This paper presents a general-purpose update semantics for expressions of subjective uncertainty in natural language. First, a set of desiderata are established for how expressions of subjective uncertainty should behave in dynamic, update-based semantic systems; then extant implementations of expressions of subjective uncertainty in such models are evaluated and found wanting; finally, a new update semantics is proposed. The desiderata at the heart of this paper center around the contention that expressions of subjective uncertainty express beliefs which are not persistent, (...) whereas propositions express beliefs that are persistent. I argue that if we make the move of treating updates in a dynamic semantics as Bayesian updates, i.e. as conditionalization, then expressions of subjective uncertainty will behave the way we want them to without altering the way propositions behave. (shrink)

This paper investigates the semantics of implicit comparatives (Alice is tall compared to Bob) and its connections to the semantics of explicit comparatives (Alice is taller than Bob) and sentences with adjectives in plain positive form (Alice is tall). We consider evidence from two experiments that tested judgments about these three kinds of sentence, and provide a semantics for implicit comparatives from the perspective of degree semantics.

The paper formalizes a change of camera angle on the classic Stalnakerian account of assertion, foregrounding that the speaker is presenting herself as though she knows the sentence she’s uttered to be true, and deriving context update from a proposal that the context set be modified so as to become a member of the same property of epistemic states as the speaker’s. The resulting formalization is one on which often, but crucially not always, an assertion serves to propose that the (...) context set be intersected with the denotation of the sentence that has been uttered. Rather than assigning ad hoc update effects to epistemic modals, exceptional updates for epistemic modals fall out of the interaction between the speaker-oriented epistemicity of epistemic modals and the speaker-oriented epistemicity of assertion. This circumvents arguments that disagreement over epistemic modals is fatal to a solipsistic contextualist account of their semantics. The model builds a bridge from truth-conditional semantics to expressivist update effects via a uniform conception of assertive update, and shows how relativist effects can be derived using a relativist illocutionary machinery, rather than a relativist semantic machinery. (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis of inquisitive rising declaratives (Gunlogson 2001, Jeong 2018) within the Table model (Farkas & Bruce 2010). On this account, intonational tunes are modifiers of context update functions: rising intonation removes the speaker commitment component of a context update. This delivers a compositional account of the contributions of sentence type and intonational tune to the illocutionary mood of an utterance, showing how the semantic type of declarative sentences, the rising intonational tune, and a general-purpose utterance function (...) (Farkas & Roelofsen 2017) conspire to derive the basic discourse effect of rising declaratives without any construction-specific stipulations. The account makes use of only the most fundamental representational primitives independently necessary to model assertions and neutral questions, showing that rising declaratives can be accounted for without recourse to projected commitments, metalinguistic issues, or explicit marking of commitment strength, evidence source, or epistemic bias (cf. Gunlogson 2008, Northrup 2014, Malamud & Stephenson 2015, Farkas & Roelofsen 2017). Inferences of bias generated by rising declaratives are accounted for with a novel pragmatics for the Table model, formalizing what is implicit in discussions of the role played in the model by speaker commitments and projected Common Grounds. (shrink)