At-issue Content Research Articles

Presuppositions and Antipresuppositions in Conditionals

Utterances of counterfactual conditionals are typically attended by the information that their antecedents are false. But there is as yet no account of the source of this information that is both detailed and complete. This paper describes the problem of counterfactual antecedent falsity and argues that the problem can be addressed by appeal to an adequate account of the presuppositions of various competing conditional constructions. It argues that indicative conditionals presuppose that their antecedents are epistemically possible, while subjunctive conditionals bear no presupposition. Given this arrangement, utterance of the counterfactual results in an antipresupposition, that is, a scalar implicature generated from the presuppositions of competing alternatives rather than from the at-issue content of competing alternatives. The content of the antipresupposition is the negation of the presupposition of the competing indicative, i.e., that the antecedent of the conditional is known to be false by the speaker.

Principles of interdimensional meaning interaction

Expressions that contribute side issues, including at least expressives, supplements, and epithets, take scope only at the level of a complete utterance. Kubota and Uegaki 2009 give a compositional semantics for side-issues, but do not explain why at-issue content never interacts with side issues. We draw an analogy with indexicals, which also depend on context but typically do not interact with surrounding semantic material. As with indexicals, side-issue content motivates staged interpretation: an at-issue stage, and a context update stage. We show how the undelimited continuations provided by Bernardi and Moortgat's 2010 Lambek Grishin calculus can provide a principled way to regulate interdimensional interaction.

A Hamblin Semantics for Evidentials

No abstract.