that cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of complement tense stems solely from differences in Feature Transmission. Regarding the semantic profile of tenses, it can be considered largely invariant.

Abstract This paper provides a systematic description and analysis of the non-predictive use of the Italian future. Several authors claim that, on this use, the Italian future is an evidential (Squartini 2001, Mari 2010, Eckardt and Beltrama 2019, Frana and Menéndez-Benito 2019). Others argue that the non-predictive future does not directly contribute an evidential signal (e.g., Giannakidou and Mari 2018, Farkas and Ippolito 2022). We side with the evidential camp. From an empirical standpoint, we present the results of a battery of tests that show that the non-predictive future patterns with evidentials cross-linguistically. From a theoretical standpoint, we put forward an analysis that combines a slightly modified version of the proposal for evidentials in Davis et al. (2007) with Schlenker’s (2007) view of expressive content. On this account, the Italian evidential future (i) lowers the quality threshold required to perform a successful speech act (Davis et al. 2007) and (ii) triggers an evidential presupposition relativized to the speaker’s beliefs (modeled after Schlenker’s analysis of expressives). Our treatment of the evidential component as an expressive presupposition opens up a new perspective on the study of evidentiality and highlights the need for further detailed empirical studies exploring the extent to which this perspective is applicable cross-linguistically.

This note presents challenge cases for prominent pragmatic responses to the proviso problem. I offer examples of uses of conditionals if psi,,phi_{P} that seem to commit the speaker unconditionally to the presupposition P of the consequent clause ϕ, even though the sentence’s predicted semantic presupposition ψ⊃P is antecedently satisfied (contrary to context-repair accounts), and independence between ψ and P isn’t antecedently assumed (contrary to independence-driven accounts). The examples provided avoid problems with other examples from the literature used against pragmatic accounts. I leave the matter as an unresolved challenge for satisfaction theories of presupposition.

In “Must ...stay ...strong!” (von Fintel and Gillies in Nat Lang Semant 18:351–383, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-010-9058-2), we set out to slay a dragon, or rather what we called The Mantra: that epistemic must has a modal force weaker than expected from standard modal logic, that it doesn’t entail its prejacent, and that the best explanation for the evidential feel of must is a pragmatic explanation. We argued that all three sub-mantras are wrong and offered an explanation according to which must is strong, entailing, and the felt indirectness is the product of an evidential presupposition carried by epistemic modals. Mantras being what they are, it is no surprise that each of the sub-mantras have been given new defenses. Here we offer them new problems and update our picture, concluding that must is (still) strong.

We evaluate the richness of the child’s input in semantics and its relation to the hypothesis space available to the child. Our case study is the acquisition of the universal quantifier every. We report two main findings regarding the acquisition of every on the basis of a corpus study of child-directed and child-ambient speech. Our first finding is that the input in semantics (as opposed to the input in syntax or phonology) is rich enough to systematically eliminate instances of the subset problem of language acquisition: overly general hypotheses about the meaning of every can violate pragmatic constraints, making such hypotheses incompatible with the child’s input. Our second finding is that the semantic input is too poor to eliminate instances of what we refer to as the superset problem, the mirror image of the subset problem. We argue that at least some overly specific hypotheses about the meaning of every are compatible with the child’s input, suggesting either that those hypotheses are not made available by UG or that non-trivial inductive biases are involved in children’s acquisition of every.