LINGUIST List 25.2210
Tue
May 20 2014
Review: Cognitive
Science; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax: Chierchia
(2013)
Editor for this issue:
Monica Macaulay <monicalinguistlist.org>
Date: 21-Jan-2014
From: Evangelia Vlachou
<evangelia.vlachou
gmail.com>
Subject: Logic in Grammar
E-mail this message to a
friend
Discuss this
message
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.
Page Updated: 20-May-2014