Month: January 2019

At-issueness in direct quotation: the case of Mayan quotatives

Scott AnderBois

In addition to verba dicendi, languages have a bunch of different other grammatical devices for encoding reported speech. While not common in Indo-European languages, two of the most common such elements cross-linguistically are reportative evidentials and quotatives. Quotatives have been much less discussed then either verba dicendi or reportatives, both in descriptive/typological literature and especially in formal semantic work. While quotatives haven’t been formally analyzed in detail previously to my knowledge, several recent works on reported speech constructions in general have suggested in passing that they pattern either with verba dicendi or with reportatives. Drawing on data from Yucatec Maya, I argue that they differ from both since they present direct quotation (like verba dicendi) but make a conventional at-issueness distinction (like reportatives). To account for these facts, I develop an account of quotatives by combining an extended Farkas & Bruce 2010-style discourse scoreboard with bicontextualism (building on Eckardt 2014’s work on Free Indirect Discourse).

An Introduction to Deep Fried Logic

Logic is Contractionless and Relevant, but Logic is (Accidentally) Contractionless and Relevant: An Introduction to Deep Fried Logic

Shay Logan

Logic, according to Beall, is the universal entailment relation. I claim that this forces us to accept that logic is contractionless and relevant. But neither relevance nor contraction-freedom, important as these features have been in the literature on logic and its philosophy, play a role in my argument. Instead, they are emergent features — logical accidents, if you will. Along the way I will familiarize us with a novel (and delicious) semantic theory that I call deep fried semantics.