A possible worlds semantics for Cuzco Quechua evidentials

The Ingredients of Reciprocity in Cuzco Quechua

In Cuzco Quechua reciprocity is marked by means of two verbal suffixes, one of which is a marker of reflexivity, the other of which is a marker of pluractionality. The paper develops an analysis that composes reciprocity from these more basic notions. Two further ingredients that are needed will be argued to derive from independent principles: universal quantification over parts of the reciproc...

Possible Worlds Semantics For Events

Various theories of events or actions have been proposed to account for commonsence conclusions. The typical way in which this proceeds is for a scenario to be invented and a logic tried against it. Then someone else may perturb the scenario a bit and the old logic fails, while a new one may succeed. The basic difficulty with this methodology is its ad hoc character. To overcome this, recent wo...

Possible Worlds Semantics for Predicates

Agnostic Possible Worlds Semantics

Working within standard classical higher-order logic, we propose a possible worlds semantics (PWS) which combines the simplicity of the familiar Montague semantics (MS), in which propositions are sets of worlds, with the fine-grainedness of the older but less well-known tractarian semantics (TS) of Wittgenstein and C.I. Lewis, wherein worlds are maximal consistent sets of propositions. The prop...

A Hamblin Semantics for Evidentials

When speakers enter a conversation, they do so with a shared body of information. As the participants in the conversation speak, what they say affects this common ground. But how exactly is the common ground affected by what they assert? On one view, an assertion updates the common ground (Karttunen 1974, Stalnaker 1975, 1978). A second view is that an assertion is a proposal to update the comm...