In the vast literature on evidentiality, empirical and theoretical focus has mostly been on propositional evidentiality, i.e. evidentials that scope over propositions. In this work, we undertake a crosslinguistic comparative study of propositional and nominal evidentiality, i.e. evidentials that scope over nominals, and are fused with the determiner/demonstrative systems or with nominal tense markers. I demonstrate that there are cohesive parallels in how flavors of both propositional and nonpropositional evidentiality interact with verbal and nominal tense and aspect. I use tools from modal logic to show that we can (i) unify the subdomains of evidentiality using modal accessibility relations while also preserving important distinctions between them, (ii) use the same tools to compositionally capture the interaction between evidentials and tense and aspect, and (iii) have the representation of an agent’s certainty of belief be reflected in quantificational force. Concretely, directly encoding the subtype of evidence in the semantics, I argue that three distinct evidential flavors embody three distinct spatio-temporal modal accessibility relations: direct (sensory) evidentials are temporally-sensitive historical necessity relations (yielding the factive nature of perception); inferential evidentials of pure reasoning are epistemic accessibility relations; inferential evidentials of results are a combination of the above two.

Arguments have always played a central role within logic and philosophy. This chapter overviews recent work on the semantics and pragmatics of argumentative discourse, with particular attention to work on the semantics of argument connectives such as ‘therefore’ in discourse coherence theory and in dynamic semantics, as well as on modal analyses of ‘therefore’. A dynamic analysis of the semantics of ‘therefore’ is described, that captures both uses of ‘therefore’ in categorical arguments as well as its uses in suppositional and complex arguments. In the final section, I overview some issues that arise on the pragmatics of arguments, such as how we are to characterize the distinctive utterance force of arguments versus explanations.

This chapter presents the most influential linguistic approaches to presupposition. Going beyond the traditional analyses of the problem of presupposition projection, it also considers recent developments in linguistics that link the analysis of presuppositions to general processes of cognition and reasoning, such as attention, probabilistic reasoning, theory of mind, information structure, attitudes and perspectival structure. I discuss some outstanding questions: whether presuppositions form one coherent group or should be thought of as different types of phenomena, why we have presuppositions at all, and why we see the presuppositions that we see (aka the triggering problem). Overall, the chapter stresses the need to consider the intricacies of the interaction of presuppositions with the broader discourse context.

The goal of this paper is to discuss which basic semantic entities we should include in our formal semantic ontology, and on which principles we should include them (cf. Bach 1986b). The vast majority of formal theories employ individuals as a basic type; they represent quantification over, modification of, and reference to individuals. But many theories include additional types or entities, including possible worlds, but also less common ones like vectors. Some papers have argued that types should be constrained or reduced; others that they should be proliferated. I present some representative arguments on both sides and suggest a path forward in evaluating them against one another.

Linguistics, like all sciences, is deep-rooted in philosophy. Perhaps the most obvious example is that linguistic meaning has been at the center of philosophic inquiry for as long as philosophic discourse has been documented.1 Nevertheless, among the current subfields in linguistics (including phonetics, phonology, and syntax), formal semantics was the latest bloomer.2 As noted in the Preface, it was not until the mid-1980s that formal semantics began to develop as an autonomous field within linguistics. And it was not until the 1990s that it became solidified as such, with the founding of the journal Natural Language Semantics and the conference Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT).3 These venues welcomed philosophers, but their aims and scope were largely linguistic.4

Tenses are one of the main devices for encoding time in language. Philosophers’ interest in tense goes back at least to Aristotle who discusses in his De Interpretatione whether or not sentences about the future have a truth value. While philosophers were originally mainly interested in the future tense, work in semantics has shown in the last decades that the present tense poses many challenges as well, challenges that are interesting for linguists and philosophers alike. This paper discusses two particularly complex present tense phenomena: the present tense in complements of indirect speech and attitude reports, and the historical present. It argues that a holistic understanding of the present tense would require collaboration between formal semantics and other fields of language study, such as psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, philosophy of language, mind and fiction, literature study and narratology.

This chapter offers a synoptic survey of work on the discourse dynamics of vague language. It starts by briefly introduction to the traditional philosophical puzzles of vagueness, to do with indeterminacy and tolerance. From there, it turns to evidence that vague language exhibits nontrivial discourse dynamics. Different approaches to the discourse dynamics of vagueness are taxonomized and critically evaluated. The chapter concludes by considering the prospects of leveraging an account of the dynamics of vague language to provide a solution to the traditional puzzles of vagueness.

We examine a previously undiscussed interaction between tense and predicates of personal taste (PPTs). While disagreements involving delicious or fun are generally considered faultless – they have no clear fact of the matter – we observe that, in joint oral narratives, this faultlessness varies with tense: if the narrative is told in the historical present, disagreements involving a PPT are not faultless. Drawing on narrative research in psychology and discourse analysis, we propose that this contrast reflects a pragmatic convention of the narrative genre that participants construct a consensus version of what happened from a unitary perspective. To link this pragmatics with the semantics, we adopt a bicontextual semantics, where the perspectival parameters for both PPTs and tense are located in a context of assessment (and not context of utterance). We show that when these contextual parameters are constrained by the unitary perspective of narratives, the present tense leads to nonfaultless disagreements, as its semantics tightly binds the temporal location of an event to the parameter relevant for appraisal. The past tense, by contrast, enables both faultless and nonfaultless disagreements. We derive this flexibility by revising the existing semantics for past tense, engendering a new perspective on crosslinguistic variation in tense usage.

We defend an acquaintance-based semantics for ‘de re’ attitude reports. We begin by surveying the philosophical literature on the logical form of the ‘de re’, with particular attention to how acquaintance relations solve the problem posed by so-called double vision scenarios. We reject the view that cognitive contact with the ‘res’ requires causal interaction: the causal conception of acquaintance is inadequately motivated in the philosophical literature on the ‘de re’. We then turn to other linguistic data. We show that the ‘de re’ analysis is needed to account for certain tense constructions. The success of this application provides a further reason to reject an exclusively causal conception of acquaintance, since the kind of cognitive contact relevant to ‘de re’ attitudes towards times cannot plausibly be causal. We discuss objections to the ‘de re’ analysis of tense, such as the apparent unavailability of double vision scenarios involving times. We consider various additional principles and constraints that further refine the theory’s predictions, and conclude that while further research is needed to fully vindicate the ‘de re’ analysis in this application, it offers the most unified and well-motivated account of the embedded tense data currently on offer.

This chapter focuses on the role that discourse relations and structure play in a variety of phenomena of interest to semanticists and philosophers. Not only do discourse relations add semantic content above and beyond the individual propositions expressed by the utterances in a discourse, but they, and the complex structures to which they give rise, can influence the interpretations of individual utterances, having an effect on the very propositions the utterances are understood to express. In this chapter, we look in detail at how theories of discourse structure can be brought to bear on at-issue and non-at-issue content, using appositive relative clauses and discourse parenthetical reports as illustrations. We also discuss recent efforts to use discourse structure to model conversational goals and capture the subjective nature of discourse interpretation as well as recent work extending theories of discourse structure to multimodal discourse. Along the way, we emphasize the importance of corpus work in studying discursive phenomena and raise a series of large questions to be pursued in future work.

Definite descriptions are an area where linguistics and philosophy have been intimately intertwined as long as they have been acquainted. But are we past all that now, in the modern era, as work on definite descriptions becomes less focussed on English, and more cross-linguistic? This chapter highlights one great unresolved issue in the theory of definite descriptions that persists even in this modern era of crosslinguistic comparison, a foundational (hence philosophical) one, pitting dynamic semantics against situation semantics. A prominent synthesis of these competing (though compatible) frameworks says that both are needed, for “strong” and “weak” articles, respectively. The strong vs. weak distinction has served as inspiration for much recent work on the crosslinguistic semantics of definiteness. While this new development has led to a much richer and more well-rounded picture of definiteness as a phenomenon, the predictions of the two analyses overlap too much, leading to spurious debate when fieldworkers go to analyze a new language. The chapter aims to clarify what is at stake empirically in the choice among analyses, and advocates for continued philosophical reflection as we operationalize our methods of discovery.

The notion of ’alternative’ is central to analyses of various semantic/pragmatic phenomena, such as disjunction, focus, discourse structure, questions, and implicature. However, basic questions concerning the various notions of alternatives have not received the attention they deserve, e.g. what exactly these notions signify, or how they are supposed to interact. This chapter reflects on such questions, centering on appeals to alternatives in characterizations of focus, disjunction, discourse goals (questions under discussion), and interrogatives. More precisely, this chapter criticizes the conflation of the set of focus alternatives with the meaning of an interrogative, discusses two conceptions of the alternatives introduced by disjunction (algebraic and attention-based), and departs from the predominant view of QUDs as, essentially, linguistic questions that represent discourse goals.