in presupposition denials.

This paper explores a puzzling polarity-based asymmetry in the use of in sentences that deny presuppositions. It argues that this asymmetry is produced by the interaction of 's controversial additive presupposition with the alternatives that are salient in the relevant contexts and demonstrates that this proposal makes good crosslinguistic predictions. Along the way, this paper shows that presupposition denials are a fruitful testing ground for uncovering details about the behaviour of and the role of presuppositions triggered within focus alternatives.

Strengthened, and weakened, by belief.

This paper discusses a set of observations, many of which are novel, concerning differences between the adjectival modals and and their adverbial counterparts and . It argues that the observations can be derived from a standard interpretation of / as universal and / as existential quantifiers over possible worlds, in conjunction with the hypothesis that the adjectives quantify over knowledge and the adverbs quantify over belief. The claims on which the argument relies include the following: (i) knowledge implies belief, (ii) agents have epistemic access to their belief, (iii) relevance is closed under speakers' belief, and (iv) commitment is pragmatically inconsistent with explicit denial of belief.

Update rules and semantic universals.

We discuss a well-known puzzle about the lexicalization of logical operators in natural language, in particular connectives and quantifiers. Of the many logically possible operators, only few appear in the lexicon of natural languages: the connectives in English, for example, are conjunction , disjunction , and negated disjunction ; the lexical quantifiers are and . The logically possible nand (negated conjunction) and Nall (negated universal) are not expressed by lexical entries in English, nor in any natural language.

Interpreting plural predication: homogeneity and non-maximality.

Plural definite descriptions across many languages display two well-known properties. First, they can give rise to so-called non-maximal readings, in the sense that they 'allow for exceptions' (, in some contexts, can be judged true even if Mary didn't read all the books on the reading list). Second, while they tend to have a quasi-universal quantificational force in affirmative sentences ('quasi-universal' rather than simply 'universal' due to the possibility of exceptions we have just mentioned), they tend to be interpreted existentially in the scope of negation (a property often referred to as , cf.

A squib on anaphora and coindexing.

There are two kinds of semantic theories of anaphora. Some, such as Heim's File Change Semantics, Groenendijk and Stokhof's Dynamic Predicate Logic, or Muskens' Compositional DRT (CDRT), seem to require full coindexing of anaphora and their antecedents prior to interpretation. Others, such as Kamp's Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), do not require this coindexing and seem to have an important advantage here.

Ellipsis and discourse coherence.

VP-ellipsis generally requires a syntactically matching antecedent. However, many documented examples exist where the antecedent is not appropriate. Kehler (2000, 2002) proposed an elegant theory which predicts a syntactic antecedent for an elided VP is required only for a certain discourse coherence relation (resemblance) not for cause-effect relations.