Craige Roberts

only: A CASE STUDY IN PROJECTIVE MEANING

I offer an integrated theory of the meaning of only in which the prejacent, while not presupposed, is both entailed and backgrounded, hence tends to project (following a general proposal about projection due to Simons et al. 2010). Moreover, I argue, contra Beaver & Brady (2008), that only is not conventionally associated with focus, the focus effects arising instead pragmatically. But I do ado...

Bringing semantics to sociophonetics: Social variables and secondary entailments

Questions in Discourse Lecture 2: Focus and Topic: Attending to Relevant Alternatives

There are many respects in which the conventional content of an utterance reflects speaker assumptions about the context of utterance and the relation between that context and the intended interpretation of the utterance. Taken together, these constitute what Vallduví (1992,1993) called the Information Packaging of the utterance, aka its Information Structure. Two central aspects of this Inform...

The Semantics of Conditional Modality

This paper proposes a new semantics for the conditional, which combines elements of Stalnaker’s theory and the rival approach due to Lewis and Kratzer. It is claimed that this conditional enables a simple compositional treatment of combinations of conditionals with modalities. ∗I owe thanks to Craige Roberts to several conversations about this topic while the ideas were in an early stage of dev...

Adaptive learning and concrete minimalism

We consider triggering approaches to language acquisition, or "T-theory." T-theory incorporates a number of significant conceptual paradoxes and empirical puzzles. We suggest that a different type of theory, "adaptation-theory" (A-theory), may avoid these paradoxes and puzzles. We sketch out a dynamical systems approach to language acquisition and representation. A-theory crucially incorporates...