Dan Beaver
Biographic Data
| ID | 684681 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dan Beaver |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dan |
| FAMILY NAME | Beaver |
| SIGNATURE | BEAVER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1859-4786 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 113 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
On Laudianism: Piety, Polemic, and Politics during the Personal Rule of Charles I
The Politics of Language
We’re running out of fuel!”: When does miscommunication go unrepaired
We introduce a framework for studying repair initiation in the face of miscommunication. Our aim is to seed development of models that both predict when conversational repair is a likely communicative strategy and explain why interlocutors would not engage in repair in the face of conversational difficulty. We identify three factors as critical to the predictability of repair: (i) the extent to which a misalignment is (un)recognized by participan…
Neutrality
Neutrality functions as an ideal in deliberation—we are supposed to have a neutral standpoint in debate, speak without bias or taking sides. We argue against the ideal of neutrality. We sketch how a theory of meaning could avoid commitment even to the coherence of a neutral space of discourse for exchanging reasons. In a model that accepts the ideal of neutrality, what makes propaganda exceptional is its non-neutrality. However, a critique of pro…
Negation and Presupposition
Over a century of scholarship on presupposition has worked towards reconciling two seemingly contrary properties of these types of inferences: the ability to project through embedding like negation, and the ability to be cancelled explicitly. Describing these properties has been key to not only diagnosing presuppositions, but also differentiating them from other types of inferences like implicatures and entailment and understanding how a theory o…
Stories and verdicts: Maleficium , judicial process and the politics of neighbourliness on the Atlantic margins in the seventeenth century
This article uses an exceptionally well-documented law case from the 1650s to offer a fresh perspective on the English experience of Atlantic settlement during its early years. It argues for the centrality of the Essex county quarter sessions court in the building of neighbourhood on the geographic and cultural margins of the Massachusetts Bay colony. By focusing on the north-eastern margin at Cape Ann, the analysis reveals aspects of state build…
How Projective is Projective Content? Gradience in Projectivity and At-issueness
Projective content is utterance content that a speaker may be taken to be committed to even when the expression associated with the content occurs embedded under an entailment-canceling operator (e.g., Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 1990). It has long been observed that projective content varies in how projective it is (e.g., Karttunen, 1971; Simons, 2001; Abusch, 2010), though preliminary experimental research has been able to confirm only some of…
Toward a Non-Ideal Philosophy of Language
Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field
This paper is a position statement on reproducible research in linguistics, including data citation and attribution, that represents the collective views of some 41 colleagues. Reproducibility can play a key role in increasing verification and accountability in linguistic research, and is a hallmark of social science research that is currently under-represented in our field. We believe that we need to take time as a discipline to clearly articula…
The Best Question: Explaining the Projection Behavior of Factives
This article deals with projection in factive sentences. The article first challenges standard assumptions by presenting a series of detailed observations about the interpretations of factive sentences in context, showing that what implication projects, if any, is quite variable and that projection is tightly constrained by prosodic and contextual information about the alternatives under consideration. The article then proposes an account which a…
Questions Under Discussion: Where Information Structure Meets Projective Content
We discuss problems familiar from the literature on presupposition and information structure, and illustrate how a synthesis using the Question Under Discussion (QUD) framework yields fresh insight. In this framework, discourse is analyzed in terms of the strategy of inquiry pursued by the interlocutors, and individual utterances are interpreted relative to the question being addressed. This way of thinking offers a new perspective on diverse phe…
Charles I and the People of England
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog: Witchcraft and Propaganda During the English Civil War
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
When Small Words Foretell Academic Success: The Case of College Admissions Essays
The smallest and most commonly used words in English are pronouns, articles, and other function words. Almost invisible to the reader or writer, function words can reveal ways people think and approach topics. A computerized text analysis of over 50,000 college admissions essays from more than 25,000 entering students found a coherent dimension of language use based on eight standard function word categories. The dimension, which reflected the de…
Principles of the Exclusive Muddle
This paper provides a lexical entry schema for exclusives covering the adverbs only, just, exclusively, merely, purely, solely, simply, and the adjectives only, sole, pure, exclusive and alone. We argue, on the basis of inter-paraphrasability relations among these exclusives and entailments involving at least and at most, that all of these items make an at-issue contribution of an upper bound on the viable answers to the current question under di…
Politics and Religion, Community and Modernity: David Underdown in the Historiography of English Puritanism
This essay argues for “political puritanism” as a unifying theme in Underdown's work, indebted to the ideas of Christopher Hill and Michael Walzer, among others, but original in its role in Underdown's narrative of England's political culture and political transformation during the Revolution of 1648/1649. This evolving idea of “political puritanism” also makes sense of Underdown's studies of “popular politics” following Pride's Purge (1971) and …
Toward a Taxonomy of Projective Content
Projective contents, which include presuppositional inferences and Potts's (2005) conventional implicatures, are contents that may project when a construction is embedded, as standardly identified by the FAMILY-OF-SENTENCES diagnostic (e.g. Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet 1990). This article establishes distinctions among projective contents on the basis of a series of diagnostics, including a variant of the family-of-sentences diagnostic, that can b…
The communicative significance of primary and secondary accents
What projects and why
Projection is widely used as a diagnostic for presupposition, but many expression types yield projection even though they do not have standard properties of presupposition, for example appositives, expressives, and honorifics (Potts 2005). While it is possible to analyze projection piecemeal, clearly a unitary explanation is to be preferred. Yet we show that standard explanations of projective behavior (common ground based theories, anaphoric the…
Social language processing: A framework for analyzing the communication of terrorists and authoritarian regimes
Social Language Processing (SLP) is introduced as an interdisciplinary approach to assess social features in communications by terrorist organizations and authoritarian regimes. The SLP paradigm represents a rapprochement of theories, tools and techniques from cognitive science, communications, computational linguistics, discourse processing, language studies and social psychology. The SLP paradigm consists of three broad stages: (1) linguistic f…
Sense and Sensitivity: How Focus Determines Meaning
As brief as possible (but no briefer)
For years researchers struggle to explain an impossible muddle of data, and then BAM! some genius comes and publishes an article in Theoretical Linguistics that turns everything on its head. In this case, the bugbear is the projection problem for presuppositions. The mind-blowing solution succeeds in explaining presuppositional inferences and felicity judgments without the abstruse non-classical logics or transformations of logical forms that oth…
Semantics and Pragmatics - A New Journal
We introduce the principles behind the launch of a new journal in semantics and pragmatics and outline the journal's processes and policies. S&P is a peer-reviewed open access journal. The main content is high quality, original, self-contained research articles on the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. While our target audience is primarily academic linguists, we expect to also publish material by, or of relevance to, philosophers, ps…
When Semantics Meets Phonetics: Acoustical Studies of Second-Occurrence Focus
A second-occurrence (SO) focus is the semantic focus of a focus-sensitive operator (e.g. only), but is a repeat of anearlier focused occurrence. We report onthe first systematic productionan d perception experiments to show that SO foci occurring after a nuclear accent are, as Rooth (1996b) has claimed, prosodically marked. We find that (i) there is no mean pitch rise on SO foci, (ii) SO foci are marked by longer duration and greater energy, and …
Always and Only: Why Not All Focus-Sensitive Operators Are Alike
Toward a Taxonomy of Projective Content
Projective contents, which include presuppositional inferences and Potts's (2005) conventional implicatures, are contents that may project when a construction is embedded, as standardly identified by the FAMILY-OF-SENTENCES diagnostic (e.g. Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet 1990). This article establishes distinctions among projective contents on the basis of a series of diagnostics, including a variant of the family-of-sentences diagnostic, that can b…
When Semantics Meets Phonetics: Acoustical Studies of Second-Occurrence Focus
A second-occurrence (SO) focus is the semantic focus of a focus-sensitive operator (e.g. only), but is a repeat of anearlier focused occurrence. We report onthe first systematic productionan d perception experiments to show that SO foci occurring after a nuclear accent are, as Rooth (1996b) has claimed, prosodically marked. We find that (i) there is no mean pitch rise on SO foci, (ii) SO foci are marked by longer duration and greater energy, and …
Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field
This paper is a position statement on reproducible research in linguistics, including data citation and attribution, that represents the collective views of some 41 colleagues. Reproducibility can play a key role in increasing verification and accountability in linguistic research, and is a hallmark of social science research that is currently under-represented in our field. We believe that we need to take time as a discipline to clearly articula…
The communicative significance of primary and secondary accents
Always and Only: Why Not All Focus-Sensitive Operators Are Alike
The Best Question: Explaining the Projection Behavior of Factives
This article deals with projection in factive sentences. The article first challenges standard assumptions by presenting a series of detailed observations about the interpretations of factive sentences in context, showing that what implication projects, if any, is quite variable and that projection is tightly constrained by prosodic and contextual information about the alternatives under consideration. The article then proposes an account which a…
Questions Under Discussion: Where Information Structure Meets Projective Content
We discuss problems familiar from the literature on presupposition and information structure, and illustrate how a synthesis using the Question Under Discussion (QUD) framework yields fresh insight. In this framework, discourse is analyzed in terms of the strategy of inquiry pursued by the interlocutors, and individual utterances are interpreted relative to the question being addressed. This way of thinking offers a new perspective on diverse phe…
Social language processing: A framework for analyzing the communication of terrorists and authoritarian regimes
Social Language Processing (SLP) is introduced as an interdisciplinary approach to assess social features in communications by terrorist organizations and authoritarian regimes. The SLP paradigm represents a rapprochement of theories, tools and techniques from cognitive science, communications, computational linguistics, discourse processing, language studies and social psychology. The SLP paradigm consists of three broad stages: (1) linguistic f…
We’re running out of fuel!”: When does miscommunication go unrepaired
We introduce a framework for studying repair initiation in the face of miscommunication. Our aim is to seed development of models that both predict when conversational repair is a likely communicative strategy and explain why interlocutors would not engage in repair in the face of conversational difficulty. We identify three factors as critical to the predictability of repair: (i) the extent to which a misalignment is (un)recognized by participan…
Toward a Non-Ideal Philosophy of Language
Conscience and Context: The Popish Plot and the Politics of Ritual, 1678–1682
The Popish Plot is the proper starting point for a reassessment of society and culture in late seventeenth-century England. The origins of the plot have become increasingly obscure, primarily because historians have made the erosion of Calvinist religious values and belief a defining characteristic of social and political change after the Restoration. John Kenyon has argued that the plot was an instance of mass hysteria, with its roots in the ove…
The Great Deer Massacre: Animals, Honor, and Communication in Early Modern England
I need not complain of the times; every traveler tells them; they are as clear to see as an Angel in the sun. (Henry Osborne, October 1642) In early October 1642, a tract of forest and deer chase in the Severn valley, northwest of Gloucester, known as Corse Lawn, became the site of a grisly spectacle. Richard Dowdeswell, a steward of the property, described the scene in a letter to Lionel Cranfield, earl of Middlesex, the absentee owner resident …
Conscience and Context: The Popish Plot and the Politics of Ritual, 1678–1682
The Popish Plot is the proper starting point for a reassessment of society and culture in late seventeenth-century England. The origins of the plot have become increasingly obscure, primarily because historians have made the erosion of Calvinist religious values and belief a defining characteristic of social and political change after the Restoration. John Kenyon has argued that the plot was an instance of mass hysteria, with its roots in the ove…
Sown in dishonour, raised in glory’: Death, ritual and social organization in northern Gloucestershire, 1590–1690∗
Death is as much a social and cultural event as a biological reality. The conventional significance and emotional content of death are invariably symbolic interpretations of a biological condition. Different kinds of societies place more or less distance between the biological death of a member and communal recognition of the event. In the cultural sense, however, no one dies alone. These observations on the social nature of death are hardly nove…
The Great Deer Massacre: Animals, Honor, and Communication in Early Modern England
I need not complain of the times; every traveler tells them; they are as clear to see as an Angel in the sun. (Henry Osborne, October 1642) In early October 1642, a tract of forest and deer chase in the Severn valley, northwest of Gloucester, known as Corse Lawn, became the site of a grisly spectacle. Richard Dowdeswell, a steward of the property, described the scene in a letter to Lionel Cranfield, earl of Middlesex, the absentee owner resident …
Flesh or Fantasy: Cannibalism and the Meanings of Violence
Ethnohistory - Volume 49, Number 3, Summer 2002
Always and Only: Why Not All Focus-Sensitive Operators Are Alike
Semantics and Pragmatics - A New Journal
We introduce the principles behind the launch of a new journal in semantics and pragmatics and outline the journal's processes and policies. S&P is a peer-reviewed open access journal. The main content is high quality, original, self-contained research articles on the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. While our target audience is primarily academic linguists, we expect to also publish material by, or of relevance to, philosophers, ps…
When Semantics Meets Phonetics: Acoustical Studies of Second-Occurrence Focus
A second-occurrence (SO) focus is the semantic focus of a focus-sensitive operator (e.g. only), but is a repeat of anearlier focused occurrence. We report onthe first systematic productionan d perception experiments to show that SO foci occurring after a nuclear accent are, as Rooth (1996b) has claimed, prosodically marked. We find that (i) there is no mean pitch rise on SO foci, (ii) SO foci are marked by longer duration and greater energy, and …
Sense and Sensitivity: How Focus Determines Meaning
As brief as possible (but no briefer)
For years researchers struggle to explain an impossible muddle of data, and then BAM! some genius comes and publishes an article in Theoretical Linguistics that turns everything on its head. In this case, the bugbear is the projection problem for presuppositions. The mind-blowing solution succeeds in explaining presuppositional inferences and felicity judgments without the abstruse non-classical logics or transformations of logical forms that oth…
What projects and why
Projection is widely used as a diagnostic for presupposition, but many expression types yield projection even though they do not have standard properties of presupposition, for example appositives, expressives, and honorifics (Potts 2005). While it is possible to analyze projection piecemeal, clearly a unitary explanation is to be preferred. Yet we show that standard explanations of projective behavior (common ground based theories, anaphoric the…
Social language processing: A framework for analyzing the communication of terrorists and authoritarian regimes
Social Language Processing (SLP) is introduced as an interdisciplinary approach to assess social features in communications by terrorist organizations and authoritarian regimes. The SLP paradigm represents a rapprochement of theories, tools and techniques from cognitive science, communications, computational linguistics, discourse processing, language studies and social psychology. The SLP paradigm consists of three broad stages: (1) linguistic f…
The communicative significance of primary and secondary accents
Politics and Religion, Community and Modernity: David Underdown in the Historiography of English Puritanism
This essay argues for “political puritanism” as a unifying theme in Underdown's work, indebted to the ideas of Christopher Hill and Michael Walzer, among others, but original in its role in Underdown's narrative of England's political culture and political transformation during the Revolution of 1648/1649. This evolving idea of “political puritanism” also makes sense of Underdown's studies of “popular politics” following Pride's Purge (1971) and …
Toward a Taxonomy of Projective Content
Projective contents, which include presuppositional inferences and Potts's (2005) conventional implicatures, are contents that may project when a construction is embedded, as standardly identified by the FAMILY-OF-SENTENCES diagnostic (e.g. Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet 1990). This article establishes distinctions among projective contents on the basis of a series of diagnostics, including a variant of the family-of-sentences diagnostic, that can b…
When Small Words Foretell Academic Success: The Case of College Admissions Essays
The smallest and most commonly used words in English are pronouns, articles, and other function words. Almost invisible to the reader or writer, function words can reveal ways people think and approach topics. A computerized text analysis of over 50,000 college admissions essays from more than 25,000 entering students found a coherent dimension of language use based on eight standard function word categories. The dimension, which reflected the de…
Principles of the Exclusive Muddle
This paper provides a lexical entry schema for exclusives covering the adverbs only, just, exclusively, merely, purely, solely, simply, and the adjectives only, sole, pure, exclusive and alone. We argue, on the basis of inter-paraphrasability relations among these exclusives and entailments involving at least and at most, that all of these items make an at-issue contribution of an upper bound on the viable answers to the current question under di…
The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog: Witchcraft and Propaganda During the English Civil War
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Questions Under Discussion: Where Information Structure Meets Projective Content
We discuss problems familiar from the literature on presupposition and information structure, and illustrate how a synthesis using the Question Under Discussion (QUD) framework yields fresh insight. In this framework, discourse is analyzed in terms of the strategy of inquiry pursued by the interlocutors, and individual utterances are interpreted relative to the question being addressed. This way of thinking offers a new perspective on diverse phe…
Charles I and the People of England
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Best Question: Explaining the Projection Behavior of Factives
This article deals with projection in factive sentences. The article first challenges standard assumptions by presenting a series of detailed observations about the interpretations of factive sentences in context, showing that what implication projects, if any, is quite variable and that projection is tightly constrained by prosodic and contextual information about the alternatives under consideration. The article then proposes an account which a…
How Projective is Projective Content? Gradience in Projectivity and At-issueness
Projective content is utterance content that a speaker may be taken to be committed to even when the expression associated with the content occurs embedded under an entailment-canceling operator (e.g., Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 1990). It has long been observed that projective content varies in how projective it is (e.g., Karttunen, 1971; Simons, 2001; Abusch, 2010), though preliminary experimental research has been able to confirm only some of…
Toward a Non-Ideal Philosophy of Language
Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field
This paper is a position statement on reproducible research in linguistics, including data citation and attribution, that represents the collective views of some 41 colleagues. Reproducibility can play a key role in increasing verification and accountability in linguistic research, and is a hallmark of social science research that is currently under-represented in our field. We believe that we need to take time as a discipline to clearly articula…
Stories and verdicts: Maleficium , judicial process and the politics of neighbourliness on the Atlantic margins in the seventeenth century
This article uses an exceptionally well-documented law case from the 1650s to offer a fresh perspective on the English experience of Atlantic settlement during its early years. It argues for the centrality of the Essex county quarter sessions court in the building of neighbourhood on the geographic and cultural margins of the Massachusetts Bay colony. By focusing on the north-eastern margin at Cape Ann, the analysis reveals aspects of state build…
Negation and Presupposition
Over a century of scholarship on presupposition has worked towards reconciling two seemingly contrary properties of these types of inferences: the ability to project through embedding like negation, and the ability to be cancelled explicitly. Describing these properties has been key to not only diagnosing presuppositions, but also differentiating them from other types of inferences like implicatures and entailment and understanding how a theory o…
Philosophy (17 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Linguistics (15 works) · Psychology (12 works) · History (11 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (9 works) · History (8 works)