Abstract According to Chomsky and followers, natural language is a computational system that generates syntactic structures that are counterfunctional with respect to communication. Consequently, language is more appropriately considered as being “designed” for thought rather than communication. In this paper, we argue that, while natural language, understood as an internal computational system along standard generative lines, is recruited for distinctive human thinking, such recruitment also requires, and is strongly influenced by, a process we dub lexical externalisation . We first show that there is good reason to believe that the atomic items that go to form words essentially include phonological information of externalised words. After that, we explore what externalisation implies with respect to the relation between lexical items and concepts. We suggest that externalisation has profound effects on what concepts we think with, as well as how concepts relate to lexical items (i.e., how thinking processes ultimately relate to linguistic computations).

Abstract Indefinites are known to give rise to different scopal (specific vs. non-specific) and epistemic (known vs. unknown) uses. Farkas and Brasoveanu (Wiley Blackwell Compan. Semant. 1–26, 2020) explain these specificity distinctions in terms of stability vs. variability in value assignments of the variable introduced by the indefinite. Typological research (Haspelmath in Indefinite pronouns. Oxford University Press, 1997) shows that indefinites have different functional distributions with respect to these uses. In this work, we present a formal framework where Farkas and Brasoveanu (Wiley Blackwell Compan. Semant. 1–26, 2020’s) ideas are rigorously formalized. We develop a two-sorted team semantics that integrates both scope and epistemic effects. We apply the framework to explain the typological variety of indefinites, showing that only lexicalized indefinites have convex meanings in our system (Gärdenfors in The geometry of meaning: semantics based on conceptual spaces. MIT Press, 2014; Steinert-Threlkeld et al. Semant. Pragmat. 16:1-EA, 2023). We account for the restricted distribution and licensing conditions of different indefinites, and we focus on a particular class of indefinites, called epistemic indefinites (Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito in Epistemic indefinites: exploring modality beyond the verbal domain. Oxford University Press, 2015).

Abstract Theorists trying to model natural language have recently sought to explain a range of data by positing covert operators at logical form. For instance, many contemporary semanticists argue that the best way to capture scalar implicatures is through the use of such operators. We take inspiration from this literature by developing a novel operator that can account for a wide range of linguistic effects that until now have not received a uniform treatment. We focus on what we call redundancy effects, which occur when attitude verbs and modals imply that certain bodies of information are unsettled about various claims. We explain three pieces of data, among others: diversity inferences, ignorance inferences, and free choice inferences. Our account yields an elegant model of redundancy effects, and has the potential to explain a wide range of puzzles and problems in philosophical semantics.

Abstract On its surface, a sentence like If Laura becomes a zombie, she wants you to shoot her looks like a plain conditional with the attitude want in its consequent. However, the most salient reading of this sentence is not about the desires of a hypothetical zombie-Laura. Rather, it asserts that the actual, non-zombie Laura has a certain restricted attitude: her present desires, when considering only possible states of affairs in which she becomes a zombie, are such that you shoot her. This can be contrasted with the shifted reading about zombie-desires that arises with conditional morphosyntax, e.g., If Laura became a zombie, she would want you to shoot her. Furthermore, as Blumberg and Holguín (J Semant 36(3):377–406, 2019) note, restricted attitude readings can also arise in disjunctive environments, as in Either a lot of people are on the deck outside, or I regret that I didn’t bring more friends. We provide a novel analysis of restricted and shifted readings in conditional and disjunctive environments, with a few crucial features. First, both restricted and shifted attitude conditionals are in fact “regular” conditionals with attitudes in their consequents, which accords with their surface-level appearance and contrasts with Pasternak’s (The mereology of attitudes, Ph.D. thesis, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 2018) Kratzerian approach, in which the if-clause restricts the attitude directly. Second, whether the attitude is or is not shifted—i.e., zombie versus actual desires—is dependent on the presence or absence of conditional morphosyntax. And third, the restriction of the attitude is effected by means of aboutness, a concept for which we provide two potential implementations. We conclude by discussing our analysis’s prospective repercussions for the theory of conditionals more generally.

Abstract I develop a framework for the compositional semantics of focus association that differs minimally from Rooth (Nat Lang Semant 1:75–116, 1992) in letting focus-sensitive operators optionally pass up evaluated focus alternatives. My proposal is informed by prior work on various complex constructions involving multiple alternative-sensitive operators and alternative sources—including multiple association with a single focus, multiple overlapping associations with separate foci, focus intervention effects in wh-questions, and focus association with wh-phrases—all of which I show can be accurately modeled in my framework. The framework allows us to maintain the idea due to Beck (Nat Lang Semant 14:1–56, 2006) that alternatives computed for the semantics of questions (Hamblin in Found Lang 10:41–53, 1973, a.o.) and of focus (Rooth in Association with focus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1985, a.o.) are formally the same objects, defusing the argument in Li and Law (Linguist Philos 39:201–245, 2016) against such unification.

Abstract Exception phrases have recently gained renewed attention in semantics. Our contribution is two-fold. (1) We provide a range of empirical data that show a much broader use of exceptives than acknowledged in previous accounts. (2) Based on advances in linguistics and philosophy—namely type-theoretical semantics and a two-dimensional denotational underpinning of plural NPs—we propose a new analysis of exception phrases. We develop a balance scale model of exceptions in terms of reference and complement sets, a model that captures previous analyses as well as the new data. The theoretical generalization to be drawn is that exceptions are linguistic manifestations of reference repair strategies, strategies that are linguistically constrained by the quantificational properties of the NP constituent from which exceptions are to be drawn. Restrictions of different types of exception phrases are formulated as restrictions on an NP’s balance scale within a compositional grammar fragment.