Workshop in Semantics and Philosophy of Language

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is happy to welcome Peet Klecha (Chicago, grad student) for this term’s third talk.

DATE: February 10, 2012
TIME: 11:30-1:30pm
PLACE: Gates Blake 321

“Modals, Conditionals, and Imprecision”

This paper proposes that the interpretation of modals is subject to (im)precision (a la Lasersohn 1999), explaining certain contextual domain shifting effects observed by Lewis (1979).

Bryan: This must be a pen – I’m looking right at it.
Alice: Not so; you could be the victim of a deceiving demon.

I argue that Alice raises the standard of precision in (1), thereby widening the domain of `have to’ to include otherwise ignorable worlds. This explains a number of similarities between domain shifting of the type in (1) and canonical cases of
imprecision, and simplifies the modal semantics. I will also extend the analysis to conditionals, accounting for so-called Sobel Sequences.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is happy to welcome Elizabeth Allyn Smith (Northwestern) for this term’s second talk.

DATE: January 27, 2012
TIME: 11:30-1:30pm
PLACE: Gates Blake 321

“Some observations, revisions, and puzzles in the semantics of comparative correlatives”

Abstract: Comparative correlative sentences (CCs) like ‘the more, the merrier’ or ‘the more a dog eats, the more it drinks’ present a number of puzzles for their analysis, including the question of whether you can use the same denotation for its comparative morpheme as the one found elsewhere in natural language. Like many before me, I will argue that CCs can be given a completely compositional analysis using the ‘regular’ comparative, but I will also present new data showing that certain revisions are necessary and that, for example, the semantics of English CCs has less in common with the semantics of conditionals than previously believed. I will also pose a number of new puzzles, both for the analysis of CCs in English, and also cross-linguistically, including some current work on CCs in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Japanese.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is happy to welcome Bridget Copley (CNRS, Paris) for this term’s first talk.

DATE: January 13, 2012
TIME: 11-1pm
PLACE: Landahl Center Seminar Room

`Connecting events‘

There is a consensus that certain events—Vendlerian Accomplishments, most saliently—are in fact composed of two sub-events, chained together in a causal relationship: John opened the door, for example, has a causing sub-event e1, and a result sub-event e2 . Various proposals have in common an operation which chains events causally, allowing a straightforward expression of the insight that John is the Agent of only the first, causing, sub-event, e1; this event then is ‘chained’ with e2, of which the Theme is predicated (Pustejovsky (1995), Higginbotham (2000), Ramchand (2008)). While these proposals allow for insightful analysis of structural and semantic properties of complex events, it is important to note that such advances come at the cost of introducing a novel rule of composition; it would be more desirable to express the connection between an event e1 and its result sub-event e2 in a way that made use of existing rules of composition.

There are also empirical challenges to this event-chaining approach to complex events.The event-chaining hypothesis entails that e2 is an inevitable consequence of e1. However, there are many cases in natural language where there is an Agent doing something (e1) which would normally (ceteris paribus) be the causing subevent of a second happening subevent, but the happening (e2) is non-existent, or the wrong kind of happening (e.g. progressives, non-culminating accomplishments, etc.). Possible worlds can be recruited to make up for this deficiency, but such recruitment of course complicates the theory.

In this talk I will present a proposal (Copley & Harley 2011) that treats an event as a function from an initial situation to the situation that results ceteris paribus. States are treated as situations. This conception of events and states corresponds to the traditional (Comrie 1976, e.g.) idea that events involve energy or force (whose ceteris paribus effect can nonetheless be nullified by other forces) while states do not involve energy at all. This treatment of events is helpful in addressing the issues mentioned above. Firstly, because an event is a function, an event and its result situation can be linked without recourse to anything other than Functional Application. Secondly, since the ceteris paribus condition is part of the definition of an event, the empirical challenges to event-chaining can be accounted for without additional machinery; in effect, causal chains of forces (events) and situations (states) are used to construct possible worlds.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is happy to welcome Katerina Chatzopoulos (Chicago, graduate student) for this term’s final talk.

DATE: November 18, 2011
TIME: 11-1pm
PLACE: Wieboldt 130

`Redefining Jespersen’s Cycle‘

The goal of this talk is to provide a semantic refinement of the Negative Cycle, known as Jespersen’s cycle (Jespersen 1917, 1924), through a definition that spells out and formalizes a background assumption in current leading research (van der Auwera 2009, 2010, van Gelderen 2008, 2011, Kiparsky & Condoravdi 2007): that the cyclicity of the phenomenon is semantic in nature and independent from its morphosyntactic realization in each one of its crosslinguistic manifestations. Although the assumptions and findings of this study are in agreement with generative outlooks on grammaticalization (Roberts & Roussou 2003, van Gelderen 2004), the representations are influenced by Autolexical Grammar (Sadock 1991, Sadock & Schiller 1993), as this allows a better visualization of the diachronic processes involved (instances of leftward lexical micromovement) and enables us to capture the notion of multiple dominance without reference to checking or agreement.

The proposed definition, abstracts away from the exact realization of the Negative cycle in French (Bréal 1897/1900, Clarke 1904, Horn 1989) and other typical Jespersen languages (e.g. English, Horn 1989, Wallage 2005; Dutch, Hoeksema 1997, Zeijlstra 2004; Egyptian, Gardiner 1903; Old Norse, van Gelderen 2008; Arabic and Berber, Lucas 2007) and views Jespersen’s cycle as a diachronic process that targets intensified predicate negation and elevates it to propositional. Motivation comes from the history of Greek, where negator renewal took place through a former emphatic, yet non discontinuous form of negation: the negative indefinite udhen, that followed the path from negative indefinite, to negative adverb, to sentential negation. This definition is all inclusive and accommodates not only for Greek, but a number of other languages in which negator renewal deviates in one way or another from the prototypical case of French (Chinese, Semitic languages, Athabaskan, German and Bantu languages).

Intensified negation (referred to as ‘emphatic negation’ in the relevant literature) is viewed here as a scale evoking or alternative evoking operation that specializes on scalar predicates, predicates that are gradable or allow for some sort of quantification. Intensified negation, e.g. ‘John didn’t drink at all’, literally negates the endpoint of a scale and everything to its left by implicature (if a Horn scale). It is shown that once the intensified form of negation loses this specialization and applies to all sorts of predicates, quantifiable and not, then it can be safely diagnosed as plain propositional negation. Thus the particular sort of semantic bleaching found in Jespersen’s cycle involves loss of reference to a scale. The exact mechanism of Jespersen’s Cycle can be formalized as involving: (a) lexicalization of the standard of comparison (cf. Kennedy & Levin 2008) and (b) re-application of the measure function. Akin in this sense is the diachronic development of other scale evoking linguistic operations in which regular renewal has been attested: comparatives (Paradis 2003), diminutives (Savickiene 1998) and honorifics (Traugott & Dasher 2002). This approach unites typical and atypical Jespersen’s cycle manifestations and views the Jespersen processes as an instance of a broader tendency active in natural language in general: scalar endpoint lexicalization followed by degree reinforcement.

The Semantics and Philosophy Workshop is pleased to welcome Maria Aloni (University of Amsterdam) for a specially-scheduled session.

DATE: Wednesday, November 16, 2011
TIME: 12-1:30pm
PLACE: Wiedboldt 130

‘Modal inferences in marked indefinites’ (joint work with Angelika Port)

Uses of unmarked indefinites like English a boy can give rise to a large number of pragmatic effects. For example, when told that you may invite a boy, you normally conclude that every boy is a permissible option (free choice inference), or, on the specific reading of the sentence, that there is a specific boy you may invite, but the speaker doesn’t know which one (ignorance inference). Many languages have developed marked indefinite forms (often with a restricted distribution) where these modal inferences are no longer pragmatic effects, but have been fully integrated in the conventional meaning of the expression. Free choice indefinites exemplify cases where the free choice inference has been conventionalized (Dayal 1998, Giannakidou 2001, Men ́endez-Benito 2010, Chierchia 2010, among others). Epistemic indefinites, also known as modal or referentially vague indefinites, exemplify cases where the ignorance inference has been conventionalized (Jayez & Tovena 2006, Alonso-Ovalle & Men ́endez-Benito 2010, Giannakidou & Quer 2011).

In this talk we will focus on two marked indefinite determiners: Italian un qualche (Zamparelli 2007) and German irgendein (Haspelmath 1997, Kratzer & Shimoyama 2002). In the first part of the talk we will identify a number of functions (context-meaning pairs) for marked indefinites, and discuss the distribution of these two items with respect to these functions (Aloni & Port 2011). The most striking aspect of the observed distribution is the different behavior of the two indefinites under epistemic and under deontic modals. Under epistemic modals both indefinites are licensed and give rise to an ignorance inference; under deontic modals only German irgendein is licensed and gives rise to a free choice inference. In the second part of the talk we will give a formal account of these facts in the framework of a Dynamic Semantics with Conceptual Covers (Aloni 2001).

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Rick Nouwen (Utrech University) for our fourth talk of the quarter.

DATE: November 11, 2011
TIME: 11-1pm
PLACE: Wieboldt 130

‘On wh-exclamatives and “noteworthiness”‘

In this talk, I will present joint work with Anna Chernilovskaya on wh-exclamatives. There are two dominating approaches to the semantics of sentences. One approach claims that wh-exclamatives are degree constructions involving degree intensification of a possibly implicit degree property (see, especially, Rett (2011)). The opposing account, mainly due to Zanuttini and Portner (2003), has it that wh-exclamatives involve a mechanism of domain widening. In this paper we show that the mechanisms behind the two competing approaches are basically indistinguishable. Moreover, we point out that there is a kind of wh-exclamatives for which these approaches do not provide the expected semantics. Finally, we put forward a distinctive and crucially much simpler proposal: exclamatives directly express a noteworthiness evaluation, either of the referent associated to the wh-phrase or of the open proposition underlying the exclamative.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Geoff Nunberg (UC Berkeley).

DATE: November 4, 2011
TIME: 11-1pm
PLACE: Wieboldt 130

‘A minimal semantics for derogatives, or being mean without meaning’

Derogative terms raise two kinds of questions. The first is how they achieve their effect of conveying disdain for the members of a group and imputing to them a set of discreditable traits: how much of this follows from their lexical meanings, and how much is part of what one asserts when one uses them? My answer to these is, in brief, almost nothing. The linguistic meaning of a derogative word like redskin is pretty much exhausted by its typical dictionary definition; e.g., “redskin: (Offensive Slang) Used as a disparaging term for an American Indian.” That account generalizes to other evaluative terms. But a second question involves a property that (some) derogatives share only with vulgar descriptions, which I call universal solvency: they can arouse strong feelings in virtue of their form alone, and that potential bleeds through the operators, like quotation, that normally absolve a speaker from responsibility for their content — one can’t ever mention them. That property involves a locutionary act, not an illocutionary one, and can’t be explained by any accounts of how they come by their evaluative import (including mine).

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Anna Chernilovskaya (Chicago and Utrecht University, grad student).

‘How to express yourself: on discourse effects of wh-exclamatives’

DATE: October 28, 2011
TIME: 11-1pm
PLACE: Wieboldt 130

ABSTRACT: Wh-exclamatives, like “What a nice guy I met yesterday!”, behave in discourse differently from assertions and questions. For example, they cannot be used for answering a question, neither can they themselves be answered.  Instead, the main goal of an exclamative utterance is to convey speaker’s attitude. In this talk I will tell about my work in progress concerning discourse behaviour of wh-exclamatives. It is based on the discourse model from (Farkas and Bruce 2009). I suggest a definition of the exclamative speech act operator in the way that allows to characterise discourse properties of wh-exclamatives. I will then try to generalise the proposal to describe the effect of other expressive utterances on context.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Rachel Goodman (Chicago, graduate student) for our first talk of the year.

`Do Acquaintance Theorists Have an Attitude Problem?’

DATE: October 14, 2011
TIME: 11:30-1:30pm
PLACE: Wieboldt 130

ABSTRACT: The traditional approach to singular thought involves the idea that there is a special epistemic relation—call it *acquaintance*—that underpins all cases in which an agent entertains a singular thought. However, the behaviour of attitude ascriptions poses a problem for this view: If attitude ascriptions that relate an agent to a singular content are true only in case in which that agent entertains that content (call this the tracking assumption for attitude ascriptions), then it appears that there is little to be said in the way of a unified theoretical account of acquaintance. I argue that the lesson we ought to learn from this is not, as has been proposed, that acquaintance is a looser and more diverse phenomenon than we might have originally thought or that singular thought does not require acquaintance at all, but rather that we should reject the tracking assumption for attitude ascriptions. I argue, furthermore, that there are reasons independent of considerations concerning singular thought to think that the tracking assumption is false.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Aidan Gray (Chicago, grad student) for the final workshop talk of the year.

‘Proper Names and the Lexicon’

DATE: Friday, June 3, 2011
TIME: 11:00am-1:00 pm
PLACE: Cobb 102

ABSTRACT: There is a persistent, if somewhat obscure, idea in the philosophical literature that the idea of translation does not apply straightforwardly to proper names. I try to work out in what sense, if any, this might be true. I argue that seeing the sense in which proper names do resist translation should make us question orthodox assumptions about the relation between form and meaning in proper names. This suggests a radical revision of our conception of the place of proper names in the lexicon.