Children add more information to their utterances by packing more material into a single clause. They can specify roles, modify nouns with adjectives and verbs with added locatives and adverbs. They can add demonstratives (those) and quantifiers (many) to nouns, and make clearer what they are referring to. Young children’s early constructions tend to mirror parental usage, just as their lexical choices do. They follow preferred argument structure and place given information in the Agent slot of transitive verbs, and keep the Object slot of transitives and the Subject slot of intransitives for new information. They may omit given information at this stage and only later add the relevant pronoun subjects. In both questions and negations, they take time to master the use of auxiliary verbs and rely on fixed “frames” for some time as they learn the meaning of each wh- question word. Children also take time in learning how different perspectives can be marked within the clause, with choices of causative, location, or voice alternations. Here children must learn the options verb by verb.

This chapter begins with an outline of logic and of the attempts to use it as a theory of human deduction. The fatal impediments to this approach led to the model theory in which models based on the meanings of premises yield deductive conclusions. And the chapter describes in detail the implementation of this theory’s account of deductions based on sentential connectives such as “if,” and how this simulation led to the discovery of systematic but compelling fallacies.The chapter outlines how algorithms based on models simulate deductions of the spatial relations among objects. And it points out the problems that need to be solved to extend accounts of elementary inferences from quantified assertions to deal with multiply-quantified relations. One alternative to the model theory is the idea that human deduction relies on probabilities. This approach concerns only which inferences people make, not the underlying mental processes by which they are made. The model theory fills the gap, because it applies to the deductions of probabilities, both those based on frequencies or proportions, and those based on evidence pertinent to unique events. The chapter ends with an account of why theories of human deduction need to be simulated in computer programs.

This chapter presents a comprehensive review of vague language studies from a pragmatic perspective. An utterance is vague when it conveys unspecific meaning. For example, “Many friends attended her birthday party,” how many is many? 20, 100 or 200? Our interpretation of “many” may vary from individual to individual, from context to context. Vague language is fluid, stretchable, and strategic. It consists of various types, including approximators, vague quantifiers, placeholder words, vague category identifiers, general terms, intensifiers, softeners, and epistemic stance markers. This chapter serves as a guide for understanding the characteristics of vague language. The discussion involves the conceptual frameworks and features of vague language, which are illustrated by examples and research drawn from intercultural corpora. This chapter reviews the theorization of vague language, its linguistic categories and pragmatic functions, vague language use in intercultural communication, and includes suggestions for future research. Vague language plays a crucial role in intercultural communication and its pragmatic functions, such as mitigation, politeness, and self-protection, form an important part of the strategic moves used in effective language interactions. This chapter provides an important contribution to the field of intercultural pragmatics.

As shown in Chapter 6, Q’eqchi’ mas is not at all similar in function to Spanish más. The closest equivalent to Spanish más is rather the Q’eqchi’ particle chik, especially in regards to the types of constructions that incorporate it and the kinds of presupposition such constructions carry. To show this, Chapter 8 details the wide range of arguments that the form chik ‘more/else’ can take as an operator: verbal and stative predicates, wh-words, and quantities, inter alia. It shows that, across all these constructions, chik presupposes that a proposition is true of some quantity (degree, event, entity, or time), and it asserts that the proposition is true for a larger quantity (greater degree, subsequent event, other entity, or later time). It shows that, while chik behaves very similarly to Spanish más and English ‘more’ (as well as English ‘else’, ‘(no) longer’, and ‘(not) again’), it does not serve the same comparative function as its Spanish and English counterparts, except in the relatively marked case of self-comparison. Finally, it compares and contrasts the meaning of chik with two closely related forms: ajwi’ ‘also’ and ka’ajwi’ ‘only’.

Chapter 4 provides examples of reanalyses, rather than different choices, that are prompted by the Principle of Determinacy. The first change involves the reanalysis of a loosely adjoined phrase as a subject argument because a topicalized subject does not result in an optimal computation. The principle also accounts for changes involving copulas, both the change from demonstrative to copula and from topic to subject. Auxiliaries and quantifiers in English provide fertile ground to investigate determinacy, because these move from lower to higher heads and specifiers, respectively. It is shown that auxiliary movement indeed violates determinacy and that options exist to circumvent it, e.g. skipping T and reanalyzing as a higher functional head. Floating quantifiers do not violate determinacy because they first move as QPs and subsequent moves are of DPs.

This chapter provides an overview of the research on semantics and related interface phenomena in heritage language grammars, focusing on three main questions: (i) whether the phenomena under investigation are subject to incomplete acquisition and/or attrition in heritage language grammars; (ii) whether heritage language grammars are subject to cross-linguistic influence from the dominant language; and (iii) whether interface phenomena are particularly vulnerable in incomplete acquisition and/or attrition. These questions are investigated in four linguistic domains that fall at the interface between syntax and semantics where there has been a substantial body of research with heritage speakers: semantics of the verbal domain, such as tense/aspect and unaccusativity; semantics of the nominal domain, such as definiteness and genericity; semantics of subject and object expression, including binding and case-marking; and quantifier semantics.

David Wilmsen examines Maltese, a peripheral dialect of Arabic. Of those, Maltese stands out as remarkably unusual. Unlike other dialects of Arabic, it is an official language of the state in which its speakers reside, the Republic of Malta, as well as being an official language of the European Union. It boasts a long literary tradition, a language academy, an active press, scholarly journals and societies devoted to it, and an ever-growing digital presence, including a large online, freely accessible corpus encompassing hundreds of millions of words. It is therefore an easily accessible language for linguistic research. The chapter examines Maltese in light of linguistic thinking about so-called enclave dialects, showing that Maltese conforms to the general characteristics of remnant dialect groupings, in that it does borrow from the languages with which it comes into contact, it does undergo independent internal change, and it does retain features of its founder languages. As such, Maltese can be instrumental in demarking the latest date for the emergence of a range of features found variously in mainland dialects of Arabic.

This chapter develops an improved assignment-variable-based compositional semantics for head-raising analyses of restrictive relative clauses, and applies the account to certain types of pronominal anaphora. The speculative choice-function based analysis of names from Chapter 4 is extended to certain indefinites, relative words, and donkey pronouns. An analysis of donkey pronouns as copies of their linguistic antecedent is supported by crosslinguistic data. Nominal quantifiers are treated as introducing quantification over assignments. The proposed semantics for quantifiers helps capture linguistic shifting data in universal, existential, and asymmetric readings of donkey sentences. Additional composition rules or principles for interpreting reconstructed phrases aren’t required (e.g., Predicate Abstraction, Predicate Modification, Trace Conversion). The semantics is fully compositional. Critical challenges are discussed.

This chapter extends the assignment-variable-based analysis of headed relative constructions in Chapter 6 to quantifier phrases with nonrelative complements. Crosslinguistic diachronic, morphological, and syntactic data are examined in support of a generalized D+XP analysis. Applications of the assignment-quantificational syntax/semantics for quantifier phrases include phenomena with “specificity,” contextual domain restriction, and distinctions between modifier (“free R”) readings and argument (“inherent R”) readings of genitives. The treatment of donkey pronouns in Chapter 6 is extended to bound-variable readings, reflexives, and other types of apparent non-c-command anaphora, such as with genitive binding and inverse linking. The account’s distinction between trace-binding and pronoun-binding is exploited in a speculative account of weak crossover.

This chapter introduces key elements of the basic syntax and semantics. Topics of discussion include the treatments of compositional semantic value, assignment functions and variables for assignments, pronouns and traces, and quantification in object language and metalanguage. A preliminary compositional semantic derivation is provided.

In this chapter, Myrto Grigoroglou and Anna Papafragou explore what seems to be a paradox about the development of pragmatic abilities: while very young children are able to perform tasks which demonstrate what is required for pragmatic reasoning, certain areas of their pragmatic performance do not become adult-like until much later. Focusing on the much-discussed topic of scalar implicature, they propose that performance in tasks designed to elicit the derivation of such an implicature is significantly affected by the nature of the contextual material provided. When, for example, children appear not to understand an utterance of the form ‘some X are Y’ as suggesting ‘not all X are Y’, it may be because they have not seen the potential relevance in the particular context of the thought that all X are Y.

Nicholas Allott considers how relevance theory can be seen as responding to doubts about the possibility of any kind of systematic pragmatic theory. He considers three sceptical positions: Fodor’s argument that pragmatic processes are not amenable to scientific study because they are unencapsulated (highly context-sensitive), Chomsky’s claim that human intentional action is a mystery rather than a scientifically tractable problem, and a third view which maintains that intentional communication is too complex for systematic study. Allott argues that work in relevance theory can be seen as successfully challenging these sceptical views and he gives concrete examples of its achievements.