November 16: Maria Aloni

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).