Faculty
Mandy Simons joined the philosophy department in 1998. She came to CMU from Cornell University, where she received her Ph.D. from the department of Linguistics. She also holds an adjunct faculty position in the Linguistics department at the University of Pittsburgh.
Professor Simons's research addresses issues in the interpretation of natural language. Her work covers topics in formal semantics, pragmatics and the philosophy of language.
Professor Simons is the faculty advisor for the interdepartment Major in Linguistics and Minor in Linguistics.
Research Interests
I am broadly interested in the question of how meaning is conveyed through language use. My research combines work in formal semantics, pragmatics, and the philosophy of langauge, with a focus on extra-linguistic aspects of interpretation. My primary interests at this time are in presupposition and in the overall architecture of the interpretation process. With respect to the latter, I have been focussing on the issues raised by embedded implicature and by the flexibility of word meaning.
Manuscripts
Presupposition and Cooperation (Under Review)
In this paper, I propose a novel view of presuppositions as those propositions which an interpreter must take the speaker to accept in order to take the speaker to be fully cooperative, in the Gricean sense. [pdf]
Presupposition without Common Ground.
In this paper, I review a number of arguments in favor of treating many of the central cases of presupposition as the result of conversational inference, rather than as lexically specified properties of particular expressions. I then argue that, despite the standard assumption to the contrary, the view of presupposition as constraints on the common ground is not consistent with the provision of a conversational account of particular presuppositional constraints. The argument revolves crucially around the workings of accommodation. I then offer an alternative view of the phenomenon of presupposition, which is compatible with a variety of sources for presuppositions. On the view offered here, presupposition is seen as a property of utterances. I argue that the presuppositions of an utterance are those propositions which an interpreter must take the speaker to accept in order to take the speaker to be fully cooperative, in the Gricean sense. [pdf]
Publications
Please note that the papers posted here are under copyright with the publishers. The PDFs are intended for personal academic use only.
A Gricean View on Intrusive Implicatures
To appear in Klaus Petrus (ed.), Meaning and Analysis: New Essays on H. Paul Grice.
This paper explores one of the long-standing objections to Grice’s account of conversational implicature: the case of purported implicatures which are apparently generated by subordinate clauses, or which fall under the scope of a logical operator (typically both). Such cases, for reasons to be detailed below, pose a challenge to Grice’s account. While those who have posed the challenge, ranging from advocates of truth conditional pragmatics to strict compositionalists, have a wide variety of views as to the correct account of the data, they are united in reaching the same negative conclusion: that Grice’s account cannot be extended to intrusive implicatures.
In this paper, I will argue for a different conclusion. I will suggest that there is a natural modification of Grice’s model which allows for the generation of implicatures from non-asserted sentence-parts. The goal of the paper is to articulate this modification and apply it to some sample cases. This is done in part 2 of the paper. In part 1, I introduce the cases to be investigated and explain in a little more detail what issues they raise. [pdf]
Foundational Issues in Presupposition.
Philosophy Compass 1 (4), 357-372, 2006.
This essay provides a brief introduction to the topic of presupposition,
and then discuses three major approaches to this phenomenon, focusing on the
answers
which each approach gives to two foundational questions: What is presupposition?
And how, or why, does it arise?
[pdf]
Observations on embedding verbs, evidentiality, and presupposition.
Lingua 117(6), 1034-1056, 2007.
This paper discusses the semantically parenthetical use of clause-embedding
verbs such as see, hear, think, believe, discover and know.
When embedding verbs are used in this way, the embedded clause carries the
main point of the
utterance, while the main clause serves some discourse function. Frequently,
this function is evidential, with the parenthetical verb carrying information
about the source and reliability of the embedded claim, or about the speaker’s
emotional orientation to it. Other functions of parenthetical uses of verbs
are discussed.Particular attention is paid to the parenthetical uses of semi-factive
and factive verbs. It is demonstrated that when so used, these verbs are in
no way presuppositional;
that is, there is no presumption, or even pretense, that their complements have
common ground status. It is further demonstrated that the loss of presuppositionality
is not accompanied by a loss of factivity: in their parenthetical use, these
verbs are non-presuppositional, but still factive. It is argued that this non-presuppositional
use of factive verbs provides support for the (minority) view that presupposition
is not a conventional property of lexical items.
[pdf]
Semantics and Pragmatics in the Interpretation of or.
SALT 15
[Abstract]
[pdf]
Dividing things up: the semantics of or and the modal/or interaction.
Natural Language Semantics 13: 271-316, 2005.
[Abstract]
[pdf]
Presupposition and Relevance.
In "Semantics vs. Pragmatics," ed. Zoltan Gendler Szabo, Oxford University
Press, 2004.
[Abstract] [pdf]
Presupposition and Accommodation: Understanding the Stalnakerian picture
Philosophical Studies 112: 251-278, 2003.
[Abstract]
[pdf]
"On the Conversational Basis of Some Presuppositions"
Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 11, 2001.
[pdf]
"Disjunction and Alternativeness".
Linguistics and Philosophy Volume 24(5), 2001. [pdf]
Issues in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Disjunction. NY: Garland Publishing, 2000.
"On the felicity conditions of disjunctive sentences" Proceedings of the Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL), 1999.
"Pronouns and Definite Descriptions."
The Journal of Philosophy. Vol. XCIII, Number 8: 408-420, 1996.
"Disjunction and Anaphora"
Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT)
6: 245-260, 1996.
"The binyan hitpa'el decomposed"
Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual
Conference of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics: 143-167, 1995.
Teaching
I teach a variety of courses in formal linguistics and philosophy of language. Here are brief descriptions of those which I teach on a regular basis.
Nature of Language (80-180)
An introduction to the systematic
study of human language, spanning issues in the philosophy of language and
contemporary linguistics.
Linguistic Analysis (80-280)
A hands-on course teaching analysis
of natural language. This course is a requirement for the Linguistics Minor.
Philosophy of Language (80-380/680)
A reading course which
provides a survey of modern approaches to central topics in the Philosophy
of Language.
Formal Semantics (80-481/781)
A high level introduction to
the practice of Natural Language Semantics in a formal framework.