VP-ellipsis generally requires a syntactically matching antecedent. However, many documented examples exist where the antecedent is not appropriate. Kehler (2000, 2002) proposed an elegant theory which predicts a syntactic antecedent for an elided VP is required only for a certain discourse coherence relation (resemblance) not for cause-effect relations. Most of the data Kehler used to motivate his theory come from corpus studies and thus do not consist of true minimal pairs. We report five experiments testing predictions of the coherence theory, using standard minimal pair materials. The results raise questions about the empirical basis for coherence theory because parallelism is preferred for all coherence relations, not just resemblance relations. Further, strict identity readings, which should not be available when a syntactic antecedent is required, are influenced by parallelism per se, holding the discourse coherence relation constant. This draws into question the causal role of coherence relations in processing VP ellipsis.

There are two kinds of semantic theories of anaphora. Some, such as Heim's File Change Semantics, Groenendijk and Stokhof's Dynamic Predicate Logic, or Muskens' Compositional DRT (CDRT), seem to require full coindexing of anaphora and their antecedents prior to interpretation. Others, such as Kamp's Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), do not require this coindexing and seem to have an important advantage here. In this squib I will sketch a procedure that the first group of theories may help themselves to so that they can interleave interpretation and coindexing in DRT's way.

Plural definite descriptions across many languages display two well-known properties. First, they can give rise to so-called non-maximal readings, in the sense that they 'allow for exceptions' (, in some contexts, can be judged true even if Mary didn't read all the books on the reading list). Second, while they tend to have a quasi-universal quantificational force in affirmative sentences ('quasi-universal' rather than simply 'universal' due to the possibility of exceptions we have just mentioned), they tend to be interpreted existentially in the scope of negation (a property often referred to as , cf. Löbner in Linguist Philos 23:213-308, 2000). Building on previous works (in particular Krifka in Proceedings of SALT VI, Cornell University, pp 136-153, 1996 and Malamud in Semant Pragmat, 5:1-28, 2012), we offer a theory in which sentences containing plural definite expressions trigger a family of possible interpretations, and where general principles of language use account for their interpretation in various contexts and syntactic environments. Our theory solves a number of problems that these previous works encounter, and has broader empirical coverage in that it offers a precise analysis for sentences that display complex interactions between plural definites, quantifiers and bound variables, as well as for cases involving non-distributive predicates. The resulting proposal is briefly compared with an alternative proposal by Križ (Aspects of homogeneity in the semantics of natural language, University of Vienna, 2015), which has similar coverage but is based on a very different architecture and sometimes makes subtly different predictions.

We discuss a well-known puzzle about the lexicalization of logical operators in natural language, in particular connectives and quantifiers. Of the many logically possible operators, only few appear in the lexicon of natural languages: the connectives in English, for example, are conjunction , disjunction , and negated disjunction ; the lexical quantifiers are and . The logically possible nand (negated conjunction) and Nall (negated universal) are not expressed by lexical entries in English, nor in any natural language. Moreover, the lexicalized operators are all upward or downward monotone, an observation known as the Monotonicity Universal. We propose a logical explanation of lexical gaps and of the Monotonicity Universal, based on the dynamic behaviour of connectives and quantifiers. We define update potentials for logical operators as procedures to modify the context, under the assumption that an update by depends on the logical form of and on the speech act performed: assertion or rejection. We conjecture that the adequacy of update potentials determines the limits of lexicalizability for logical operators in natural language. Finally, we show that on this framework the Monotonicity Universal follows from the logical properties of the updates that correspond to each operator.

This paper discusses a set of observations, many of which are novel, concerning differences between the adjectival modals and and their adverbial counterparts and . It argues that the observations can be derived from a standard interpretation of / as universal and / as existential quantifiers over possible worlds, in conjunction with the hypothesis that the adjectives quantify over knowledge and the adverbs quantify over belief. The claims on which the argument relies include the following: (i) knowledge implies belief, (ii) agents have epistemic access to their belief, (iii) relevance is closed under speakers' belief, and (iv) commitment is pragmatically inconsistent with explicit denial of belief.

This paper explores a puzzling polarity-based asymmetry in the use of in sentences that deny presuppositions. It argues that this asymmetry is produced by the interaction of 's controversial additive presupposition with the alternatives that are salient in the relevant contexts and demonstrates that this proposal makes good crosslinguistic predictions. Along the way, this paper shows that presupposition denials are a fruitful testing ground for uncovering details about the behaviour of and the role of presuppositions triggered within focus alternatives.