Stefan Hinterwimmer

Cornelia Ebert

This anthology of papers analyzes a range of specificity markers found in natural languages. It reflects the fact that despite intensive research into these markers, the vast differences between the markers across languages and even within single languages have been less acknowledged. Commonly regarded specific indefinites are by no means a homogenous class, and so this volume fills a gap in our understanding of the semantics and pragmatics of indefinites. The papers explore differences and similarities among these specificity markers, concentrating on the following issues: whether specificity is a purely semantic or also a pragmatic notion; whether the contribution of specificity markers is located on the level of the at-issue content; whether some kind of speaker-listener asymmetry concerning the identification of the referent is involved; and the behavioral scope of these indefinites in the context of other quantifiers, negation, attitude verbs, and intensional/modal operators.

Different Kinds of Specificity Across Languages

This book deals with the interpretation of adverbially quantified sentences containing definite DPs and Free Relatives (FR) Thereby, it concentrates on the origins of Quantificational Variability Effects (QVEs), i.e. readings according to which the respective quantificational adverb seems to quantify over the individuals denoted by the respective DP/FR. QVEs are usually discussed only in connection with singular indefinites and bare plurals. This book therefore provides the first comprehensive account of QVEs with definite DPs and Free Relatives (while also discussing singular indefinites and bare plurals). Presenting new empirical observations and arguments for the assumption that Q-adverbs quantify over situations exclusively, it is also an important contribution to the theoretical debate concerning the quantificational domain of Q-adverbs.. It is of interest to linguists working in formal semantics and the syntax-semantics interface as well as to philosophers of language who are interested in adverbial quantification and situation semantics. Furthermore, it offers an introduction to the core issues of situation semantics and adverbial quantification and is therefore accessible to graduate students interested in these topics.

Stefan Hinterwimmer

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