This article argues for a typology of conditionals in Ancient Greek based on pragmatic rather than formal (e.g., mood) or semantic (e.g., temporal reference) criteria. It does so by proposing a novel pragmatic typology of conditionals with past tenses for Archaic and Classical Greek based on a corpus analysis of 973 conditionals. This article disti...
When it comes to human communication, there are several possible ways of expressing the same idea. This is often explained in terms of direct and indirect speech acts. The concept of direct and indirect speech acts is not only of interest to scholars within linguistics, but rather, it has come to serve as a source of entertainment for a wider audie...
Published in Frontiers in Psychology
Published in Frontiers in Psychology
How quickly do children and adults interpret scalar lexical items in speech processing? The current study examined interpretation of the scalar terms some vs. all in contexts where either the stronger (some = not all) or the weaker interpretation was permissible (some allows all). Children and adults showed increased negative deflections in brain a...
Published in Intercultural Pragmatics
Building on their well-known act theory of propositions, Soames and Hanks have proposed a theory of what it is for sentences to express propositions, thereby answering a central question about the foundations of semantics. The basic idea is that for a sentence to express a proposition in a language is for speakers of the language to use the sentenc...
Published in Intercultural Pragmatics
We intuitively make a distinction between lying and misleading. As several philosophers have pointed out, on the account of this distinction favored here – the adverbial account, as I’ll call it – it provides evidence on the theoretical notion of what is said and the related theoretical distinction between semantics and pragmatics. For, on that acc...
Published in Frontiers in Communication
Linguistic communication is geared toward the exchange of information, i.e., changing the addressee's world views. In other words, persuasion is the goal of speakers and the force of the speaker's commitment as indicated in the utterance is an important factor in persuasion. Other things being equal, the stronger the speaker's commitment, the easie...
This article reports the results of an experimental study that examines the influence of bilingualism on the acquisition and use of the Maximize Presupposition principle in the context of speakers' choices among propositional attitude predicates (equivalent to) know and think. We compared the performance of monolingual Slovenian-and Italian-speakin...
The sentence 'The boss fired the employee who is always late' invites the defeasible inference that the speaker is attempting to convey that the lateness caused the firing (cf. 'The boss fired the employee who is from Philadelphia', which does not invite an analogous inference). We argue that such inferences cannot be understood in terms of familia...
Across languages, certain logically natural concepts are not lexicalized, even though they can be expressed by complex expressions. This is for instance the case for the quantifier not all. In this paper, we propose an explanation for this fact based on the following idea: the logical lexicon of languages is partly shaped by a tradeoff between info...
