We offer a new analysis of the semantics of the English it-cleft, building on recent work on exclusive particles such as "only." The analysis emphasizes the discourse function of clefts — which, we claim, is to terminate a line of inquiry by marking an answer as complete. It accounts for the semantic effects — not previously appreciated — of focus placement within the cleft pivot. It also provides a solution to a previously discussed problem with the projection of exhaustivity from embedded contexts.

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This paper explores the discourse status of English causal clauses introduced by since. Tests for non-at-issueness demonstrate that neither the relation (between the subordinate and the superordinate clause) expressed by since nor the content of the subordinate clause is at-issue. Other diagnostics further show that these two not-at-issue contents triggered by since belong to two different classes of projective content. This can be accounted for by attributing two different sources to their non-at-issueness: the relation expressed by since is not-at-issue for structural reasons, i.e. because since-clauses modify high evidential or speech act phrases, which are not-at-issue; the content of the subordinate clause is not-at-issue because since lexically selects factive clauses. More generally, this study (and future comparative studies on other subordinators) promises to shed further light on the constraints on different contents projected by the same trigger and the role played by structure in non-at-issueness.

Donkey sentences have existential and universal readings, but they are not often perceived as ambiguous. We extend the pragmatic theory of non-maximality in plural definites by Križ (2016) to explain how hearers use Questions under Discussion to fix the interpretation of donkey sentences in context. We propose that the denotations of such sentences involve truth-value gaps -in certain scenarios the sentences are neither true nor false -and demonstrate that Križ's pragmatic theory fills these gaps to generate the standard judgments of the literature. Building on Muskens's (1996) Compositional Discourse Representation Theory and on ideas from supervaluation semantics, we define a general schema for dynamic quantification that delivers the required truth-value gaps. Given the independently motivated pragmatic theory of Križ 2016, we argue that mixed readings of donkey sentences require neither plural information states, contra Brasoveanu 2008,

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