25.2210, Review: Cognitive Science; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax: Chierchia (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-2210. Tue May 20 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.2210, Review: Cognitive Science; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax: Chierchia (2013)

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Date: Tue, 20 May 2014 08:44:05
From: Evangelia Vlachou [evangelia.vlachou at gmail.com]
Subject: Logic in Grammar

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-3150.html

AUTHOR: Gennaro  Chierchia
TITLE: Logic in Grammar
SUBTITLE: Polarity, Free Choice, and Intervention
SERIES TITLE: Oxford Studies in Semantics and Pragmatics
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Evangelia Vlachou, University of the Aegean

SUMMARY

Ever since the publication of “The Logical Syntax of Language” by Carnap
(1934), logicians and linguists have dealt with the question of how logic and
syntax interact in a way such that hearers draw pragmatically appropriate
inferences. Gennaro Chierchia’s book “Logic in Grammar” (2013) explores this
question by studying the common properties of lexical items that participate
in what Chierchia calls the “Polarity System” (PS): (a) universal free choice
items (FCIs) (like ‘any’ in English, ‘qualunque’ in Italian) and existential
FCIs (like ‘irgendein’ in German and ‘uno qualunque’ in Italian), (b)
epistemic indefinites (like ‘un qualche’ in Italian and ‘vreun’ in Romanian),
(c) weak negative polarity items (NPIs) (like ‘ever’ in English and ‘mai’ in
Italian) and strong NPIs (like ‘in weeks’ and ‘until’ in English), (d)
emphatic NPIs and ‘minimizers’ (like ‘lift a finger’ in English) and (e)
negative words (N-words) (like ‘nessuno’ and ‘neanche’ in Italian). Chierchia
focusses on the pragmatic inferences that one can draw from the use of PS
items as well as on the way these inferences predict the use of these items in
syntax. This interplay between syntax and logic is worked out around the axis
of scalar reasoning and implicatures as well as that of interference and
intervention phenomena.

It is proposed in this book that PS items share the same meaning with regular
existentials like ‘some’ and ‘a’ in English; they all commonly come with
domains of quantification. They differ from existentials in that the latter do
not always activate alternatives. To the contrary, PS items always activate
alternatives through the process of exhaustification, which requires that the
meaning of an item is checked against alternatives. Variation within the PS is
then explained in terms of the different alternatives its members activate.

The argumentation in “Logic in Grammar” is structured as follows. Chapter 1
introduces the reader to the properties and limits of the phenomenon of
polarity sensitivity in language, by focusing on seemingly different but
logically related items: ‘or’, ‘any’ and ‘ever’. An initial proposal is put
forth in this chapter, namely that polarity items like ‘any’ and ‘ever’ have a
focal feature that activates subdomain alternatives. These alternatives go
through the process of exhaustification and lead to strengthening. Since
alternative exhaustification in contexts that are not downward entailing leads
to contradiction, polarity items (PIs) are ungrammatical in contexts that are
not downward entailing. This hypothesis is compared against other theories on
polarity sensitivity and serves to explain the difference between PIs and
other lexical items like ‘some’ and ‘a’.

Chapter 2 discusses the common points between the free choice item ‘any’ and
free choice disjunction, and argues that scalar implicatures are related to an
exhaustification process common to all NPIs.

Chapter 3 and subsequent chapters are where the principal hypothesis pursued
in this book is fully worked out. In chapter 3, Chierchia compares emphatic
NPIs (‘even’) to non-emphatic NPIs (‘only’) and argues that both types of
items are the weakest scalar items with necessarily activated alternatives:
they trigger implicatures that emerge through exhaustification. Chapter 4
discusses the challenges to this idea by working around the following four
axes: (i) intervention, (ii) presuppositionality, (iii) weak and strong NPIs
and (iv) negative concord. Chapters 5 and 6 show how the principal hypothesis
of the book applies to both existential as well as to universal FCIs and aim
to unify both of them: in opposition to other existentials or universals, the
alternatives of FCIs are not subject to relevance. The FC effect results from
recursive exhaustification, that is, from the requirement to exhaustify
pre-exhausted alternatives. Chapter 7 addresses the problems caused to the
grammaticality of an NPI by the intervention of certain items between this
item and the downward entailing (DE) operator: they interrupt the DE nature of
the operator and provoke, in this way, exhaustification crash. Chapter 8, the
final chapter, constitutes an overview of the study and closes the book with a
discussion on how the proposal pursued in this book pertains on to the
relation between syntax and logic as well as on how children acquire the
polarity system.

EVALUATION

On an empirical basis, the book is comprehensive in scope: it examines seven
groups of items (existential free choice items, universal free choice items,
epistemic indefinites, weak NPIs, strong NPIs, N-words, emphatic NPIs) mainly
from three languages (English, Italian, German) and examines them from the
perspective of the inferences that hearers draw from their use. In this way,
the book is of great importance to linguists interested in each individual
item in these three languages but also in the question of inferences in
language. Chierchia guides the reader through the minimal details of the
behavior of each and every item, which makes the book appropriate to be used
by students in their first steps in semantics and comparative linguistics.

Although the author does not always provide hints on the relation between the
appendices’ contents and the chapters’ contents, the appendices provided at
the end of Chapters (2)-(7) transform Chierchia’s “Logic in Grammar” into a
useful handbook for those who wish to be initiated into the formal details of
how the polarity system works.

“Logic in Grammar” is part of a long tradition of studies on polarity
phenomena in language that started out as early as Hein (1890), the first
systematic investigation of PIs in Middle English (see Vlachou 2007 for the
most recent overview). Although there is quite an extensive literature on
these phenomena, there has been no systematic account of what unifies them.
Chierchia’s book fills this gap by successfully addressing the common property
that unifies all of them and makes them participate in what Chierchia calls
the “Polarity System”. In doing so, he pushes the discussion on polarity in
language towards a more philosophical direction. Another positive aspect of
“Logic in Grammar” is that it also takes into account items that are
grammatical in plain unmodalized episodic contexts, such as ‘irgendein’ in
German (following up on Kratzer (2002) and Vlachou (2002a,b, 2006, 2007,
2012).
 
The main proposal of “Logic in Grammar” is that all items that participate in
the Polarity System share the same meaning with existential indefinites like
‘some’ and ‘a’ that open up a domain of quantification. Their difference lies
in the way they manipulate alternatives. In the case of non-polarity
indefinites, the use of alternatives is context-dependent, i.e., alternatives
are transparent whenever conversationally appropriate. In the case of polarity
items, their meaning is always checked against their alternatives. Their
difference lies in that they activate different (parts of the domain of)
alternatives.

This proposal is in line with other studies on certain items that participate
in the polarity system as well as on the acquisition of implicatures. Kadmon &
Landman (1993) propose that domain widening that leads to strengthening is
crucial to the distribution of the polarity item ‘any’. Krifka (1995) provides
a uniform account of emphatic and non-emphatic NPIs while Lahiri (1998)
analyses emphatic NPIs in a similar way. Recently, Vlachou (2012) argues that
free choice items differ from regular indefinites in that they always activate
alternatives and differ among each other in that they activate different parts
of the set of alternatives. In doing so, they form two interpretational
categories (full set and subset FCIs).
 
It is unfortunate that the author does not provide an in-depth discussion of
the predictions of his proposal as far as the acquisition of these items is
concerned (except for a quick discussion in Chapter 8). Chierchia’s proposal
coheres well with recent approaches to children's difficulties with
implicatures (Chierchia et al. 2001; Gualmini and Crain 2001; Gualmini et al.
2001; Barner and Bachrach, 2010; Barner, Brooks, and Bale, 2011) that
demonstrate that children’s difficulties with implicatures have to do with
difficulties with alternatives and more precisely with accessing the lexicon
in generating alternatives.

“Logic in Grammar” will be of great interest to linguists working on negation
and polarity related phenomena (negative polarity items, free choice items,
negative concord, double negation) as well as on pragmatic implicatures and
alternative semantics. Moreover, this book will interest philosophers of
language and logicians. Further, scholars interested in cross-linguistic and
typological studies will certainly consider this book as a valuable source of
data mainly from English, Italian and German.

In general, Chierchia’s “Logic in Grammar” substantially contributes to our
understanding of the way inferences are encoded in languages and decoded by
individuals. It paves the way for future deep and thorough investigations of
how human beings perceive and express meanings related to quantities, sets and
individuals.

REFERENCES

Barner, David, Neon Brooks, and Alan Bale. 2011. Accessing the unsaid: The
role of scalar alternatives in children’s pragmatic inference. Cognition 118,
84-93.

Barner, David and Asaf Bachrach. 2010. Inference and exact numerical
representation in early language development. Cognitive Psychology, 60, 40-62.

Carnap, Robert. 1934. Logische Syntax der Sprache. Vienna: Springer. [The
Logical Syntax of Language (transl. by Paul Kegan), 1937, Kegan Paul, London.]

Chierchia, Gennaro, Stephen Crain, Maria Teresa Guasti, Andrea Gualmini, and
Luisa Meroni.. 2001. The acquisition of disjunction: evidence for the
grammatical view of scalar implicatures. Proceedings of BUCLD 25. In A. Do et
al. (Eds.). Cascadilla Press, Somerville Mass., 157-168.

Gualmini, Andrea and Stephen Crain. 2001. Downward Entailment in Child
Language. University of Maryland Working Papers in Linguistics, 11, 112-133,
University of Maryland at College Park.

Gualmini, Andrea, Stephen Crain, Luisa Meroni, Gennaro Chierchia and Maria
Teresa Guasti. 2001. At the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface in Child Language.
Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 11, 231-247. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University.

Hein, Julius. 1890. Uber die bildliche verneinung in der mittelenglischen
poesie. Anglia 15. 41–186, 396–472.

Kadmon, Nirit and Fred Landman. 1993. Any. Linguistics and Philosophy 15,
353-422.

Krifka, Manfred. 1995. The semantics and pragmatics of polarity items.
Linguistic Analysis 25.  209-257.

Lahiri, Uttama. 1998. Focus and negative polarity in Hindi. Natural Language
Semantics 6. 57-125.

Vlachou, Evangelia 2002a. How homogeneous are Free Choice Items? Paper
presented at the 19e Romaanse Taalkundedag, University of Utrecht.

Vlachou, Evangelia. 2002b. Polarity properties of French qu- indefinites.
Paper presented at the Amsterdam-Utrecht workshop on Negative Polarity Items.

Vlachou, Evangelia. 2006. Le puzzle des indéfinis en qu-.  Indéfinis et
prédication. In F. Corblin, L. Kupferman and S. Ferrando (eds.), 235-249, PUB,
Paris.

Vlachou, Evangelia. 2007. Free choice in and out of context: semantics and
distribution of French, Greek and English free choice items. LOT dissertation
series. University of Utrecht.

Vlachou, Evangelia. 2012. Delimiting the class of free choice items in a
comparative perspective: evidence from the database of French and Greek free
choice items. Lingua 122, 14, 1523-1568.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr. Evangelia Vlachou is currently Lecturer of Comparative Linguistics at the
Department of Mediterranean Languages of the University of the Aegean, in
Greece. Her dissertation 'Free choice in and out of context' published in the
LOT dissertation series in 2007 dealt with the semantics and distribution of
free choice items in a cross-linguistic perspective and developed a theory of
these items that relied on the interaction of lexical items’ semantic features
with the context. Her research also extends to other areas of the
syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface such as negation, quantification and
indefiniteness. Her work is published in journals and edited volumes.








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