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Quotational indefinites

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Abstract

This paper discusses one understudied variety of indefinites, which I call quotational indefinites. Quotational indefinites are attested in languages like Bulgarian and German (see Cieschinger and Ebert 2011 on the latter), and are akin to Japanese wh-doublets (Sudo 2008, ms) and English placeholder words like whatshisface or so-and-so (cf. Clark and Gerrig 1990). The main claim of the paper is that quotational indefinites have a mixed semantics: they range over linguistic expressions yet make reference to both expressions and their denotations. These indefinites also require that the expressions they quantify over be of a certain type (a referential expression, a particular type of adverbial, etc.) and be uttered in a previous conversation. The formal analysis is framed in a two-dimensional semantics (Potts 2005, 2007) which cleanly separates the indefinite force and the reportative implications of sentences with quotational indefinites. This work uncovers important interactions between indefiniteness, quotation, and reportativity, and broadens our understanding of the typology of indefinites.

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Notes

  1. The following abbreviations are used in glossed examples: 1sg = first person singular (etc. for other persons and numbers), acc = accusative, c = declarative complementizer, cop = copula, dat = dative, def = definite, ev = evidential, fem = feminine, gen = genitive, masc = masculine, neut = neuter, nom = nominative, past = past tense, pl = plural, pp = past participle, q = interrogative complementizer, refl = reflexive, top = topic.

  2. The particular restrictions on expressions over which QIs can range are discussed in Sect. 2.3.

  3. In Sect. 5.2, I will demonstrate how the proposed analysis can be extended to QIs which range over predicative expressions.

  4. See also Cieschinger and Ebert (2011) for evidence that QIs in German can take scope under quantifiers and modal operators.

  5. I omit the reportative implication whenever its presence is irrelevant to the issue at hand.

  6. See in particular her novelty-familiarity condition (Heim 1982:312).

  7. The latter ignorance part is argued to be a pragmatic inference (see Sect. 5.4).

  8. An anonymous reviewer asks why presupposition plugs (i.e. verbs of saying; see Karttunen 1973, 1974) are not used as a way of telling apart presuppositions from conventional implicatures. The reason is that in the presence of verbs of saying conventional implicatures can undergo a perspective shift (see Kratzer 1999; Harris and Potts 2009; Koev 2013). The effect of such shift is similar to that of presupposition cancelation, which hampers the comparison between those two layers of meaning.

  9. These observations crucially rely on quotation marks as indicators of what is quoted and what is not. As a reviewer points out, spoken language rather uses prosodic cues for quoted status and these rarely provide reliable information on where the boundaries are. Also, orthographic traditions may vary across languages; e.g. quotative adjuncts like she asked are graphically unquoted in English but not in French. It is thus important to emphasize that all the judgments reported in the paper were obtained from written examples. The use of quotation marks followed the convention of the particular language and the sentences did not involve any syntactic complexities.

  10. The semantic properties of Japanese wh-doublets are further discussed in Sect. 5.3.

  11. Notice that Sudo’s solution to the referentiality condition imposes non-trivial restrictions on the logical types assigned to DP meanings. Since proper names, definite descriptions, and demonstratives but not indefinites can “antecede” dare-dare (see Sudo 2008, ms), we are forced to assume that the former expressions evaluate to type e while the latter expressions evaluate to some other logical type, e.g. (e→t)→t.

  12. I thank Cornelia Ebert (p.c.) for clarifying this point.

  13. This is because quoted speech need not be well-formed (see (37) below).

  14. See Maier (2014) for a similar implementation.

  15. More specifically, pure quotation can be viewed as generalizing direct quotation by abstracting away from the particular speech context (cf. Ginzburg and Cooper 2014).

  16. I owe this observation to Peter Sutton, p.c.

  17. Below, we will encounter another apparent case of transparency in quotations, i.e. the possibility that quoted QIs are interpreted outside the quoted segment. I believe this has less to do with the nature of quotation and has more to do with the expression-based semantics of QIs.

  18. I disregard the fact that QIs in Bulgarian and German can optionally take an NP complement, as in edi-koe si gadže ‘QI.neut boyfriend’ (6b) or dem und dem Freund ‘QI.dat friend’ (6c). If a restrictor argument turns out to be obligatory, the at-issue meaning of QIs should be amended to \(\lambda P_{\mathtt{e} \to \mathtt{t}} \lambda Q_{\mathtt{e} \to \mathtt{t}} .\exists z_{\mathtt{u}} (P( [\!\![z ]\!\!]^{c',w} ) \ \&\ Q( [\!\![z ]\!\!]^{c',w} ))\). One could then assume that when an overt restrictor is missing, a covert NP with some underspecified meaning is present.

  19. For example, Murray (2014) and AnderBois et al. (2015) offer unidimensional dynamic accounts whereby at-issue content introduces an update proposal that can be negotiated among speech participants while conventionally implicated content directly restricts the context set. Building on this idea, let γ be the logical type of assignment functions, information states be characteristic functions from assignment functions (of type γ→t), and updates be functions from information states to information states (of type (γ→t)→(γ→t)). The dynamic meaning of a sentence of the form QI arrived can then be stated as follows. (Notice that each conjunct below abbreviates an appropriate type-theoretic meaning; cf. Muskens 1996.)

    1. (i)

      (i) \(\begin{array}[t]{l} [\!\![{\text{QI arrived}} ]\!\!]_{(\upgamma \to \mathtt{t}) \to (\upgamma \to \mathtt{t})}^{c}\\ = \exists p_{\mathtt{s} \to \mathtt{t}} \wedge \exists z_{\mathtt{u}} \wedge arrive(p, [\!\![z ]\!\!]^{c'} ) \wedge \mathbf{sp}(c) = \mathbf{hr}(c') \wedge z \in \mathbf{utt}(c') \wedge \mathbf{r}{\text{-}}\mathbf{expr}(\mathbf{cs}(c),z) \end{array} \)

    The at-issue proposition is p. Due to the update \(arrive(p, [\!\![z ]\!\!]^{c'} )\), p can only contain worlds in which \([\!\![z ]\!\!]^{c'}\) arrived. If accepted, the at-issue proposition will restrict cs(c), the context set of c, by means of an update like cs(c)⊆p. The conventionally implicated content of the sentence is directly predicated of the context set, via r-expr(cs(c),z). Crucially, all occurrences of z are dynamically bound by \(\exists z_{\mathtt{u}}\) and \(c'\) will be anaphoric to a speech context operator placed in previous discourse.

  20. The mechanism of quantifier raising is independently motivated by the need to fix type mismatches resulting from occurrences of quantificational objects.

  21. I am slightly abusing notation here. Since technically intensions are functions rather than sets, the entailment condition in (44) should rather read \(\forall w'( [\!\![S' ]\!\!]^{c'} (w') \Rightarrow [\!\![S ]\!\!]^{c} (w'))\). Alternatively, the entailment condition could be written as \(^{\{ \} } [\!\![S' ]\!\!]^{c'} \subseteq \,^{\{ \} } [\!\![S ]\!\!]^{c}\), where \(^{\{ \} } \varphi _{\mathtt{s} \to \mathtt{t}} : = \{ w \in D_{\mathtt{s}} \,|\,\varphi (w) = 1\}\).

  22. Maier’s proposal also involves lambda binding over strings, which is intuitively related to the string-substituting component of the quotation rule in (49). See also Kubota and Levine (2016), who invoke a lambda calculus over strings in their analysis of gapping, topicalization, and quantifier scope.

  23. The si marker is probably diachronically related to a proximal demonstrative in Old Church Slavonic (Ora Matushansky, p.c.).

  24. Note that this requirement cannot be captured in terms of logical types, as Sudo (2008, ms) proposes for referential terms in (3), unless a much more fine-grained type theory is assumed. One cannot just require that the expressions over which edi-kak si quantifies denote functions from events to truth values because this would fail to distinguish between QIs over manner adverbials and QIs over time or place adverbials.

  25. In the interest of space, I omit the relevant data and refer the reader to Sudo’s work.

  26. These data were tested on four Japanese speakers. For each of (61)–(62), they were asked whether Masa’s original utterance was about himself or about the utterer of the sentence. One speaker did not accept shifted interpretations in general (whether or not a wh-doublet in the complement clause was present) and her judgments were disregarded. The remaining three speakers all agreed that a shifted and a non-shifted interpretation is possible for both (61) and (62). Two speakers commented that the shifted interpretation is preferred with the topic marker -wa on the first person pronoun boku while the non-shifted interpretation is preferred with the nominative marker -ga on the pronoun. Overall, the intuition that Japanese wh-doublets have no effect on the interpretation possibilities for indexical pronouns in speech reports was quite robust.

  27. Non-verbatim interpretations of Bulgarian/German QIs in similar contexts do not seem possible. For example, Der Satz “Die und die ist angeblich geflohen” hat zehn Wörter ‘The sentence “Die und die ist angeblich geflohen” has ten words’ is plain false in German. It cannot be made true by the fact that a seven-word subject could be filled in for die und die so that the quoted sentence totals ten words.

  28. Sudo assumes that traces inside quotation are substituted by a mechanism similar to the one that is encoded in the interpretation rule for pure/direct quotation in (49).

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Acknowledgements

I am very thankful to Cornelia Ebert, Emar Maier, Roger Schwarzschild, Yasutada Sudo, Ede Zimmermann, the main editor Henriette de Swart, three anonymous reviewers, and the audiences at the University of Düsseldorf, FASL 24, and Sinn und Bedeutung 20 for valuable input. For judgments, I am indebted to Paul Gauss, Kayo Gauss-Aragaki, Nami Kim, Svetoslav Koev, Fabian Koglin, Barbara Mergelsberg, Donka Stefanova, Peter Sutton, Wataru Uegaki, and Yoshie Yamaguchi. Finally, I would like to thank Kurt Erbach for proofreading the manuscript. All mistakes are my own.

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    Todor Koev

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Koev, T. Quotational indefinites. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 35, 367–396 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-016-9344-x

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