snippets

Issue 37 - December 2019

Special issue in honor of Uli Sauerland

Contents

1. Andreea C. Nicolae, Patrick D. Elliott, and Yasutada Sudo

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2. Dorothy Ahn
ASL IX to locus as a modifier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
3. Artemis Alexiadou
Decomposing scalar approximatives in Greek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Anna Alsop, Lucas Champollion, and Ioana Grosu
A problem for Fox’s (2007) account of free choice disjunction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. Anton Benz and Nicole Gotzner
Quantifier irgendein and local implicature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6. Jonathan David Bobaljik and Susi Wurmbrand
Fake indexicals, binding, and the PCC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
7. Brian Buccola and Emmanuel Chemla
Alternatives of disjunctions: when a disjunct contains the antecedent of a pronoun . . . . 16
8. Luka Crnič and Brian Buccola
Scoping NPIs out of DPs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
9. Chris Cummins
Some contexts requiring precise number meanings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
10. Patrick D. Elliott and Paul Marty
Exactly one theory of multiplicity inferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
11. Anamaria Fălăuş and Andreea C. Nicolae
Two coordinating particles are better than one: free choice items in Romanian . . . . . . . . 27
12. Danny Fox
Individual concepts and narrow scope illusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
13. Danny Fox
Degree concepts and narrow scope illusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
14. Nicole Gotzner
Disjunction, conjunction, and exhaustivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
15. Martin Hackl
On Haddock’s puzzle and the role of presupposition in reference resolution . . . . . . . . . . . 37
16. Andreas Haida
Symmetry, density, and formal alternatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
17. Nina Haslinger and Viola Schmitt
Strengthened disjunction or non-classical conjunction? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
18. Fabian Heck and Anke Himmelreich
Two observations about reconstruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
19. Aron Hirsch
Modal adverbs and constraints on type-flexibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
20. Natalia Ivlieva and Alexander Podobryaev
On variable agreement and scope reconstruction in Russian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
21. Hadil Karawani
The past is rewritten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
22. Manfred Krifka and Fereshteh Modarresi
Persian ezafe and proportional quantifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
23. Paul Marty
Maximize Presupposition! and presupposition satisfaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
24. Lisa Matthewson, Sihwei Chen, Marianne Huijsmans,
Marcin Morzycki, Daniel Reisinger, and Hotze Rullmann
Restricting the English past tense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
25. Clemens Mayr
On a seemingly nonexistent cumulative reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
26. Marie-Christine Meyer
Scalar Implicatures in complex contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
27. Moreno Mitrović
Null disjunction in disguise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
28. Andreea C. Nicolae and Yasutada Sudo
The exhaustive relevance of complex conjunctions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
29. Rick Nouwen
Scalar vagueness regulation and locative reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
30. Robert Pasternak
Unifying partitive and adjective-modifying percent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
31. Hazel Pearson and Frank Sode
‘Not in my wildest dreams’: a part time minimizer? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
32. Orin Percus
Uli and our generation: some reminiscences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
33. Jacopo Romoli
Why them? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
34. Fabienne Salfner
The rise and fall of non-conservatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
35. Petra B. Schumacher
Vagueness and context-sensitivity of absolute gradable adjectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
36. Stephanie Solt
More or less an approximator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
37. Giorgos Spathas
Plural anaphoric reference and non-conservativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
38. Benjamin Spector
An argument for the trivalent approach to presupposition projection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
39. Bob van Tiel
‘The case against fuzzy logic revisited’ revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
40. Lyn Tieu
A developmental asymmetry between the singular and plural . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
41. Tue Trinh
A tense question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
42. Hubert Truckenbrodt
On remind-me presuppositions and embedded question acts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
43. Michael Wagner
Disjuncts must be mutually excludable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
44. E. Cameron Wilson
Constraints on non-conservative readings in English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
45. Susi Wurmbrand
Indexical shift meets ECM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
 !

Restricting the English past tense

Lisa Matthewson · University of British Columbia
Sihwei Chen · Academia Sinica
Marianne Huijsmans · University of British Columbia
Marcin Morzycki · University of British Columbia
Daniel Reisinger · University of British Columbia
Hotze Rullmann · University of British Columbia

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7358/snip-2019-037-mchr

Kratzer (1998) argues for a pronominal analysis of tense (see also Partee 1973; Sauerland 2002),
but she also identifies behaviours of the English past which seem unexpected under the pronominal
account. Consider (1), for example.
(1) [You are looking at churches in Italy. There is no previous discourse when the following
question comes up:]
A: Who built this church?
B: Borromini built this church. (Kratzer 1998)
The puzzle is that this context provides no salient reference time (RT) to which a temporal pronoun
could refer, yet the past tense is acceptable. Kratzer proposes that the English simple past form
represents either a pronominal past tense, or a combination of present tense and perfect aspect. She
supports this proposal through a comparison with German, in which the simple past is infelicitous
in (1), as expected for an unambiguously pronominal tense.
Explaining the acceptability of (1) via a present perfect reading of the past tense form runs into
the complication that the English present perfect is itself infelicitous in (1), likely due to the non-
repeatability of the event (McCawley 1971). Here we reinterpret the ambiguity of the English past
as being between pronominal and existentially quantified tense (see Partee 1984; Ogihara 1996;
von Stechow 2009 on existential tense; and Grønn and von Stechow 2016 for this ambiguity). (1)
is then acceptable under the existential reading, which merely asserts the existence of some prior
RT.
So far, so good. However, notice that the English simple past is not always acceptable in
contexts without salient RTs. This is shown in (2), where the # applies globally to the conversation.
(2) #[I am curious which of my friends has read Emma at some point in their life.]
A: Who read Emma?
B: Julia read Emma.
A salient RT renders this dialogue felicitous:
(3) [There has been confusion about what our book club’s chosen book was this month. Some
of us read Emma and some read Persuasion.]
A: Who read Emma?
B: Julia read Emma.

snippets 37 ! 12/2019 ! 61
 !

The contrast between (2) and (3) would follow if the English past were purely pronominal after all
– but that would leave (1) unexplained.
We propose the following generalization. The English past on its existential reading must
have non-vacuous domain restriction. According to this, the past tense in (3) can be analyzed as
existentially quantifying over times within the past month. In contrast, (2) is ruled out because
there is no meaningful domain restriction: the issue here is whether the sentential subject has read
Emma at some point in their entire lifespan. ((2) is a typical experiential context, well-known for
being suited to the present perfect.)
The past tense’s required domain restriction can be provided via a specific event, whose run
time crucially need not be known. In (1), the speakers may have no idea when the church was
built, but there was clearly at some point a particular building event of that church. Knowledge of
a specific event also licenses the reading dialogue, as shown in (4). The phenomenon generalizes
to other predicates, as shown for example in (5).

(4) [I bought a brand-new copy of Emma and now I see the pages are creased. I ask my family:]
A: Who read Emma?
B: Julia read Emma.

(5) Who littered?

# in the context: I am curious about who has ever done anti-social things in a forest.
ok in the context: I am walking in the forest and notice a piece of litter on the ground.

The ambiguity we propose here for the English past tense may be overtly spelled out cross-
linguistically; there may be languages which overtly distinguish pronominal from existential tenses
(see e.g., Rieger 2011 on Swahili; Chen et al. 2019 on Atayal and Javanese).

References
Chen, Sihwei, Jozina Vander Klok, Lisa Matthewson, and Hotze Rullmann. 2019. The ‘experi-
ential’ as an existential past: Evidence from Javanese and Atayal. Ms. University of British
Columbia.
Grønn, Atle, and Arnim von Stechow. 2016. Tense. In The Cambridge Handbook of Formal Se-
mantics, ed. Maria Aloni and Paul Dekker, 313–341. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kratzer, Angelika. 1998. More structural analogies between pronouns and tenses. In Proceedings
from Semantics and Linguistic Theory VIII (SALT 8), ed. Devon Strolovitch and Aaron Lawson.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.
McCawley, James D. 1971. Tense and time reference in English. In Studies in Linguistic Semantics,
ed. D. Terence Langendoen and Charles J. Fillmore, 97–113. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and
Winston.
Ogihara, Toshiyuki. 1996. Tense, Attitudes, and Scope. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Partee, Barbara H. 1973. Some structural analogies between tenses and pronouns in English.
Journal of Philosophy 18:601–609.
Partee, Barbara H. 1984. Nominal and temporal anaphora. Linguistics and Philosophy 7:243–286.
Rieger, Dorothee. 2011. Swahili as a tense prominent language. Swahili Forum 18:114–134.
Sauerland, Uli. 2002. The present tense is vacuous. Snippets 6:12–13.

62 snippets 37 ! 12/2019
!
 !

von Stechow, Arnim. 2009. Tenses in compositional semantics. In The Expression of Time, ed.
Wolfgang Klein and Ping Li, 129–166. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

This research is supported in part by SSHRC grant #435-2016-0381.

Lisa Matthewson
[email protected]
Department of Linguistics
University of British Columbia
2613 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4
Canada

Sihwei Chen
[email protected]
Institute of Linguistics
Academia Sinica
128 Section 2, Academia Road
115 Taipei
Taiwan

Marianne Huijsmans
[email protected]
Department of Linguistics
2613 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4
Canada

Marcin Morzycki
[email protected]
Department of Linguistics
University of British Columbia
2613 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4
Canada

Daniel Reisinger
[email protected]

snippets 37 ! 12/2019 ! 63
 !

Department of Linguistics
University of British Columbia
2613 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4
Canada

Hotze Rullmann
[email protected]
Department of Linguistics
University of British Columbia
2613 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4
Canada

64 snippets 37 ! 12/2019
!