Workshop in Semantics and Philosophy of Language

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.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Yusuke Kubota (University of Tokyo) for the seventh workshop talk of the quarter.

‘Revisiting the progressive/perfect ambiguity of “-te iru” in Japanese: A scale-based analysis’

DATE: Friday, May 27, 2011
TIME: 11:00am-1:00 pm
PLACE: Cobb 102

ABSTRACT: The interpretation of the Japanese aspectual marker “-te iru” is notoriously complex, but at its core is the opposition of the ‘progressive’ vs. the so-called ‘resultative perfect’ interpretations, sensitive to the lexical aspect of the predicate it attaches to: with activity predicates, “-te iru” induces the progressive interpretation (analogous to English progressive) while with achievement predicates, it gives rise to the so-called ‘resultative perfect’ interpretation. With accomplishments and degree achievements, the sentences are often ambiguous between the progress and the resultative perfect interpretations. Building on recent scale-based approaches to gradable predicates and verb meanings (cf., e.g., Kennedy & McNally 2005, Kennedy & Levin 2008), I will propose a uniform analysis of this apparent ambiguity of “-te iru” which systematically predicts the correlation between lexical aspect and -te iru’s progressive/perfect meanings.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Emma Borg (University of Reading) for our sixth workshop talk of the quarter.

‘Minimal Semantics and the Nature of Context-sensitivity’

DATE: Friday, May 20, 2011
TIME: 11:00am-1:00 pm
PLACE: Cobb 102

ABSTRACT: There is a currently lively debate in semantics between theories which place stringent limits on semantically relevant context-sensitivity (varieties of minimal semantics) and those which take semantically relevant context-sensitivity to be much more pervasive (of which the best known form is contextualism). This talk tries to get clearer on exactly what is at stake in the debate: what are the notions of context-sensitivity in play and what exactly are the participants to the debate disagreeing about?

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Jason Bridges (Chicago) for our fifth workshop talk of the quarter.

‘Contextualism, Pragmatism, and Provincialism’

DATE: Friday, May 13, 2011
TIME: 10:00am-12:00 pm (note the change in time and place)
PLACE: Wieboldt 203 (note the change in time and place)

The paper can be downloaded here.

ABSTRACT: The recent flowering of “contextualist” doctrines is widely viewed as a natural consequence of a shift to a more pragmatic perspective on meaning, in which the communicative and expressive context of an utterance is seen as playing a more thoroughgoing role in shaping meaning than had previously been acknowledged. But in fact, mainstream contextualist doctrines seem to follow from the new pragmatic orientation only given dubious assumptions about the relevant features of communicative and expressive contexts. This charge is developed through consideration of a widely accepted contextualist treatment of the word “rich”, here called economic contextualism. The case against economic contextualism involves detailed examination of empirical and theoretical issues of a sort that have been ignored in the contextualist literature. The final sections of the paper indicate how arguments of this character might be applied to other forms of contextualism and trace some of their general implications, including the threat they pose to contextualist approaches to skeptical puzzles, and the space they open for views that allow for pervasive context-sensitivity but are quite far from the doctrines currently advanced under the “contextualist” banner.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Eric McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University) for our fourth workshop talk of the quarter.

‘Hedging, Cooperation and Conditionals’

DATE: Friday, May 6, 2011
TIME: 11:00am-1:00 pm
PLACE: Cobb 102

ABSTRACT: Communication is generally supposed to be cooperative in a way characterized by Gricean maxims. However, in many situations, the interests of communicators are opposed and there is incentive to be deceptive or to withhold information. Why then does cooperation arise? This question has been widely discussed in economics and biology in the context of game theory. Using (a version of) a model from this literature, I consider ways in which negative results of actual noncooperative linguistic behavior can be avoided by further linguistic acts. The result is analyses of hedges, for damage limitation on semantic content, and so-called relevance conditionals, for avoiding consequences of bad pragmatic discourse moves.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to present Hans Kamp (Universität Stuttgart), who will give the third workshop talk of the quarter.

‘Articulated contexts and their use in the interpretation of Definite Noun Phrases’

DATE: Friday, April 29, 2011
TIME: 11:00am-1:00 pm
PLACE: Cobb 102

ABSTRACT: The topic of this talk is a formally characterized general concept of context – that of an ‘articulated context’ – and some of the uses to which such contexts can be put.

The most distinctive properties of articulated contexts are:

(a) they unify the utterance contexts known from the work of Montague, Cresswell, Kaplan and others (who use such contexts to deal with indexicals and certain other directly referential expressions) with the discourse contexts of DRT and other forms of dynamic semantics;

(b) they also incorporate other information, such as (i) encyclopaedic knowledge of the sort that most of us carry around and use in the interpretation of, e.g. proper names and, (ii) where this is relevant, information of the perceptually accessible environment.

Articulated contexts were motivated by the need for a classification of definite noun phrases in relation to how their reference presuppositions may be resolved. The various types of definite NPs differ from each other, I will argue, in terms of the component or components of the articulated context that the interpreter may resort to in order to resolve their respective presuppositions.