The "doubt-whether" puzzle

The English predicate doubt is known to exhibit a distinctive selectional restriction: it is compatible with declarative as well as whether- complements but is incompatible with constituent wh-complements. The interpretation of a whether-complement under doubt is also puzzling, as ⌜doubt whether p⌝ is almost—but not completely—synonymous with ⌜doubt that p⌝. I will argue that these behaviors of doubt can be given a semantic account, by making use of the mechanisms of HIGHLIGHTING and EXHAUSTIFICATION. Doubt expresses an existential doxastic attitude toward the negation of the highlighted content of the complement while having pre- suppositions that are sensitive to the ordinary content of the complement. Given that ⌜that p⌝ and ⌜whether p⌝ are equivalent in the highlighted con- tent but non-equivalent in the ordinary content, the semantics explains fine-grained differences in interpretations between ⌜doubt whether p⌝ and ⌜doubt that p⌝. Furthermore, given the lack of a stronger scalemate, the interpretation of ⌜doubt that/whether p⌝ undergoes strengthening due to exhaustification, akin to the behavior of ‘scaleless’ modals reported in the literature.

Coercion as Proof Search in Dependent Type Semantics

This paper presents an analysis of coercion and related phenomena in the framework of Dependent Type Semantics (DTS). Using underspecified terms in DTS, we present an analysis of selectional restriction as presupposition; we then combine it with a type called ‘transfer frame’ to provide an analysis of coercion. Our analysis focuses on the fact that coercion is triggered not only by type mismatch between predicates and their arguments, but also by more general inference with contextual information. We show how the analysis can be extended to copredication of logical polysemy and complement coercion. Finally, we will suggest that this analysis can shed light on an aspect of complicity that is invoked in interpreting coercion and other meaning-shifting phenomena.

Structural and semantic ambiguity of why-questions: An overlooked case of weak islands in English

We argue that English why-questions are systematically ambiguous between a purpose and a reason interpretation, similarly to Mandarin, Russian, and Polish (contra Stepanov & Tsai 2008). We argue that the distinct semantic interpretations correspond to two distinct base-generated positions of why. While reason why is base-generated within CP (Rizzi 2001, Ko 2005), purpose why is adjoined to vP (Stepanov & Tsai 2008). Furthermore, we show that English purpose why, similarly to previously reported data from Mandarin, is only compatible with dynamic predicates with agentive subjects. We argue that this selectional restriction follows from two properties: (i) why semantically requires a proposition as its argument, and (ii) only dynamic predicates with agentive subjects have a syntactic structure that accommodates two adjunction sites of the relevant semantic type, i.e., they contain two distinct propositional levels (Bale 2007) and therefore two attachment sites for why. In contrast, propositionally simple predicates only have one propositional level and hence only one possible attachment site, which corresponds to the reason interpretation of why. Evidence for this proposal comes from the observation that only the lower why - associated with the purpose reading - is sensitive to negative islands, which suggests that its attachment site is below negation (vP), whereas the higher why is insensitive to island effects of this sort, which suggests that its base generated position is above negation (CP).