The logic of decision

Deutsche Grammatik = 獨逸小文典

Ifs and Cans

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On Subjunctive Conditionals

This is the first book that presents a complete empirical description and theoretical analysis of all major classes of derived adjectives in Spanish, both deverbal and denominal. The reader will find here both a detailed empirical description of the syntactic, morphological and semantic properties of derived adjectives in contemporary Spanish and a cohesive Neo-Constructionist analysis of the syntactic and semantic tools that contemporary Spanish has available to build adjectives from other grammatical categories within a Nanosyntactic-oriented framework. In doing so, this book sheds light on the nature of adjectives as a grammatical category and argues that adjectives are syntactically built by recycling functional heads belonging to other categories. The book will be useful both to researchers in Spanish linguistics or theoretical morphology and to advanced students of Spanish interested in the main ways of building new adjectives through suffixation in this language.

Morphologically Derived Adjectives in Spanish

In this paper, we discuss and analyze ...ish/-ish in three of its uses: as a modifier of gradable adjectives; as a clause-final particle that hedges on a speaker’s degree of commitment to a proposition; and as a general precision-regulator. In each case, -ish/. . . ish makes reference to a degree that is slightly less than the standard for the constituent it applies to. We propose that proposition-modifying . . . ish belongs to the class of metalinguistic degree morphology alongside metalinguistic comparisons, which have received recent attention in the literature (e.g., Giannakidou & Yoon 2011; Morzycki 2011). We argue for a unified analysis of ... ish/-ish as a degree modifier, where the relevant degree variable can be provided lexically, or through a type-shifting operation that makes available a degree of precision in the sense of Morzycki (2011). This study has implications for research on the semantics of metalinguistic degree morphology, imprecision, speaker-oriented phenomena, and the role of subjectification in semantic change.

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A new metalinguistic degree morpheme

This dissertation discusses a special use of the German subjunctive that I dub the "free factive" subjunctive (FFS) It is exemplified in (1)

(1) 	Ich hatte Pizza im Kuhlschrank
	I haveSUBJ pizza in the fridge
	`I have pizza in the fridge'
	There is an opportunity for you involving the fact that I have pizza in the fridge
	
Unlike the more familiar uses of the subjunctive, the speaker can use (1) to make a "tentative offer"; that is, (1) not only conveys that the believes that there is in fact pizza in the fridge, but it conveys an additional meaning component paraphrased here as "there is an opportunity  "

I show that this use of the subjunctive is distinct from two other uses of the German subjunctive: an irrealis use that is found cross-linguistically to express lowered epistemic commitment (cf ao Farkas 1992, Villalta 2008, Matthewson 2010) and an evidential use that marks the utterance as part of a report (cf ao Fabricius-Hansen and Saeboe 2004, Potts 2005, Sode 2014)

FFSs can only be used under two conditions: 
a) there needs to be a salient decision problem in the context, and
b) the proposition co-occurring with the FFS needs to "boost" one of the decision problem's action alternatives
Then the FFS conveys that there is a world where choosing the "boosted" action alternative is optimal (Formally, I propose a multi-dimensional analysis using the framework argued for in McCready 2010 and Gutzmann 2012 and translating basic notions of decision theory into intensional semantics)
 I then discuss two types of relevance conditionals, only one of which is compatible with past tense 

(2) 	a If you are hungry, there is pizza in the fridge
	b If you were hungry (yesterday), there was pizza in the fridge
(3)	a If I am being honest, you look awful
	b *If I was being honest (yesterday), you looked awful
	
I argue that we can maintain a unified analysis of relevance conditionals if we assume a pragmatic analysis based on conditional independence (along the lines of Franke 2009) and additionally assume that conditionals like (3a) are self-referential in the sense of Eckardt 2012: "you look awful" is an instantiation of "being honest"; therefore (3a) becomes true by uttering it Uttering "you looked awful", on the other hand, cannot serve as an instantiation of "I was honest yesterday", causing (3b) to be odd

Free factive subjunctives in German

In the recent formal semantic and pragmatic literature, discourse particles are discussed as linguistic elements which convey additional comments on the utterance in which they occur (e.g. Zimmermann 2011 and references therein). The main focus of these investigations has been, for the most part, the contributions of a limited set of particles in declarative sentences used as assertions; in these works, occurrences of particles in other sentence/ speech act types are seen as secondary.1 There are, however, particles which occur exclusively in interrogative sentences used as questions. In this paper, we investigate the contribution of four German discourse particles that nearly exclusively occur in questions: denn and etwa in their Federal German variants and Austrian German leicht and eh.2 The core puzzle we address is the distribution of the four particles across different types of questions (cf. Krifka 2011), which seems to be perculiar at first glance; consider the contrast between (1) and (2).

A condition on the distribution of discourse particles across types of questions

Abstract This paper discusses word order effects in German adverbial clauses: often, the matrix clause can exhibit either V2 or V3 word order. I argue that adverbial clauses with V3 word order have an obligatory ‘biscuit’ interpretation and receive a speech act modifying interpretation, as has previously only been argued for ‘biscuit conditionals’. I show that this phenomenon holds more generally. On the other hand, a pragmatic analysis for V2 biscuit conditionals remains necessary.

Adverbial clauses and V3

We discuss the semantic contribution and distribution of conditional antecedents containing the discourse particle denn (“antecedents with denn”, abbreviated as AWD). We propose that AWDs occur only in contexts where (i) the speaker does not believe the antecedent proposition p to hold, and (ii) the truth of p has been nonexplicitly (= tacitly) proposed. To gain a better understanding of (ii), we conduct two corpus studies. The first study investigates the relative location of AWDs with respect to their consequents. We find that unlike antecedents of regular hypothetical conditionals, AWDs occur significantly more often after the material in the consequent and parenthetically inside this material than before it. In a second study, we investigate the position of the tacit proposal relative to the AWD. We find that it typically precedes the AWD. Both results are in accordance with (ii). We then present a classification of the types of tacit proposals that we find with AWDs: speakers use AWDs to qualify their own statements or to doubt proposals of others, in both cases managing potential updates to the common ground.

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Eva Csipak

Papers

A new metalinguistic degree morpheme

Free factive subjunctives in German

A condition on the distribution of discourse particles across types of questions

Adverbial clauses and V3

Conditional antecedents containing the German discourse particle denn: a corpus study