COLLOQUIUM
Semantics and Pragmatics Exchange (SemPrE)
Univ.-Prof.
Dr. Hana Filip, PhD
Lehrstuhl Semantik,
Institut fr Sprache und Information
Wednesday,
12:30 -2 pm
Building 24.53,
Room 01.81
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July 7, 2021 12:30 – 2 pm, online via Webex https://hhu.webex.com/meet/tsnider Julie Hunter Linagora Relations
and Structure in Discourse Interpretation In this talk we consider a variety of ways that the semantic relations
that we infer between propositional level contents—and the often
complex structures to which they contribute—can influence semantic
interpretation. In particular, we show how recent work on discourse relations
and structure has been used to model phenomena along the semantics-pragmatics
interface, to analyze multimodal discourse, and to provide an account of
discourse goals and the interaction of bias and discourse interpretation. |
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June 16, 2021 17:00-18:30, online via Webex https://hhu.webex.com/meet/tsnider Andrea Beltrama University
of Pennsylvania Imprecision and speaker
identity: How social meaning affects pragmatic reasoning Recent
work at the interface of semantics and sociolinguistics proposed that the
linguistic signaling and uptake of social identity traits can be captured via
models similar to those used to formalize pragmatic inferences (Acton 2019;
Burnett 2019; Henderson and McCready 2020) and non-at-issue content (Smith et
al. 2010); and provided empirical evidence that listeners reason about the
semantic/pragmatic properties of linguistic utterances to draw social
inferences about the speaker (Beltrama 2018; Jeong 2018). These findings
raise the question of whether reverse effects exist as well, i.e., whether
(and how) social meanings can also impact the interpretation of semantic/
pragmatic meanings. We provide experimental evidence that (i) numerals
receive stricter interpretations when uttered by Nerdy (vs. Chill) speakers;
and that (ii) this effect is stronger for comprehenders who dont (strongly)
identify with the speaker, suggesting that pragmatic reasoning is crucially
shaped by social information about both the speaker and the comprehender.
Taken together, these findings suggest that social meanings are more
intricately intertwined with pragmatic reasoning than previously thought: not
only is the signaling and uptake of social meanings amenable to being
formalized through the same reasoning patterns that can be applied to pragmatic
inferences; but social meanings are also recruited by comprehenders to
resolve the indeterminacy surrounding the interpretation of semantic
meanings. The emerging picture is one in which different layers of meanings
inform one other in a bi-directional fashion, highlighting the importance of
integrating the study of social content into theoretical and experimental
semantics and pragmatics. |
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June 9, 2021 12:30-14:00, online via Webex https://hhu.webex.com/meet/tsnider Moshe
E. Bar-Lev Language, Logic & Cognition Center (LLCC) The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Obligatory
implicatures and the relevance of contradictions Magri (2009, 2011)
proposed a theory of some cases of oddness based on an obligatory calculation
of implicatures. While conceptually motivated, his theory has been shown to
have limited empirical coverage. Alternative proposals improved on the
empirical side, but lacked conceptual motivation. The goal of this talk is to
explore a modification of Magri's view which preserves the conceptual
motivation while achieving wider empirical coverage. On this view oddness
comes about due to a conspiracy of two assumptions: (i) in the computation of
implicatures, alternatives cannot be ignored if their presence leads to a
relevant meaning (BarLev 2018); (ii) contradictions are relevant (following
Lewis 1988). |
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May 12, 2021 12:30-14:00, online via Webex https://hhu.webex.com/meet/tsnider Ashwini Deo The Ohio State
University A strong question:
Unifying exclusivity, mirativity, precisification, and intensification in Marathi =c Several Indo-Aryan
languages, including Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, and Marathi contain a
discourse clitic whose uses overlap with those of English discourse adverbials
like the exclusives only/just, intensifiers really/absolutely/totally, precisifiers right/exactly,
expectation confirmers indeed/that very/exactly, and scalar additive even, without
corresponding perfectly to any of them. I offer a unified analysis of the
varied and seemingly disparate uses of this expression type, focusing on the
Marathi variant =c. Under the analysis I will discuss, =c signals that an
underspecified, vague question is being interpreted so as to maximize the
informativity of the answer provided by the prejacent. The analysis treats =c
as a generalized informativity booster'' that comments on the strength of
the question that the prejacent resolves. This discourse function proposed
for =c is substantively different from the discourse function associated with
exclusives (like only), which are said to comment on the strength of the prejacent
among alternative answers to a contextually fixed question. The analysis
proposed here thus identifies a new possible function for discourse
management expressions, enriching our understanding of the typology of such
expressions. Within Marathi, this new perspective allows us to treat =c as
the pragmatic antonym of another enclitic particle in Marathi =tar which is
analyzed as signaling that the question resolved by its prejacent is weak. At
the crosslinguistic level, this new perspective opens the door to a better
understanding of discourse particles by offering an explanation for why
exclusivity, mirativity, precisification, and intensification often cluster
together in many languages, another example I will consider being English just. |
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May 5, 2021 12:30-14:00, online via Webex https://hhu.webex.com/meet/tsnider Lelia Glass Georgia Institute of Technology Quantifying relational nouns in corpora While relational nouns (cousin) are
traditionally delineated in a binary and theory-dependent manner, this paper
approximates relationality as a continuous, objective corpus metric (Percent
Possessive) – allowing for lexicon-wide exploration of which nouns are
more or less relational and why. Comparing across nouns and accounting for
the ontological class of the nouns referent, I find that Percent Possessive
is positively correlated with a nouns per-million-word frequency. Comparing
across different web communities, I find that a noun is more frequent, and
shows a greater ratio of definite to indefinite tokens, in the community where
its Percent Possessive is significantly higher. I take these findings to be
consistent with the claim that a noun is more relational (as measured by
Percent Possessive) when human interaction with its referent is more
conventional (as measured by its frequency and definite-to-indefinite ratio).
Inspired by the many authors who have suggested a socio-cultural component to
relationality and possession, this paper explores at scale in English how
nouns reflect the conventions of the people who use them. |
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April 28, 2021 12:30-14:00, online via Webex https://hhu.webex.com/meet/tsnider Noortje Venhuizen Universitt des
Saarlandes
Formal Semantics and Distributional
Semantics offer complementary strengths in capturing the meaning of natural
language. As such, a considerable amount of research has sought to unify
them, either by augmenting formal semantic systems with a distributional
component, or by defining a formal system on top of distributed
representations. Arriving at such a unified formalism has, however, proven
extremely challenging. One reason for this is that formal and distributional
semantics operate on a fundamentally different 'representational currency':
formal semantics defines meaning in terms of models of the world, whereas
distributional semantics defines meaning in terms of linguistic context. An
alternative approach from cognitive science, however, proposes a vector space
model that defines meaning in a distributed manner relative to the state of
the world. In this talk, we will present a re-conceptualization of this
approach by deriving it from well-known principles of formal semantics,
thereby demonstrating its full logical capacity. The resulting Distributional
Formal Semantics is shown to offer the best of both worlds: contextualized
distributed representations that are also inherently compositional and
probabilistic. We will then show how these representations can be used for
'deep language modeling', by introducing a neural network model that captures
various semantic phenomena, including probabilistic inference and entailment,
negation, quantification, reference resolution and presupposition. |
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January 20, 2021 12:30-14:00, online via Webex https://hhu.webex.com/meet/tsnider Kurt
Erbach und Leda Berio Universitt Bonn
and HHU Dsseldorf Counting and
categorizing: The relationship
between the mass/count distinction and thought In this talk, we
propose that the count/mass distinction has meddler and spotlight effects on
thought (see Wolff and Holmes 2010) which is supported by the interaction between
syntax and categorization in noun acquisition of speakers of languages with
distinct counting morphosyntax (e.g. Gordon 1985; Imai & Gentner 1997;
Lucy & Gaskins 2003). It has been shown that speakers of languages with
different counting systems both make use of the same cognitive tools, albeit
differently (Inagaki & Barner 2009; Barner, Inagaki & Li 2009). For
example, in English counting constructions, nouns are distinguished as either
count or mass while in Japanese counting constructions, all nouns are counted
with classifiers. Despite these differences, speakers of both languages
behave one way with respect to nouns that refer to complex objects and
another way with nouns that refer to non-solid substances (Inagaki &
Barner 2009, Imai & Gentner 1997) though there are some differences
across languages in behavior with nouns that refer to simple objects and non
solid substances (Imai & Gentner 1997; cf. Lucy & Gaskins 2003).
While it has been argued that this state of affairs rules out stronger Whorfian
accounts of language (Bale & Barner 2019), we provide a more detailed
account of the relation between the count/mass distinction and thought. |
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January 13, 2021 12:30-14:00, online via Webex https://hhu.webex.com/meet/tsnider Nina
Haslinger Georg-August-Universitt Gttingen Plurals as
higher-order scalar predicates: Unifying cumulativity and non-maximality Sentences like (i)
are traditionally taken have distinct cumulative and distributive readings.
While the distributive reading requires Ann and Sarah to each like all of the
four neighbors, the cumulative reading merely requires that Ann and Sarah
each like at least one of the neighbors and each neighbor is liked by at
least one of them. This is usually viewed as an ambiguity that reflects the
presence or absence of distributivity or cumulation operators in the LF of
such sentences (for an overview, see Champollion to appear). (i) Ann and Sarah like their four neighbors. In this talk, I
present English and German data in support of two empirical claims that
complicate this standard picture. First, the availability of cumulative
readings appears to be a context-dependent matter: A sentence containing two
or more plurals is acceptable in a cumulative scenario only if that scenario
answers the QUD or issue raised in the discourse context in the same way as
a distributive scenario. I argue that this contextdependency does not just
reflect pragmatic pressure to address the QUD. Instead, it seems to be of a
piece with a semantic constraint defended by Kriz (2015) for non-maximal
readings of definites (see also Malamud 2012): Roughly, a sentence like (ii)
may be true in a non-maximal scenario only if that scenario provides the same
answer to the QUD/issue as a maximal scenario. (ii) The neighbors are asleep. Second, the
acceptability of sentences like (i) in cumulative scenarios is influenced by
the extensions of alternative predicates: (i) can clearly be judged true if
Ann likes neighbors 1 and 2 and Sarah likes neighbors 3 and 4, but seems less
acceptable if the scenario further specifies that Ann absolutely hates 3 and
4 and Sarah absolutely hates 1 and 2. Again, this behavior parallels previous
observations about standard cases of nonmaximality like (ii), where it seems
to make a difference whether the `exceptional' neighbors are reading quietly
or having a noisy street party (cf. Kriz 2015). In sum, there are
far-reaching parallels between cumulative readings of sentences with multiple
plurals and nonmaximal readings of plural definites. Yet, since these
parallels can be replicated with cumulative readings of predicate and
sentential conjunctions ((iii), cf. Schmitt 2019) and cumulative readings of
quantifiers ((iv), cf. Schein 1993 a.o.), cumulativity cannot be reduced to a
non-maximal interpretation of the individual plurals involved. (iii) The ten experts said that Macron will
resign and that Merkel won't resign. (iv) Ann and Sarah read every book on the list. I show how this
data pattern can be captured within a nonstandard plural semantics that
relies both on the analogy between plural quantification and vague scalar
predication (Burnett 2017) and on the idea that complex constituents
containing a plural expression themselves receive a plural denotation via
special composition rules (Schmitt 2019). Plural expressions of any category
denote partially ordered scales with a positive set and a negative set
that parallels the positive and negative extension of vague scalar
predicates. In particular, like the scales for vague predicates, these plural
scales may have a gap between the positive and the negative set which is
resolved in a QUD-dependent manner, accounting for the context-dependency of
cumulative and non-maximal interpretations. Further, the analogy between
plural predication and scalar predication gives rise to a unified account of
the role of alternative predicates in the semantics of cumulative and non-maximal
sentences. References
Burnett, Heather (2017): Gradability in natural
language. Logical and grammatical foundations (Oxford Studies in Semantics
and Pragmatics 7). Oxford University Press. Champollion, Lucas (to appear): Distributivity, collectivity,
and cumulativity. In Daniel Gutzmann, Lisa Matthewson, Ccile Meier, Hotze
Rullmann & Thomas Ede Zimmermann (eds.), Blackwell Companion to
Semantics. Kriz, Manuel (2015): Aspects of homogeneity in
the semantics of natural language. University of Vienna dissertation. Malamud, Sophia A. (2012): The meaning of plural
definites: A decision-theoretic approach. Semantics and Pragmatics 5(3).
1–58. Schein, Barry (1993): Plurals and Events. MIT
Press. Schmitt, Viola (2019): Cross-categorial plurality
and plural composition. Semantics and Pragmatics 12(17) |
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December 2, 2020 12:30-14:00, online via Webex https://hhu.webex.com/meet/tsnider Mia Windhearn Heinrich Heine University Exclusive
Quantification without Focus Alternatives This talk will discuss
quantification by exclusive operators and the availability of semantic
alternatives both with and without an overt focus structure. Exclusive operators
like only have traditionally been assumed 1) to associate with focus, and 2)
to quantify over propositions (Rooth 1992). I will argue that most
focus-sensitive operators should more accurately be characterized as
alternative-sensitive. Focus sensitivity is thus a sub-type of a broader
phenomenon of alternative semantics, even in the context of exclusive
operators. Much of
the data comes from English just and its wide range of uses as canonical and
non-canonical exclusive, some of which are exemplified below. As indicated,
only a subset of these uses make use of a prosodic focus structure. (1) The
lamp just broke! (All by itself!) (Unexplanatory) (2) Bob
is just a [philosopher]F (not a linguist). (Focus-Evaluative) (3) Carl
just has [two]F degrees. (Focus-Entailment) (4) Ana
has just gone to get her car. (Temporal) (5)
Theres a spider just above your head. (Spacial) (6) That
spider is just gigantic! (Emphatic) In addition to English just, I
will discuss some data from Serbian and Chol that further support the
separation of alternative set generation and focus. I will provide a unified
semantics for exclusivity that takes exclusive operators to take arguments of
variable type. In doing so, following Zimmermann 2017, I propose that exclusives
should not be taken to quantify over propositions. I argue instead that
exclusive operators take a structured proposition including the locus of
alternation and the background question as their argument. Focus is one
mechanism for providing such a locus, but as I hope to show, by no means the
only strategy available to exclusive operators. |
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November 18, 2020 12:30-14:00, online via
Webex https://hhu.webex.com/meet/tsnider Todd Snider Heinrich Heine University Constraints on Propositional Anaphora Anaphors are words whose reference is determined on the
basis of the interpretation of some other word or phrase (its antecedent).
For example, pronouns are anaphors whose antecedents denote individuals, as
in (1). (1) Nancy has a car. She has owned it for five years. This talk will focus on anaphors which refer to
propositions, as in (2). (2) Nancy has a car. She told me that. In particular, this talk will discuss some of the
constraints on propositional anaphora, exploring when propositional anaphora
is licit (and when it is not). The first part of the talk deals with pragmatic
discourse-level constraints, in particular at-issueness. There are competing
notions of at-issueness, but many are discussed in the
literature—explicitly or implicitly—as having consequences for a
proposition's availability for anaphora in non-trivial ways (e.g., AnderBois
et al. 2013). I argue against this tight linking, and demonstrate that a
proposition's at-issue status in a discourse (at least as defined by Simons et
al. 2010) is neither necessary nor sufficient to determine its availability
for anaphora. Thus, propositional anaphora is not constrained by atissueness,
at least under one prominent definition thereof. The second part of the talk moves
from the discourse to the sentence, to see if there are syntactic constraints
on propositional anaphora. In the tradition of Karttunen's (1969) examination
of which NPs make an individual available for anaphoric reference, I present
(highlights from) a comprehensive examination of which structures make
propositions available for anaphora. I present some surprising results which
cut across traditional syntactic classifications, including data on small
clause and raising/control/ECM verb constructions. This data leads me to
propose a new generalization for when propositions are available for
anaphoric reference. I then compare the observed behavior of propositional
anaphora to that of individual anaphora. |
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November 4, 2020 12:30-14:00, online via Webex https://hhu.webex.com/meet/tsnider Peter Sutton Heinrich Heine University A non-identity
does not imply a plurality: The Problem of the Many and the semantics of numeral
constructions The Problem of the
Many (Geach, 1962; Lewis, 1993; Unger, 1980) is a paradox that arises in
relation to counting and/or quantifying over entities in the denotations of
count nouns. For example, there are contexts/situations in which it is true
that there is one cloud in the sky, however, when it comes to the extension
of the cloud in question, there are multiple, non-identical sums of water
droplets, each of which is an equally good candidate to be the extension of
that cloud. Therefore, either each of these sums of droplets is a cloud and
we have many clouds or no sum of droplets is a cloud and so we have no
clouds. Either way, paradoxically, we do not have one cloud, contrary to our
starting assumption. Perhaps
surprisingly, the Problem of the Many is not usually discussed in relation to the
semantics of numeral constructions such as one/two/three clouds. In this talk, I
argue that the Problem
of the Many forces us adopt an analysis of count nouns and numeral
phrases based on a logically weaker mereological property than is commonly
assumed. However, once we do so, it becomes clear what the source of the
paradox is and how to avoid it: when it comes to counting with natural
language predicates, it is not the case that a non-identity implies a
plurality. In other words, we have good reason to think that if a and b are in
the extension of P and ab, it is not always
the case that the sum of a and b counts as two Ps. |
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January 15, 2020 Aviv Schoenfeld Tel Aviv University The subkind reading of nouns and the hierarchical structure of kinds The research question is: which nouns
in English can get a subkind reading? The key data is in (1-4). I will
present experimental support to the contrast between wild animal - wildlife in (1)-(2),
which parallels that of vehicle-transport, treated in Sutton & Filip (2018: ex.5): (1) I wonder which wild animal is the
most common. (2) #I wonder which wildlife is the
most common. (3) I wonder which cheese is the most
common. (4) I wonder which food is the most
common. From Grimm & Levin (2017) and
Sutton & Filip (2018), I derive the hypothesis that a noun can get a
subkind reading if and only if it heads a certain hierarchical structure. I
formulate the relevant structure based on data like (5)-(7), regarding which
kinds can be in the denotation of nouns with a subkind reading: (5) Mutts are the most popular dog in
America. (Mutts are dogs that are unclassified
for breed.) (6) Knives are a prominent weapon in
ancient Indian history. (Not every knife is a weapon.) (7) Grass is the most valuable plant
on the planet. (Not everything that counts as grass
is a plant organism.) Under my analysis, for count nouns
like animal
in (1), it does not matter whether the subkinds are named by count or mass
nouns, but it does matter for mass nouns like those in (2)-(4). I will show
that cheese
and food
head the relevant structure, because there are enough subkinds that are named
by mass nouns (e.g. cheddar and mozzarella, meat and dairy). The same does not hold for wildlife in
(2), e.g. English has no mass noun counterpart of tiger. Thus, I provide an alternative
analysis to those in Grimm & Levin (2017) and Sutton & Filip (2018)
regarding why object mass nouns like furniture and wildlife lack a subkind reading. Grimm, Scott & Beth Levin. 2017.
Artifact nouns: Reference and countability. Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS) 47. 55-64. Sutton, Peter R. & Hana Filip.
2018. Restrictions on subkind coercion in superordinate object mass nouns. Proceedings of Sinn und
Bedeutung 21. 1195-213. |
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December 4, 2019 Jeremy Kuhn Institut Jean
Nicod, CNRS cole Normale
Suprieure Gather/numerous as a
mass/count opposition Predicates like gather and be numerous have both been described
as collective predicates, since they predicate something of a plurality.
The two classes of predicates differ, however, with respect to plural
quantifiers (e.g. all), which are grammatical with gather-type predicates but
ungrammatical with numerous-type predicates. Here, I show that the gather/numerous
opposition derives from mereological properties that are familiar from the
domains of telicity and mass/count. I address problems of undergeneration and
overgeneration with two technical innovations: first, I weaken the property
of divisibility to Champollions (2015) property of stratified reference;
second, I provide mechanisms to rule out accidental satisfaction of the
logical property. From a broader perspective, we place collective predication
in a larger context by building empirical connections to mass/count and
collectivity across semantic domains. |
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July 3, 2019 Alexander Stewart Davies University of Tartu Contingent Content Parthood and the False Dichotomy between Speech Act Pluralism and Speech Act Monism In a string of publications dating
back to 1997, Cappelen and Lepore have used the fact that there can be
multiple true indirect speech reports, each with a different complement, but
nonetheless, made of a single utterance of a sentence, to defend the view
that when we utter a sentence, we dont just say one thing (the content of
the sentence uttered), we thereby say many things. In this paper, I argue
that neither view is correct. I argue that thing that A said is a
homogeneous count noun phrase, and for that reason, just as whether there is
one or three bouquets in my hand depends upon the context for counting, so
too, how many things a person says in uttering a sentence in context, depends
on the context for counting. In the course of the argument, I will need a
notion of content parthood. I provide a novel definition of content parthood
which makes content parthood contingent. Thus, the parts of what someone says
depend upon the world in which she says them. Ignorance of the world in which
one says something, results in ignorance of (the parts of) what one is
saying. |
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June 26, 2019 Yasutada Sudo University College London The Plurality Inference as a Non-Propositional Quantity Implicature Plural nouns typically give rise to
'plurality inferences', e.g. "Andrew wrote papers" implies that
Andrew wrote multiple papers, not just one. However, plurality inferences are
not always present, e.g. "Andrew did not write papers" does not
mean the same thing as "Andrew did not write multiple papers".
There are three types of approaches to the plurality inference: (i) the
scalar implicature approach (Spector 2007, Zweig 2009, Ivlieva 2013, Mayr
2015), (ii) the ambiguity approach (Farkas & de Swart 2010, Grimm 2013,
Mart 2018), and (iii) the antipresupposition approach (Sauerland 2003,
Sauerland et al. 2005). In this talk, I will propose a new
scalar implicature account. The idea of the scalar implicature account is
that the plural is semantically number-neutral, and the plurality inference
arises as a scalar implicature in competition with the singular. Previous
studies pointed out that the scalar implicature computation is not so
straightforward, given that pairs like "Andrew wrote papers" and
"Andrew wrote a paper" will be truth-conditionally identical, if
the plural is semantically number-neutral. Different versions of the scalar
implicature account make use of different truth-conditional asymmetries, e.g.
non-global levels of meaning, strengthened meaning for the singular
alternative, etc. I propose instead that the plurality inference can be
derived as a global-level quantity implicature based on a
non-truth-conditional aspect of the meaning. Specifically, the singular and
plural sentences differ in anaphoric possibilities: the plural sentence
introduces a discourse referent that ranges over singular or plural entities,
while the singular sentence introduces a discourse referent that only ranges
over singular entities. Based on this asymmetry, a quantity implicature is
derived that the discourse referent is meant to only range over plural
entities. This analysis requires no additional mechanism beyond what is
usually assumed (embedded scalar implicature or higher-order implicature),
unlike the previous scalar implicature accounts. I will formalize this idea
in Update Semantics, and demonstrate that it makes correct predictions about
negative sentences and quantified sentences. |
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June 12, 2019 Nina Haslinger University of
Gttingen Viola Schmitt University of
Vienna Cumulative readings of quantifiers: A
plural projection approach We present an analysis of cumulative readings of quantifiers in German
within the Plural Projection framework of Schmitt (2017). In this theory, the
property of semantic plurality is generalized across categories: In addition
to pluralities of individuals, there are pluralities of functions,
propositions etc. Further, when a constituent X dominates a semantically
plural expression Y, X counts as a plural expression as well and its
denotation inherits the part structure associated with Y via a special
composition rule. Cumulative readings are the result of repeatedly applying
this composition rule. Unlike earlier approaches to cumulativity, this
analysis is surface-compositional and does not make crucial use of event
semantics. We will apply this framework to two types of examples. The first type
involves universal quantifiers that have cumulative readings wrt.
syntactically higher plurals, but not wrt. syntactically lower plurals. For
instance, the 'every' DP in (1-a) has a cumulative reading, while the one in
(1-b) does not (Schein 1993, Kratzer 2000 a.o.). (1) a. Two girls fed every dog in this town. In German, this class includes DPs with the determiner 'jed-'
('every') as well as distributive conjunctions with 'sowohl ... als auch'
('as well as'). The second type of examples involves cumulative readings of
modified numerals like 'genau n Leute' ('exactly n people') or 'gerade mal n
Leute' ('no more than n people'). As noted by Buccola & Spector (2016),
the upper bounds introduced by numeral modifiers seem to disappear in some
cumulative sentences: (2) Gerade mal
fnf Leute haben mehr als 20 Liter Bier getrunken. (2) can be true in scenarios where more than five people drank beer.
We argue that such non-upper-bounded readings are only available if the
modified-numeral DP cumulates with another plural in its scope. If so,
cumulative readings of universal quantifiers and cumulative readings of
modified numerals are both subject to semantic asymmetries conditioned by
scope. So both classes of quantifiers provide evidence that cumulativity does
not entail scopelessness. In the Plural Projection framework, interactions between cumulativity
and scope are unsurprising since cumulative sentences do not involve a
special LF syntax (as proposed by Beck & Sauerland 2000). The theory
allows us to give a natural account of the asymmetry in (1) and can be
extended to cover examples like (2) by combining it with a two-dimensional
semantics for modified numerals. We will also show how this framework accounts
for the `mixed' cumulative/distributive readings discussed by Schein (1993).
Finally, we will provide an independent argument against analyses based on
syntactically derived cumulative predicates. The argument involves cumulative
readings of sentences in which plural quantifiers occur within a conjunction. |
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April 17, 2019 Massimo Poesio Queen Mary University of London Disagreements in anaphoric interpretation
In this talk I will first of all present the evidence that convinced us that the assumption that a single
interpretation can always be assigned
to anaphoric expression is no more than a convenient idealization. I will then discuss recent work on the DALI
project that aims to develop a new model of
interpretation that abandons this
assumption for the case of anaphoric interpretation / coreference. I will present the recently released
Phrase Detectives 2.1 corpus,
containing around 2 million crowdsourced judgments for more than 100,000 markables, an average of 20
judgments per markable; the Mention
Pair Annotation (MPA) Bayesian inference model developed to aggregate these judgments; and the results of a
preliminary analysis of disagreements in
the corpus suggesting that between 10% and 30% of markables in the corpus appear to be genuinely ambiguous. |
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April 10, 2019 Ai Taniguchi Carleton University Non-redundancy, social meaning, and role language In this talk I use tools from formal semantics
and pragmatics to analyze social meaning, and argue that social meaning is an
imposition on the input context of an utterance. Particularly, I explain why
the repeated usage of a sociolinguistic variant in discourse is not
redundant. I then extend this analysis to an understudied phenomenon in
Japanese called role language. Social meaning indexes a speakers
identity and stances, including but not limited to geographical origin, age,
gender, sexual orientation and even friendliness (cf., Eckert 2000; 2008;
among others). For example, the monophthongized version of /paI/ realized as
[pa:] and /ɹaIli/
as [ɹa:li]
in (1) both index southernness.
I call expressions like [pa:]/ [ɹa:li] socially indexing expressions
(SIEs). (1) Riley [ɹa:li] bought
a pie [pa:]. Riley bought a pie + The speaker is
from the South. Some scholars wonder if social
meaning is a conventional implicature (CI) (Levinson 1979; Smith et al.
2010): a secondary entailment that comments on the primary (at-issue) entailment
(Potts 2005). While I agree with Smith et al. (2010) that social meaning is a
secondary entailment, I argue that its not a CI. Formally, I will analyze
the social meaning of SIEs as the intersection of its indexical field (the
set of properties associated with the variant (Eckert 2008)) and what I call
the indexical
set, which is the set of all possible possible personas for the speaker,
according to the hearer. This has the effect of making social meaning
hearer-dependent: no matter what persona you want to portray to the world,
what persona you actually end up conveying depends on how the hearer
perceives you (Burnett 2019). Role language refers to a set of
linguistic expressions that depict the speakers character type, largely
seen in Japanese fiction (Teshigawara & Kinsui 2011; Kinsui 2003). For
example, -nya
in (2) indicates that the speaker is a cat character. (2) nyaa-tachi-no mokuteki-wa mezurashii pokemon ...
sore-o wasureru-nya! me.nya-PL-GEN objective-top rare Pokemon that-ACC forget-NEG.NYA Our objective is (to catch) rare Pok ́emon. .
. dont forget that! + The speaker is a cat I argue in this talk that role
language is really a kind of social meaning, contrary to Teshigawara &
Kinsui (2011)s suggestion that social meaning does not include traits like
speaker species. Something like -nya is analyzable as a SIE with a fairly
specific indexical field: {λxλw.catw(x)}. It just means that the
speaker is speaking a (faux) cat dialect. This work contributes to recent
efforts by scholars (e.g., Beltrama & Staum Casasanto 2017; Burnett 2019;
Smith et al. 2010) to bridge the gap between the sociolinguistic literature
and the formal semantics/pragmatics literature. From this we gain insights into
how different layers of meanings interact in language and manifest in
identity construction. |
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April 3, 2019 Henk Zeevat SFB991, HHU Dsseldorf and ILLC,
Amsterdam University Semantics made easy(?): Non-lexical frame semantics Standard logical representation of NL
meaning starts from logic as given by the logical tradition (Boole, Frege,
Kripke) and takes the basic organisation of standard logical systems
(variables, boolean operators, quantifiers) as given. It is very questionable
though that any of the logical operators in that tradition can be found in
natural languages as constants. Non-lexical frame semantics (NLFS) is an
attempt to come up with a different style of logical representation that is
closer to the syntactic organisation of NLs than, e.g., DRT and that
abolishes variables and logical operators by developing a new account of
scope phenomena. NLFS is a geometrical model based on
the graphs of frame semantics or dependency grammar (this taking on board
both the Frame Hypothesis and the essential identity of syntactic
representation with logical representation) and adding two new arrows: domina
arrows to indicate that an element depends on another element and anaphora
arrows that mark the relation between an anaphoric element and its
antecedent. Negation is treated by introducing the notion of a negative
predicate that excludes values for its non-dependent arguments. NL
conjunction is treated by a combinatorial extension of the standard
representations. The system is intended as a
linguistic account of logical representation. It should be better in dealing
with semantic universals and in capturing linguistic generalisations, e.g.,
between quantification, negation and conditionals, as well as aiming for
simplicity. Since it also covers new ground, it constitutes a challenge to
other proposals for logical representation of NL meaning. |
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January 9, 2019 Scott Grimm University of Rochester Plurality and Referentiality Certain uses of the plural form of indefinite
nouns, such as in (1), have long been puzzling because they appear to include
reference to singular entities. (1) a. Q: Do you have children?
A: Yes, I have one. b.
Ed didn't see dogs. (False if Ed saw one dog) Based on such examples, many
researchers have argued that plural indefinite nouns are actually
"inclusive", designating 'one or more' (including singular
entities), rather than "exclusive", designating 'more than one'
(excluding singular entities). Sauerland et al. (2005), among others, relate
the inclusive reading to downward-entailing environments (such as negation or
the antecedent of conditionals), claiming number marking on indefinites in a
downward entailing environment does not affect truth conditions. This talk presents experimental and
empirical evidence that the inclusive readings (i) cannot be causally related
to downward-entailing environments, as this association both under- and
over-generates and (ii) cannot be associated with indefinites in general, but
only with non-specific/non-referential indefinites. Instead, the
experimental results indicate that the key factor is whether the indefinite
can be construed as non-referential/generic, which favors inclusive readings,
or referential, which resists them. The contexts which permit inclusive
readings, e.g. negation and interrogatives, are shown to be just those which
may in general block referential commitment. I argue this lack of referential
commitment promotes inclusive plural readings. I then discuss the
typological prediction of this account, namely that inclusive plural readings
should only occur in languages for which the bare plural has
non-referential/generic uses, a claim which receives support from languages
such as Armenian. |
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December 12, 2018 Jakub Kozakoszczak University of
Warsaw and Heinrich Heine University, Dsseldorf Natural Negative Evidence in Formal
Semantics The common type of negative evidence employed in formal semantics is
the judgment-based somewhat elusive notion of semantic deviance –- a
notion that the field of formal semantics acknowledges but might lack the
right tools to model (Vecchi et al. 2011). [W]e still do not have a precise
linguistic account of what it means for a linguistic expression to be
nonsensical or semantically deviant, nor a clear relation between this
notion and that of being unattested in a corpus: Semantic deviance remains a
difficult and understudied phenomenon (Vecchi et al. 2016). In this talk, I will present (i) an analytic procedure of translating
semantically unacceptable expressions to factorized comprehension sets (Katz
1964) via intended meaning and semantic hypothesis, and (ii) a statistical
test to tell whether the expression has zero probability of occurring in text
corpora given the meaning and the hypothesis. I will demonstrate this
treatment on starred expressions from the existing literature. The resulting
new type of evidence is the empirical probability that a given formalized
meaning is impossible to occur. I will discuss its limitations and argue for
its potential to address four flaws of the traditional judgment-based
evidence: 1. Volatility. The
differences in the judged acceptability among respondents can originate from
different meanings ascribed to the expression. 2. Causal
obliqueness. The psychological relation of unacceptability is equivocal in
that it can be caused by different flaws, suit different explanations, and
support unrelated hypotheses. 3.
Unobservability. Judgments are produced by respondents through introspection
whereas text corpora are intersubjectively observable. 4.
Theory-loadedness. Judgment reports are responses to designed questions
whereas language behavior documented in corpora occurs naturally without
interaction with the researcher. |
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December 5, 2018 Federico Silvagni Complutense
University of Madrid States, events and copulas: a Romance
perspective This talk focuses on the aspectual distinction between States and
Events and its manifestations in Romance languages, with particular attention
to Spanish. The main goal of this study is to establish a satisfactory limit
between these two aspectual classes, by answering two main questions: (i)
what is an Event (and, as a consequence, a State)? (ii) How is this
distinction encoded in grammar? The need for this study derives from the puzzling (and long-standing)
observation that [dynamism], or any other equivalent criterion (Vendler 1957;
Kenny 1963; Comrie 1976; a.o.), is not a relevant primitive of eventivity,
since there are predicates that behave as Events despite the fact that they
are non-dynamic, i.e. static (Dowty 1979; Maienborn 2005, 2007, 2011; a.o.).
I observe that, once we abandon [dynamism], we reach a State/Event distribution
that is equivalent to the Individual-Level/Stage-Level distinction (Milsark
1974; Carlson 1977), whose understanding, in fact, represents another major
unknown for the research on inner aspect (see Fernald 2000; Fbregas 2012). I put forward the hypothesis that the State/Event and the
Individual/Stage distinctions are one and the same thing (see also Hoekstra
1992), and that the difference between the two classes rests merely on the
lack or the presence of inner aspect. Moreover, based on the concept of
event adopted in modern (post-Einsteinian/Minkowskian) physics and
philosophy, where reality is taken as a 4D continuum (3 Space + 1 Time
dimensions), I propose that the aspectual primitive of eventivity is a
Spacetime point, which I label as [Stage] (also Silvagni 2015, 2016, 2017). In order to find out how such a [Stage] primitive (and, thus, the
State / Event distinction) is encoded in grammar, I focus on non-verbal
predication in Romance languages; more in particular, I study the Spanish copular
alternation (ser/estar) and its relation to mono-copular languages, such as
French and Italian. I empirically show that [Stage] is a formal feature (in
the sense of Zeijlstra 2008, 2014), which is encoded in Event predicates
(that is, SLPs) as an uninterpretable instance [uS], and that Eventive (or
SL) structures are derived by an agreement operation between a predicate and
an Asp head endowed with an [iS] feature, which is realized as estar in the
case of Spanish. The study provides a more accurate understanding of the State/Event
distinction and, at the same time, the Individual/Stage contrast.
Additionally, it constitutes a detailed analysis of non-verbal predication
and copular alternation in Romance, which can also offer a comprehensive
explanation of typical controversial phenomena, such as coercion and the
IL/SL distinction in those languages that lack a SL-copula. |
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November 21, 2018 Radek Šimk Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin Interpreting Slavic bare NPs: Empirical reflections on the null
hypothesis The literature on bare NPs in
articleless languages has been dominated by the neo-Carlsonian view,
according to which bare NPs denote properties and can be type-shifted to
other meaning types, such as particulars (iota), kinds (cap), or quantifiers
(ex), whereby these type-shifts are restricted in various ways (Chierchia
1998, Krifka 2003, Dayal 2004, Geist 2010, a.o.). According to some versions
of this view, bare singulars end up being interpreted on a par with definite
descriptions, either essentially always (Dayal 2004) or always when they are
topical (Geist 2010). In my talk, I will offer an
alternative, inspired by Heims work (Heim 1982, Heim 2011), according to
which bare NPs in articleless languages, including bare singulars, are completely
underspecified with respect to (in)definiteness. The idea is that bare NPs
denote restricted variables (or functions from situations to such variables,
being of type <s,e>), which either receive a value contextually or are
bound by intra-sentential quantifiers (Heim 1982). Consequently, inferences
typically associated with definite descriptions - particularly uniqueness
and/or maximality - never really arise for bare NPs (contra the
neo-Carlsonian view of definite bare NPs). This return to what could be
considered the null hypothesis - namely that definiteness is not even a
relevant category in languages without articles - will be supported by corpus
and experimental evidence. Novel analyses based on Czech corpus data (from
Šimk & Burianov 2018) show that bare NPs are interpreted as
indefinite more often than some theories would expect. Also, they exhibit no
bias of singulars to be interpreted as definites (Dayal 2004) - the
proportion of definite and indefinite bare singulars vs. plurals is identical.
Furthermore, the majority of indefinite interpretations of Czech bare NPs can
be traced to particular expressions in the clause (e.g. presentational verbs,
negation, adverbs of quantification, etc.) - suggesting that indefinite
interpretations indeed arise from clause-internal quantificational closure of
the bare NP variable, contributed by a suitable object language expression.
Indefinite bare singulars are thus no longer quirks requiring special
treatment (Dayal 2004), but fall out naturally from the analysis. Another
portion of evidence comes from experiments on the interpretation of Russian
bare NPs, as compared to German (in)definite NPs (Šimk & Demian,
submitted). These experiments show a weak but consistent effect of
definiteness on uniqueness (sg) and maximality (pl) in German. Russian, on
the other hand, exhibits no such consistent effect - Russian bare NPs are
interpreted as indefinite (or non-definite) even if such an interpretation is
primed by information structure (word order, prosody; cf. Geist 2010 and many
others), or grammatical number (Dayal 2004), making the results fully
consistent with the null hypothesis. |
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November 7, 2018 Halima Husič Ruhr-Universitt
Bochum Towards a Formal Account of the
Countability of Qualities and Events While abstract objects are a well-discussed topic in philosophy, in
linguistics this class of nouns has occasionally been investigated, usually
as part of a bigger linguistic issue, as e.g. derived nominals, countability
or polysemy. In standard analyses of the semantics of count and mass nouns
abstract nouns are usually left out. However, abstract nouns are frequent
in language and they can also be count or mass: (1) Have you noticed how much beauty goes
into dying? (2) One of the many
virtues of pumpkins is the ability to combine equally well with sugar and
spices or salt and cheeses, making them perfect for pies, cookies and cakes,
as well as for soups, side dishes and stews. In my talk I will discuss the polysemy of nouns that denote abstract
entities and tackle the question how countability is defined in such nouns. I
will present an empirical investigation of such nouns which includes (i) an
annotation of lexical properties that are responsible for a count and mass
interpretations, (ii) a specification of dependent senses of nouns and how
they are derived and (iii) a corpus study. Based on this research I will
propose an analysis to account for count and mass uses of abstract nouns. |
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October 24, 2018 David Nicolas CNRS, Institut
Jean Nicod (joint work with
Salvatore Florio, University of Birmingham) Plurals
and mereology A
prominent tradition in linguistic semantics analyzes plurals by appealing to
mereology (e.g. Massey 1976,Link 1983, Link 1998, Gillon 1992, Champollion
2016, Champollion 2017). The mereological approach to the semantics of
plurals has attracted heavy criticisms, especially within philosophical logic
where many authors subscribe to an alternative framework based on plural
logic (e.g. Boolos 1984, Yi 1999, Rayo 2002, Rayo 2006, McKay 2006, Oliver
& Smiley 2013). Some of the criticisms target a broader class of
'singularist' semantics which interpret plural expressions in terms of
singular ones. The mereological approach is the most popular, and perhaps the
most plausible, of those analyses. These
criticisms have been very influential in philosophy. What has been overlooked
is that, once the mereological approach is properly understood, linguists
have the basic tools to respond. Our aim is to clarify and develop these
responses systematically, bringing together the linguistic and philosophical
literature. In the
first part of the talk, we offer a precise articulation of the mereological
approach and of the semantic background in which the debate can be
meaningfully reconstructed. We focus on the best-known implementation of the
approach, namely that of Godehard Link, but we comment on the relevance of
our discussion for alternative implementations. In the
second part, we deal with the criticisms and assess their logical,
linguistic, and philosophical significance. Our conclusion is that the
mereological approach fares no worse than plural logic and that it remains a
viable and well-motivated framework for the analysis of plurals. |
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October
17, 2108 Carol-Rose
Little Cornell
University Numerals
and quantification in Chol In this talk, I
investigate a set of underdescribed numeral constructions in Chol that I
call possessed numerals. Unlike the bare numerals in (1), these possessed
numerals in (2) occur with possessive prefix i- and relational suffix -el,
allowing both cardinal (2a) and ordinal (2b) interpretations. (1)
cha-tyikil wiik two-CL man two men (2)
Possessed numerals a. tyi i-cha-tyikl-el wiik
TYI A3-two-CL-RS man the
two men b. i-cha-tyikl-el=b wiik
A3-two-CL-RS=REL man the
second man The cardinal
interpretation in (2a) contains tyi in addition to the possessed numeral and
the ordinal interpretation in (2b) contains a relative clause marker =b.
Building off the semantics of bare numerals in Chol (Bale and Coon, 2014), I
propose a compositional semantics for these possessed numerals. I argue that tyi in (2a)
introduces a uniqueness presupposition, supported by data from the ordinal
construction and the possessed numeral one, which lack tyi. The morpheme tyi shows up in other quantificational
phrases to derive strong quantifiers from weak quantifiers. For instance, I
present data from other quantifiers like pejtyel and its possessed form tyi
i-pejtyel-el all that have similar entailment differences as (2a) and
(1) do. All data comes from my fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico. |
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July 12,
2018
New York University Two switches
in the theory of counterfactuals: A study of truth conditionality and minimal change I report on a
comprehension experiment on counterfactual conditionals based on a context
involving two switches (joint work with Ivano Ciardelli and Linmin Zhang). We
found that the truth-conditionally equivalent clauses (i) switch A or
switch B is down and (ii) switch A and switch B are not both up make
different semantic contributions when embedded in counterfactual antecedents.
Assuming compositionality, this contradicts the textbook view that meaning
can be identified with truth conditions. This finding has a clear explanation
in inquisitive semantics: truth-conditionally equivalent clauses may be
associated with different propositional alternatives, each of which counts as
a separate counterfactual assumption. Related results from the same
experiment challenge the common Stalnaker-Lewis interpretation of
counterfactuals as involving minimizing change with respect to the actual
state of affairs. We propose to replace the idea of minimal change by a
distinction between foreground and background for a given counterfactual
assumption: the background is held fixed in the counterfactual situation,
while the foreground can be varied without any minimality constraint. (This talk presents
work reported in a paper recently appeared in the journal Linguistics and
Philosophy, available at http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003200.) |
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July 4, 2018 Eytan Zweig University of York Semantic and Pragmatic Effects on Bare Plurals in Questions It is
well established in the literature (see Sauerland et al. 2005 and Zweig 2009
among others) that in the context of a polar question, bare plurals and
singular indefinites do not seem to be distinct; i.e., (1a) and (1b) will
receive identical answers, Yes for at least one apple and No only if
there are no apples whatsoever: 1a. Do we have apples in our pantry? 1b. Do we have an apple in our pantry? What is
less frequently discussed in the literature, however, is that this similarity
is modulated by a variety of pragmatic considerations, relating to both the
context in which the question was asked and the possible referents for the
noun phrase in question. In this talk, I will explore some of these effects,
presenting novel data from a visual world experiment and discussing the
theoretical implications of its results in the greater context of plural
semantics. |
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June 27, 2018 Luka Szucsich Humboldt‐University Berlin Obviation in North Slavic
languages In many
languages, including Romance and some Slavic languages, subjunctive clauses
selected by volitional verbs allow for syntactic phenomena to occur in a less
local domain than it is the case with other types of subordinate clauses
(especially indicative clauses). One of these phenomena is so‐called ‛obviation, i.e. obligatory
disjoint reference of subjects in the matrix clause and subjects in
subjunctive clauses, cf. (1) for Polish. (1)
Jareki chc‐e,
żeby
pro*i/j śpiewa‐ł.
Polish JarekM:SG:N wantPRS:3:SG thatSUBJ pro singLPT‐M:SG ‛Jarek wants
him to sing. Obviation
is often attributed to ‛domain extension collapsing the tense domains
of the matrix and the embedded clause. The nature of domain extension,
however, is rarely explicitly analyzed. I will present an analysis of
obviation effects which relies on cross‐clausal feature dependencies. I assume that
(potentially cross‐clausal)
occurrences of features may constitute the relevant domains for construal
processes. Selectional properties of volitional verbs and the deficiency of
the clausal complements T‐feature provide the prerequisite for cross‐clausal feature sharing, i.e. the matrix and the
complement clauses T‐features
form one feature chain making the respective instances featurally identical.
I will show, however, that feature identity may be not only determined by
φ‐features
and referential indices, but also by features such as [agentivity], or
features determining, whether a situation is subject to control by a
participant (Szabolcsis RESP feature), or contrastive focus features. |
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June 13, 2018 Marcin Wągiel Masaryk University Brno Subatomic quantification in natural language In
standard lattice‐theoretic
approaches to natural language (e.g., Link 1983, Landman 2000, Champollion 2017)
singularities and pluralities are presumed to involve distinct mereologies
and it is commonly supposed that quantificational expressions do not access
subatomic part‐whole
relations. In this talk, I explore three hypotheses regarding natural
language semantics: (i) natural language is sensitive to topological
relations holding between parts of singularities (cf. Grimm 2012), (ii) there
are general counting rules that presuppose such relations, and (iii)
quantification over parts is subject to identical restrictions as
quantification over wholes. I propose that to be countable' means to be an
integrated part of an integrated whole' where part' employs the reflexive
mereological relation, and thus covers both proper and improper parts. In
other words, only an entity conceptualized as a whole that comes in one piece
can be put in one‐to‐one correspondence with the natural numbers.
Similar, a proper part of such an entity that is conceptualized as an
integrated object is also countable. The evidence for the linguistic
relevance of this claim comes from the interaction between cardinal numerals
and partitives involving irregular plurals in Italian as well as distinct
classes of Polish half', part' and whole' words and from the
quantificational behavior of multipliers such as the English double. |
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May 30,
2018 John Collins University of East Anglia The Syntax-Semantics Interface and Its Ontological
Significance The orthodoxy in semantic theory is that semantics carries various presuppositions
and entailments about ontology - the world. I shall suggest that all the
virtues of the orthodoxy may be retained while relinquishing the ontological
load. Semantics, on such a view, constitutes constraints upon what can be
said rather than determinants of how the world is. |
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May 2,
2018 Jon Ander Mendia Heinrich
Heine University, Dsseldorf Epistemic Numbers Epistemic
Numbers (ENs) are complex cardinal numerals formed by combining a number with
a non‐numerical
expression, typically an indefinite. Unlike other cardinal numbers, ENs (i)
denote a range of possible values, and (ii) convey an epistemic effect of
uncertainty or vagueness about the exact number. For instance, a sentence
like twenty‐some people came is an acceptable answer to a question like How many people
came?, and it can denote integers ranging from 21 to 29, conveying that
the speaker is unsure about the exact number. I focus on three main cross‐linguistic facts: (i) some languages allow ENs
with a variety of quantifiers, not just indefinites akin to some or wh‐indefinites; (ii) in some languages ENs can
either precede or follow the numeral; and (iii) the interpretation of ENs
depends on the numerical base of the language, and cannot combine with just
any numeral. Giving prominence to this cross‐linguistic variability, in this talk, I provide
an initial semantic analysis flexible enough to account for a variety of
languages, and a pragmatic account of the epistemic effect. |
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April
25, 2018 Henk Zeevat University
of Amsterdam & Heinrich Heine University, Dsseldorf Quantification in Frames In
earlier work, I discussed the Stat'imc'ets quantifier system in which no
generalised quantifier can take scope over another and which therefore only
has cumulative readings for QNP V QNP sentences. This gives an argument for
frames as the basis for NL semantics rather than (extensions of) FOL, since,
in the latter systems, quantifiers are predicted to have scope over each
other by default and cumulative readings that have to be painfully
reconstructed. The Stat'imc'ets data seem to show that rather than scope
taking readings, cumulative readings are the typologically unmarked case for
QNP V QNP sentences. Stat'imc'ets
has however a category of formally distinct dependent NPs which together with
possessive NPs allow for readings dependent on quantifiers. These readings
need to be accounted for, just like the possibility of the Stat'imc'ets
system leading to a system like English in which all quantifiers can be
dependent. The talk will present a new treatment of this using the attribute
domina which links dependent NPs to their dominant NP or operator (this is
just the easiest way of dealing with quantifier scope in dependency grammar).
Dominated NPs will end up having functional denotations in an extension of a
standard satisfaction semantics for frames and will so also allow an
explanation of the paycheck sentences. Also, the Barry Schein mixed cases can
be adequately treated (cumulative but the tricks may be dependent on the
basketball players): Every basketball player
learnt two new tricks from these videos. Viola
Schmitt's pioneering work on conjunction and plurals can be constructed as an
argument against my frame analysis of cumulative quantification, showing that
it is much too simple and needs extension to most other categories. This is a
highly non‐trivial
business in frame semantics. An example is the cumulative reading (only Bill
sang, only John danced) of: John and Bill sang and
danced. A new
generalisation is presented that overcomes the objection and that also deals
with collective readings. The Stat'imc'ets quantifier system is a special
case of the generalisation. A full treatment of conjunction in frames is
however definitely an open problem. |
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April
18, 2018 Daniel Gutzmann University
of Cologne I lost my damn watch! Expressive adjectives between
syntax and semantics Expressive
adjectives (EAs) received a lot of attention in the semantic literature, which
however treated their syntax mostly just like that of ordinary descriptive
adjective. However, as I show in this talk, EAs differ in many and sometime
puzzling aspects from descriptive ones. They cannot be modified or carry
degree morphology, for instance. Most crucially, they exhibit interesting
compositional behavior since they can be interpreted in a position different
than they appear. Arguing against a purely pragmatic approach, both
experimentally and conceptually, I propose a syntactic solution for the
constraints in the semantic interpretation of EAs that builds on the
assumption that expressivity is a syntactic feature, on par with features
like tense or number. I develop an (upwards) agreement‐based analysis according to which the expressive content
of an EAs is introduced by an uninterpretable expressivity feature which
agrees with a corresponding interpretable feature at some higher node. This
not only gets the restrictions about where EAs can be interpreted right but
can also derive a lot of their special behavior and leads to direct mapping
between syntactic structure and semantic interpretation. |
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January
24, 2018 Louise McNally Universitat
Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona 'Figurative' uses of verbs
and grammar (joint
work with Alexandra Spalek) The goal
of this talk, based on work in progress with Alexandra Spalek, is to draw
attention to the contrastive study of 'figurative' uses of verbs as a way of
gaining a new perspective on the challenges that must be met when addressing
the interaction between conceptual content associated with words and their
grammatical properties. Specifically, I will present the results of a
comparison of the 'literal' and 'figurative' uses of six English verbs and
their Spanish counterparts. This comparison reveals that figurative uses are
strongly constrained by grammatical properties of the literal uses,
indicating that the two uses emanate from a single lexical entry for each
verb. Crucially, we find striking contrasts between figurative uses in the
two languages which correlate with independently identified contrasts in the
grammars of their verbal systems. However, at the same time, we find striking
similarities in the sorts of conceptual domains in which the figurative uses
are attested for each pair, even when the grammatical details differ,
pointing to important conceptual similarities between the English and Spanish
counterparts. The data will therefore force us to ask how contrasting
grammatical constraints are associated with similar conceptual content. I will
offer some preliminary reflections on this question, particularly in relation
to the debate over Levin & Rappaport Hovav's (1991) Manner/Result
Complementarity hypothesis. |
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January
17, 2018 Michael Daniel Linguistics Convergence
Laboratory National Research University Higher School of Economics,
Moscow ROOM: Building 25.13,
Room U1.24 (PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE OF VENUE) Associative plural as
indexical category Animacy Hierarchy
was introduced as a cross-grammatical factor which governs, in different
languages, widespread splits of nominal categories, including case or number
marking. Among other phenomena, Animacy Hierarchy has been invoked to
describe the lexical distribution of associative plurals (APL). In this paper
I argue that APL as an interpretation of nominal plurality is motivated not
by the high position the respective noun holds on the Animacy Hierarchy but
is a combined effect of coercion by the unique reference inherent to proper
names and associative links easily recoverable for human referents.
Interpretation of APL relies upon activation of set relations its referent
holds to other entities in the speech act or in the speech participants
minds. APL is thus argued to be an indexical rather than a functional
semantic category. --- In the end, and if we have time, I will place APL in
the context of other interpretative, or 'vague' categories, such as flexible
relative clauses and genitives. |
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January 10,
2018 Curt Anderson Heinrich
Heine University Some Exclamatives In previous work (Anderson, to appear, Proceedings of Sinn und
Bedeutung 21), I provide an analysis of what I call some-exclamatives, an
exclamative form in English using the determiner some along with an
intonational contour marking it as an exclamative (as in he is some
lawyer!). These exclamatives express a positive or negative evaluation of
how the referent of the some-headed DP exemplifies the property denoted by
the NP. In this talk, I present preliminary experimental data examining the
interaction of rising/falling intonation and speaker evaluation. From an
online judgement study, we find that listeners can use intonation to make
inferences regarding whether the speaker is making a positive or negative
evaluation. Additionally, we find interactions between bias and the semantic
class of the nominal complement of some (whether the noun denotes a human
or an instrument). I extend my prior analysis in order to account for some of
these findings. |
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December
13, 2017 CANCELLED WILL BE
RESCHEDULED John Collins The Syntax-Semantics Interface and
Its Ontological Significance The
orthodoxy in semantic theory is that semantics carries various presuppositions
and entailments about ontology ‐ the world. I shall suggest that all the virtues
of the orthodoxy may be retained while relinquishing the ontological load.
Semantics, on such a view, constitutes constraints upon what can be said rather
than determinants of how the world is. |
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December
6, 2017 Keren Khrizman Heinrich
Heine University Russian Diminutives as
Counting and Measuring Operators: Implications for the Semantics of Counting,
Measuring and the Mass/Count Distinction Diminutive nominal suffixes occur in many
typologically diverse languages and have a varied interpretational pattern.
Crosslinguistic studies identify at least three uses of diminutives: (i)
expression of smallness; (ii) expression of individuation into small/minimal
units accompanied by a grammatical shift from mass to count noun; (iii)
emotional evaluation (Jurafsky 1996, Schneider 2003/13, Fortin 2011).
Previous research has focused on the contrast between proper diminutives
expressing small size/measure and emotive diminutives (e.g. Schneider
2003/13, Fortin 2011) and there has been little semantic study of the
individuating function of diminutives. The results of a few studies suggest
that (at least in some languages) there may be a categorial distinction between
the two types of suffixes: proper diminutives are adjectival (Fortin 2011,
Wiltschko & Steriopolo 2007) while individuating suffixes are either
quantificational (Jurafsky 1996, Fortin 2011) or classifiers (Wiltschko 2006,
Ott 2011). However, this has not been explored in detail. The present project
aims to explore the syntax and semantics of proper vs. individuating
diminutives in Russian (as in stolik a small table and ris‐risinka rice‐ a grain of rice), focusing on the following
questions: (i) Why do diminutives individuate, i.e. why does smallness
facilitate grammatical individuation? (ii) Under what grammatical, lexical
and pragmatic conditions do they individuate? (iii) Is the semantic contrast
reflected in a syntactic, categorial distinction, and if so, then why? I
explore these issues in the context of recent work on counting, measuring and
the mass/count distinction (Chierchia 1998/2010, Krifka 1989/95, Landman
2004/16, Rothstein 2009/10/17, Filip & Sutton 2016) and hypothesize that
individuating and non‐individuating
diminutives belong to the class of counting and measuring operators
respectively. More specifically, proper diminutives are measure modifiers
assigning measure characteristics to entities, whereas individuating suffixes
are counting operators which allow parts of substances to be counted. I show
that studying diminutives in the proposed framework will lead to a better
understanding of diminutives, and, also, it will throw light on fundamental
topics in semantics including measuring, countability and individuation. |
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November
29, 2017 Kurt Erbach, Peter R. Sutton, Hana Filip, and Kathrin Byrdeck Heinrich Heine University Object mass nouns in Japanese Classier languages are commonly taken to have no grammaticized lexical
mass/count distinction, but rather have this distinction encoded through the
syntax and semantics of classiers (e.g. Chierchia 1998, 2010; Muromatsu
2003; Rothstein 2010, 2017). We contest this claim by drawing on data from
Japanese, a typical classier language. We provide novel empirical evidence
showing that Japanese quantiers (e.g. nan-byaku-to-iu hundreds of) can
be used as tests for the mass/count status of Japanese nouns in the absence
of classiers. Such quantifiers can directly modify nouns like onna-no-hito (woman)
denoting inherently individuable entities, but not nouns denoting undifferentiated stuff like yuki (snow). Moreover, and more importantly, acceptability
tests using these quantiers lead to the identification of object mass nouns
in Japanese, i.e. nouns that have inherently individuable entities in their
denotation and yet are infelicitous in syntactic environments which are
diagnostic of count nouns. This mismatch between notional and grammatical
categories and the existence of object mass nouns in Japanese contradicts
Chierchia's (2010) prediction that such noun behavior should not exist in
classifier languages. It follows that Japanese lexical nominal system is
endowed with a grammatical mass/count distinction, which bears a certain
resemblance to that which we nd in number marking languages (e.g. English),
therefore casting doubt on the common view that classier languages have no
grammaticized lexical mass/count distinction. We propose a novel semantic
analysis of Japanese lexical nouns and classiers, based on Sutton &
Filip (2016), a framework that unites notions of context in Rothstein (2010)
and Landman (2011), and motivates the idea that counting contexts can remove
overlap so that count nouns have disjoint counting bases while mass nouns do
not. |
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November
22, 2017 Yasutada Sudo University
College London The semantic role of
classifiers in Japanese In obligatory
classifier languages like Japanese, numerals cannot directly modify nouns
without the help of a classifier. It is standardly considered that this is
because nouns in obligatory classifier languages have uncountable
denotations, unlike in non-classifier languages like English, and they need
to be turned into countable denotations by classifiers before being able to
be modified by numerals. Contrary to this, it is proposed that what makes
Japanese an obligatory classifier language is not the semantics of nouns but
the semantics of numerals. Specifically, evidence is presented that numerals
in Japanese cannot function as predicates on their own, which is taken as
suggesting that numerals in Japanese are exclusively used as singular terms.
It is then proposed that the semantic function of classifiers is to turn such
singular terms into modifiers/predicates. |
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November
15, 2017 Laura Kallmeyer and Rainer Osswald Heinrich Heine University Polysemy, Coercion, and Quantification In this work
we model systematic polysemy and its interaction with quantification within a
framework that combines Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) with frame
semantics and Hybrid Logic (HL). We first
present the proposal from Babonnaud et al. (2016) according to which an
inherently polysemous
noun such as `book', which provides referential access to both a physical and
an informational
object, is assumed to refer to entities of type physical‐object which have an attribute content whose
value is of type information. The physical aspect and the informational
aspect are then addressed in different ways in contexts such as `read the
book', `carry the book', `master the book' or `a heavy book on magic'. Treating
books as physical information carriers in this way gives rise to the
following quantification puzzle as noted for instance in (Asher &
Pustejovsky, 2006). While 'John carried off every book in the library' poses
no problem since the domain of quantification consists of physical entities,
it not obvious how to cope with 'John read every book in the library', which
is naturally interpreted as quantifying over all contents of the books in the
library. Since the library may own more than one copy of a book, there is not
necessarily a one‐to‐one
correspondence between the physical books in the library and the book
contents. It is not even necessary that John used a copy from the library at
all. The
solution we propose retains the idea that books are treated as physical
information carriers, i.e., we quantify over these physical objects, while
using only the information components as arguments of the predicate in the
scope of the quantifier. This is possible due to the flexibility of the
chosen syntax‐semantics architecture, in particular,
underspecified use of Hybrid Logic and specific syntax‐semantics interface features. |
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November
8, 2017 Eleni Gregoromichelaki and
Jon Ander Mendia Heinrich Heine University Continuation
and discussion of their respective talks on October 18 and 25, 2017. |
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October 25,
2017 Eleni Gregoromichelaki Heinrich Heine University Ad-hoc grammatical
categorisation in DS-TTR I will
introduce a formalism, DS-TTR, motivated by the need to underpin dialogue
modelling and explain the role of language in human interaction. In DS-TRR,
the view of natural languages as codes mediating a mapping between
expressions and the world is abandoned to give way to a model where
utterances are taken as joint actions aimed to locally and incrementally
alter the affordances of the context. Such actions employ perceptual stimuli
composed not only of words and syntax but also elements like visual
marks, gestures, sounds, etc. Any such stimuli can participate in the
domain-general processes that constitute the grammar, whose function is to
incrementally predict the next action steps via the dynamic categorisation
and integration of various perceptual inputs. One consequence of this view is
that specifically linguistic syntactic categories, representations or
constraints are eschewed and explained away as the effects of the dynamics of
interactive processing. Given these assumptions, a challenge that arises is
how to account for the reification of such processes as exemplified in
apparent metarepresentational practices like quotation, reporting, citation
etc. I will argue that even such phenomena can receive adequate and natural
explanations as demonstrations through a grammar that allows for the ad-hoc
creation of occasion-specific content through reflexive mechanisms. |
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October
18, 2017 Jon Ander Mendia Heinrich Heine University Some kind of relative clause Amount
Relatives (ARs) differ from restrictive relative clauses in that they have an
interpretation where what is referred to is not a particular object denoted by
the head of therelative clause, but an amount of such objects (Carlson 1977,
Heim 1987). For instance, the sentence it will take us the rest of our lives
to drink the champagne they spilled that evening is ambiguous: on its more
salient interpretation, the sentence claims that what would take us long to
drink is a particular amount of champagne, not any particular champagne. Virtually
all extant analyses of ARs agree on one thing: the that-clause denotes a set
of degrees. This is usually implemented by covert movement of a degree
operator and abstraction over a degree variable. In this
talk I propose to reanalyze ARs. I suggest that the
"amount" interpretation is a special case of kind
interpretation. First, I show that both "kind" and amount
interpretations show the same distinguishing properties when we compare them
to ordinary (intersective) relative clauses. Second, I show that there is no
trace of the presence of degree quantification/abstraction in ARs, a fact
that, all else equal, is not expected if Ars were degree expressions. Then I
analyze "amount" interpretations as cases of ad hoc
subkind interpretations: the that-clause contributes a way to determine a
particular subkind of the kind-level object provided by the head of the
relative clause (in the example above, an ad hoc subkind of champagne). Time
permitting, I will discuss the fact that other languages may possess ARs as
envisioned by traditional analyses -i.e. they must be treated as degree
expressions- and consider the cross-linguistic ramifications of this state of
affairs. |
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July 26,
2017 Shalom Lappin University of Gothenburg, King's College London and Queen Mary
University of London
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July 19,
2017 Anna Czypionka University of Konstanz Temporal implicatures in sentence comprehension:
Evidence from acceptability ratings and self-paced reading times Implicatures
are inferences that go beyond the literal semantic meaning of an utterance.
In psycholinguistics, scalar implicatures are the most widely researched type
of implicature. These implicatures are triggered by scalar expressions, like
some (implying some, but not all), and have been investigated in a number of
paradigms. We present data on a new type of implicature, namely, temporal
implicatures. These are triggered by temporal expressions like this week (implying
this week, but not next). When combined with predicates that ascribe a
temporary property like be ill, this implicature makes sense: John is ill
this week implies that John is ill only this week. However, a combination
with predicates ascribing permanent properties like be tall is less
felicitous: # John is tall this week implies that John's size is not
constant; this implicature clashes with speakers' world knowledge about the
size of grown-ups. A series of judgment studies employing the
Literal Lucy paradigm show that just like scalar implicatures, temporal
implicatures are psychologically real and are independent from the semantic
meaning of the sentence. In addition, data from self-paced reading show that
temporal implicatures are routinely drawn during language comprehension, and
computed early. We argue that the infelicity of temporal modification with
permanent predicates (# John is tall this week) is due to a pragmatic
inference that conflicts with world-knowledge, rather than grammatical. |
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July 12,
2017 Agata Renans Ulster University Accounting for inferences of pluralized count and mass nouns :
Evidence from Greek Across languages, plural marking on count nouns typically gives rise to multiplicity inferences ,
indicating that there is more than one entity in the denotation of the noun.
Plural marking has also been observed to occur on mass nouns in Greek, giving
rise to a parallel abundance inference, indicating that there is a large quantity of
what is denoted by the noun. Kane et al. (2016) propose a unified implicature
account of abundance and multiplicity inferences, which prima facie
predicts a uniform pattern across inferences, and standard implicatures. We
tested this prediction by comparing multiplicity inferences, abundances
inferences, and standard implicatures in Greek-speaking children and adults.
The results reflect an overall pattern of implicature calculation, supporting
a unified implicature analysis across the inferences. |
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July 5,
2017 Kurt Erbach Heinrich Heine University Fighting for a share of the covers: Accounting
for inaccessible readings of plural predicatesPlural predication presents a
challenge that remains unsettled despite the numerous attempts to present a satisfying
analysis (Moltman 2016, Farkas &de Swart 2010, Oliver & Smiley 2006,
Yi 2005, 2006, Landman 2000, 1989a,b, Schwarzschild 1996, Link 1993, 1983,
Krifka 1990, 1989, Schein 1986, Scha 1981, to name a few). The current
discussion looks at a small part of this multi-faceted topic, namely the
available readings of certain plural predicates. Gillon (1987) argues that
certain plural predicates are ambiguous inrespect to the truth value of their
minimal covers—i.e. sets of subsets ofpluralities, in which none of the
subsets overlap with the sum of the others, and the sum of all subsets is
equal to the plurality itself. While Gillons (1987) argument is logically
sound, I present evidence that suggests that certain minimal covers are not
immediately accessible interpretations of cumulative predicates. Namely, following certain
plural predicates, the lexical modifiers together and individually cannot be
used in tandem to indicate which minimal cover of the predication is true.
Following Gillon (1987), I assume these minimal covers must exist despite
their inaccessibility, so the issue at hand is determining how they come to
exist and why they are inaccessible from the initial interpretation of
certain plural predicates. Landmans (2000) analysis of events and plurality
provides a multi-step process in which cumulative predicates are derived from
covers. This analysis can be used to show how the interpretations of
predicate that includes the relevant minimal covers come to exist, but leaves
the inaccessibility of such covers unexplained. I propose that complex
minimal covers are inaccessible because their derivation is simply too
complex to process on-line. This explanation accounts for the infelicity of
lexical modifiers, preserves the logic of minimal covers, and avoids the
introduction of further devices into the account. |
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June 28, 2017 Mojmr Dočekal and Marcin Wągiel Masaryk
University, Czech Republic Counting degrees and events: A cross-linguistic
perspective In this talk, we bring in novel data concerning distribution and
semantic properties of two classes of adverbs of quantification in Czech,
i.e., event numerals such as *dvakrt* ('twice/two times') as opposed to
degree numerals such as *dvojnsobně* ('doubly/twofold'). We explore the
contrasts between the expressions in question including the interaction with
comparatives and equatives as well as scope asymmetries. Furthermore, we
discuss their relationship with frequency adverbs and degree adverbs,
respectively, as well as cross-linguistic variation including data from
typologically distinct languages such as Vietnamese. We propose that degree
numerals target values on a provided scale and are, hence, best analyzed as
degree quantifiers resembling differentials whereas event numerals have a
more general semantics which primarily allows for quantification over
individuated events, but also enables to operate on degrees. |
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June 21, 2017 va Kardos University of Debrecen, Hungary Telicity across languages This talk is
concerned with how telicity arises across languages. More specifically, it
offers a semantic take on the encoding and calculation of telicity and
identifies two types of strategies in typologically such different languages
as English, Hungarian and Slavic languages. It promotes the idea that
telicity arises either (i) as a result of overt or covert maximalization over
events, as in the case of most predicates in Hungarian and Slavic languages,
or (ii) simply due to the co-occurrence of a verb encoding incremental
change, a theme participant whose quantity is known, and a bounded path that
is traversed in the course of the denoted event, as with most English verbal
predicates (Kardos 2012, 2016). Important ways in which the languages under
investigation differ is that they rely on these strategies to different
extents, which has significant interpretational and morphosyntactic
differences with respect to verbal predicates. Following
Filip and Rothstein (2006) and Filip (2008), I assume that telicity arises either
as a result of a maximalization operator MAXE mapping sets of partially
ordered events onto sets of maximal events. The application of MAXE is
contingent on a verb assigning a figure-path incremental relation, a
quantified theme DP, and a bounded path, an idea originating in Beavers
(2012). Alternatively, telicity can also arise without maximalization over
events with a verb assigning a figure path incremental role to a theme DP
whose quantity is known and a bounded path since in these cases for any event
that the verbal predicate describes, it does not describe any non-final
subevent of that event. An important difference between the two processes is
that the former leaves the predicate with quantized reference, and thus
telicity is guaranteed, whereas in the latter case it is not a necessary
consequence. This is
illustrated in Hungarian and Slavic languages, where event maximalization is
encoded in particle verbs and perfective verbs. In English, where event
maximalization is not necessary for telic interpretations in the case of most
predicates, degree achievements like warm and cool are well-known for
aspectual variability (Hay et al. 1999). Furthermore, in the case of
predicates containing a particle verb or a perfective verb, which arguably
encode event maximalization, the internal argument is semantically
constrained in a way that the quantity of its referent must be known, and
this satisfies a necessary condition for telicity (see above). As for how
the event maximalizing operator is encoded, there are different options to be
explored. It is either the case that it is encoded covertly in VPs, as in
some instances in English, or perfective verbs, as argued for by Filip (2008)
in her analysis of Slavic languages, or that it is encoded overtly in perfective
prefixes in Slavic languages or verbal particles in Hungarian. That particles
and prefixes seem to systematically turn stative predicates into telic
predicates in Hungarian and several Slavic languages may be taken as one
piece of evidence for their being overt event maximalization/telicity
markers. Yet another
question that is worth pursuing is whether bounded events must be marked in
Slavic languages similarly to Hungarian. If this requirement holds, the
expectation is that predicates that are inherently bounded (e.g. achievements
like die and break a vase and degree achievements associated with an endpoint
like empty the fridge and straighten the rope) must contain some marking
element (e.g. a particle or a prefix). In Hungarian, this expectation is met,
whereas in Slavic languages different patterns arise, making obligatory
telicity marking suspicious (cf. Di Sciullo & Slabakova 2005). |
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June 14, 2017 Łukasz Jędrzejowski University of Cologne On (the diachrony
of) jakoby-clauses
in Polish In this talk, I will examine the
development and use of dependent clauses in Polish introduced by the
complementizer jakoby
(lit. as if) and show which factors in the lexical meaning of jakoby were
responsible for the semantic change that it underwent. In
the Old Polish example given in (1), the dependent clause is introduced by
the hypothetical comparative complementizer jakoby (as if) and it is embedded
under the matrix predicate widzieć (seem), expressing indirect inferential evidence:
the people on earth interpreted
it as if it wanted to slay all of them (KG, Kazanie I: Na Boże Narodzenie 26-7) In Old Polish, jakoby-clauses
can be embedded only under verbs of seeming. In other words, the structure seem as if p is
used instead of seem that p if what the available evidence suggests is somehow in
conflict with what the speaker believes or used to believe. In Present-day
Polish, in turn, as illustrated in (2), the jakoby‑clause is embedded under
the speech verb zaprzeczać (deny):
The company denied that there supposedly were any reports about faulty
prepaid cards. (NKJP, Dziennik
Zachodni, 27/9/2006) The complementizer jakoby is
not interpreted as a hypothetical comparative conjunction as if any
longer, but as a hearsay complementizer (that + allegedly). Interestingly, neither Czech nor
Slovak have experienced this change. Based
on Faller (2011) and Murray (2017), I will present account showing that the
change of jakoby
involved two main developments: First, the meaning of jakoby was broadened to allow for
inferences from reportative information (compatible with, but not enforced by
its seem-type
embedding verbs). Second, the reportative flavor acquired by jakoby
licensed its use in complements of speech verbs. Since these new contexts
were no longer compatible with the original inferential meaning, they
ultimately lead to the inability to use jakoby in its original contexts, cf. (3):
References Faller,
Martina (2011): A possible worlds semantics for Cuzco Quechua evidentials,
in: Proceedings
of SALT 20 ed. by Nan Li and David Lutz, eLanguage, 660‑683. Murray, Sarah E. (2017): The Semantics
of Evidentials. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
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June 7, 2017 Stergios Chatzikyriakidis University of
Gothenburg In defence of lost
causes? Type Theories for Natural Language Semantics In this talk, I will
present an overview of the use of TTs for representing linguistic semantics.
A historical overview is first given that covers in brief the history of type
theory. Then, the discussion moves to the application of type theories,
mostly type theories within the tradition of Martin Lf, to various issues in
linguistic semantics like common nouns, modification, belief intensionality
and copredication among others. Various alternatives are discussed when
needed while the differences with simple type theory, which is the basis of
Montague Grammar, are highlighted. Furthermore, the use of proof assistants
implementing constructive type theories in dealing with Natural Language
inference and checking the correctness of formal semantics accounts is
discussed arguing that constructive type theories combined with the
associated maturity in proof assistant technology can produce powerful
reasoning engines and effective semantic account checkers. Lastly, I
discuss the use of TTs within the new setting in computational linguistics,
namely Deep Learning, trying to see its usefulness or not, and potential
avenues of interaction between the two fields. |
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May 31,
2017 Natalia
Gagarina Leibniz-ZAS Berlin Aspect (and other verb
categories) in monolingual and bilingual acquisition I trace the developmental
projection of the acquisition of aspect (and other verb categories) in
monolingual and bilingual children. Specifically, the goal is find out, how
children use the verb morphology to gain access to syntactic structure and to
identify differences in monolingual vs. (simultaneous and successive)
bilingual acquisition. Working within the general framework of
constructivism, I will show how the semantic structure of a predicate guides
the acquisition of the tense/aspect and agreement morphology. Our methodology is called
predicate tracking. Working within the lexicon of individual children, a
predicate is identified and then the emergence of the verb morphology is
tracked. Thus, the history of acquisition for each predicate is determined.
Minimal morphological contrasts as evidence for the productivity of
tense/aspect and agreement concepts are searched for. Prior research has
shown a relatively consistent frequency pattern cross-linguistically where
the following two configurations are highly probable: 1) telic verbs with
past tense and bounded aspectual morphology, and 2) atelic verbs with
non-past tense and unbounded aspectual morphology. This finding has prompted
the argument that aspect emerges prior to tense in child language. According
to some variations on the Principle and Parameters theme, this sequence is
required by the principle of economy. Our research with the predicate
tracking methodology indicates the following: 1) the precise pattern of
acquisition is determined by the properties of lexical aspect, i.e., the
logical structure of predicates, 2) the pattern varies cross-linguistically,
and 3) deictic tense is likely to be productive prior to viewpoint aspect. |
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May 24, 2017 Leda Berio, Anja Latrouite, Robert Van Valin,
Gottfried Vosgerau Heinrich
Heine University Dsseldorf Immediate and General Common Ground The traditional literalist account of meaning has been challenged by
several theories that stress the importance of context and of contextual
information in communication, especially for mechanisms of meaning
determination and reference fixing. However, the role of lexical meaning in
such contextualist accounts often remains only vaguely defined. In this paper,
we defend an account of communication that keeps the advantages of
contextualist theories, while a new element is introduced that we claim could
help solving some of the remaining issues. By differentiating Immediate and
General Common Ground in communica- tion, we draw a distinction between
mechanisms related to the situation at hand and those concerned with world
and language knowledge. We further argue that such a distinction can help
understanding cases of loose use and metaphors of which we provide some
examples. Finally, we claim that this distinction has grammatical reality, as
it is shown by the examples from Lakhota (North America), Umpithamu
(Australia), Kuuk Thaayorre (Australia) and Mongsen Ao (India) discussed in
the paper. |
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May 17, 2017 George
Tsoulas University
of York How to pluralise a
Mass noun: The ingredients The relation
between mass terms and plurals is well known and well supported empirically
in terms, for example, of determiners that are common to the two classes of
nominals to the exclusion of the singular. At the same time it comes in
general as a surprise that given the notion that mass terms as "somehow
plural" they never show up in the plural. From this point I look
at a set of languages which do pluralise mass nouns and attempt to derive the
possibility of plural mass terms. The objective is to build a syntactic
and semantic framework with as minimal assumptions as possible, within which
they can naturally occur. More specifically I look a the set of
required morphosyntactic features, their position in the nominal extended
projection and their associated semantics. Then we try to understand
where the points of variation lie and what sort of variation is
predicted. |
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May 3, 2017 Stefan Heim Uniklinik RWTH Aachen &
Forschungszentrum Jülich If so many are
"few", how few are "many"? The neurocognition of
quantifier processing |
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April 26, 2017 Kathrin Byrdeck & Kurt Erbach Heinrich Heine University Dsseldorf Object Mass Nouns in Japanese Classifier
languages are commonly assumed not to have a grammaticized
mass/countdistinction among nouns. In this talk we pursue two main goals.
First, based on data from Japanese and some insights in Sudo (2016,
forthcoming), and Inagaki & Barner (2009), we provide new empirical
evidence that Japanese nouns for concepts like BOOK, DOG, SHOE (encoded by
prototypical count nouns in languages with a grammaticized mass/count
distinctions) and collective artifacts like MAIL, FURNITURE have individuated
counting bases. We provide empirical evidence in support of the claim that
Japanese nouns like yūbinbutsu (`mail) have the hallmark properties of
object mass nouns: (i) they are compared according to cardinality in `more
than constructions (also Inagaki & Barner 2009), and (ii) they are
infelicitous in constructions associated with count nouns. To the extent that
the existence of object mass nouns can be established in the grammar of
Japanese, as we argue, it follows that Japanese has grammatical reflexes of
the mass/count distinction, rather than just exhibiting cognitive and
grammatical reflexes of individuation (atomicity) alone. Second, we offer a
new formal analysis of the Japanese mass/count distinction, building Sutton
& Filips (2016) context-sensitivity driven account of the mass/count
distinction, and specifically of object mass nouns. Our results bolster a
nascent growing body of studies strongly suggesting that Japanese (and other
classifier languages) in fact do have direct grammatical reflexes of the
mass/count distinction. |
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April 19, 2017 Emar Maier University of Groningen Eventive vs. Evidential Speech Reports In this
talk I argue for a distinction between eventive and evidential speech
reports. In eventive speech reports the at-issue contribution is the
introduction of a speech event with certain properties. Typical examples
include direct and free indirect speech. In evidential speech reports, by
contrast, the fact that something was said is not at issue, but serves to
provide evidence for the reported content. Typical examples include Quechua
and Bulgarian reportative evidentials, Dutch and German reportative modals
('schijnen', 'sollen'), and the German reportive subjunctive. Following up on
an observation by Von Stechow & Zimmermann (2005:fn.16), I argue that
English indirect discourse is ambiguous. In the current framework this means
it allows both an eventive reading, where a reported speech act is at issue,
and an evidential reading, where it is backgrounded. |
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January 11, 2017 Dolf Rami Georg-August Universitt Gttingen Names, Pronouns and Demonstratives as use-sensitive expressions Kaplan
famously distinguished between pure indexicals and true demonstratives.
Nevertheless, he thought that these two kinds of expressions are only two
subvarieties of the same
semantic kind, namely the kind of context-sensitive expressions. I will argue
that Kaplan underestimated the significance of his distinction and that it is
in fact a distinction in semantic kind. In my opinion, there are two
different sorts of expressions whose reference depends in different ways on the occasion of their use and
which should semantically berepresented in different ways. Firstly, there are context-sensitive
expressions. The reference of these expressions depends on certain objective
factors that constitute a context of use. These expressions have a Kaplanian
character that determines their referent relative to a context of use.
Examples of this kind are expressions like I, now and today. They all
share the following feature: It is impossible that two different uses of an
expression of these kind have different referents relative to the same context of use. Formally they can be
represented, as Kaplan did, by functions from contexts of use to
intensions. Secondly, there are
use-sensitive expressions. These expressions are neither sensitive to any
objective factors of a context of use nor can their linguistic meaning be
conceive of as a character. These expressions can have anaphoric or
referential uses. Some of them have bound and pragmatic anaphoric uses. The
reference of such an expression is determined relative to a referential or
pragmatic anaphoric use by accompanying referential intentions. Uses of use-sensitive expressions are
individuated by means of their accompanying referential intentions. Formally use-sensitive expressions
are represented as indexed
expressions that are semantically interpreted by means of an
index-sensitive assignment
function. Different indexes correspond to different referential
intentions. Co-referential use-sensitive expressions are semantically
interpreted by means of indexed-assignment-functions with the same output. In
this sense, the referent of a use-sensitive expression is determined by subject
factors that are independent of the parameters of a context of use. The
reference of use-sensitive expressions can additionally be constrained in
some cases by the use-conditional meaning of such an expression.
Use-conditional linguistic meanings can either be captured (a) as
restrictions on indexed-assignment-functions or (b) as restrictions on the
class of adequate possible uses of an expression. It is possible that any two
different uses of an expression of these kind have different referents
relative to the same or different contexts of use. Some use-sensitive
expressions also have bound uses and their corresponding assignment functions
can be shifted by the right sort of quantifiers. Bare demonstratives are
use-sensitives expressions without an additional use-conditional meaning and
they only have pragmatic anaphoric uses. Proper names are use-sensitives
expressions with an additional use-conditional meaning that restricts the
possible referents of a name to its bearer; but names only have pragmatic anaphoric
uses. Third person personal pronouns are use- sensitives expressions with an
additional use-conditional meaning that restricts the possible referents of them to male or female
individuals and they have both pragmatic and bound anaphoric uses. |
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December 14, 2016 Ruth Kempson King's College London Language as Mechanisms for Interaction: the challenge of modelling
dialogue My task is to
introduce and justify the formalism of Dynamic Syntax (DS), whose central claim
is that natural languages are mechanisms for interaction, defined by grammars
that articulate the online incremental process of growth of
interpretation/linearisation underpinning both production and parsing. The
talk will then argue that with this perspective, there is evidence that
language evolution could have been possible without having to presume rich
innateness, sudden-switch change, or prior availability of higher-order
inferential capacities such as mind-reading. My starting point is to illustrate
data from conversational dialogue which are a huge challenge for syntax and
semantics models, since sentence-based grammars are not at all well suited to
express the facts of dialogue
– and even for pragmatists, since dialogue dynamics provide evidence that successful
communication does not have to involve reading others minds or grasping some propositional understanding
to be shared. Rather, what is
essential is speaker/hearer interaction. Then I will give a sketch of Dynamic Syntax sufficient to show
how the dynamics of dialogue will
emerge as an automatic consequence of the framework as well as
expressing universal constraints
on the process of structural growth. Finally I shall show how the individual mechanisms that
underpin anaphora, ellipsis, discontinuity effects, and scope dependencies, can all be seen to be
vehicles for interaction, in
virtue of generalisations across these phenomena which can only be expressed in dynamic,
interactive terms. |
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December 7, 2016 Kurt Erbach Heinrich Heine University Dsseldorf Bare singular nouns in Hungarian and the mass/count distinction I argue for an analysis of Hungarian in which notional singular count
nouns are semantically number neutral, and thus felicitous, with measure constructions
and the WH-quantifier mennyi (what quantity of). This provides an alternative
analysis to Schvarcz (2016) and Schvarcz & Rothstein (2015) who analyze
the majority of Hungarian notional count nouns as dual life—i.e. mass
or count depending on the context. They assume knyv (book) is mass with mennyi &
measure constructions, but it is count in cardinality constructions. However,
certain Hungarian constructions indicate bare singular count nouns are
interpreted as number neutral. Furthermore, measure constructions sanction
the occurrence of mass and bare plural count nouns but disallow singular
count nouns (Krifka 1989, Landman 2016). Following Landman (2016) allows a
more straightforward analysis that shows the Hungarian nominal system is more
like other mass/count languages has been previously thought. |
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November 30, 2016 Todor Koev Heinrich Heine University Dsseldorf Adverbs of Change, Aspect, and Anaphoricity Adverbs of change, such
as quickly or slowly, have been known to give rise to a number of
interpretations. A sentence like Kazuko ran to the store quickly can describe
the intensity of the described action (a manner reading), the temporal extent
of the entire event (a duration reading), or the time between the culmination
of the event and some previous event (an anaphoric reading). It has also been
noticed that available interpretations are sensitive to thelexical aspect of
the verbal predicate; for example, The police quickly spotted the suspect is
only compatible with an anaphoric reading for quickly. Existing accounts of
adverbs of change (e.g. Cresswell 1978; Rawlins 2013) take manner readings as
primary and successfully extend these to duration readings, but struggle to derive
anaphoric readings. In contrast, I take anaphoric readings as primary and
argue that other readings are special cases of these. Adverbs of change are
claimed to modify the temporal distance between two instantaneous events that
are compositionally or anaphorically available. The proposed account, couched
in a dynamic semantic framework, does particularly well in predicting
anaphoric interpretations and demonstrates how adverbs of change interact
with lexical aspect to derive other available readings. It also correctly
predicts certain positional effects and can accommodate the idiosyncratic
behavior of adverbs like slowly, which appears to lack truly anaphoric
interpretations. |
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November 23, 2016 Maria Spychalska Ruhr University of
Bochum Scalar implicatures in context of
full and partial information: Evidence from ERPs A major part of the
psycholinguistic research on scalar implicatures has been focused on the
question of how scalar implicatures are generated: in a default and automatic
manner or as results of effortful reasoning processes. This so-called
default- vs. context-based controversy has been experimentally
operationalized in terms of processing costs of scalar implicatures: the
processing costs have been taken as a proxy of the implicatures default vs.
non-default character. Yet, it has eventually become evident that the data
hardly fit this dichotomy. Many studies on the processing of scalar
implicatures brought contrastive results: some experiments provided evidence
that the processing of the pragmatically enriched interpretation is costly
relative to the processing of the semantic meaning, other studies found no
additional cost for the processing of scalar implicatures. It was further shown by Degen &
Tannenahus (2015) that scalar implicatures may be differently processed
depending on contextual support: in contexts that support the pragmatic
interpretation, scalar implicatures will occur as default and automatic,
whereas when the contextual support is weaker, listeners will take longer to
arrive at the inference. This results were integrated within a probabilistic
model of linguistic processing, called constraint-based account and
predicting that interlocutors may use information from multiple sources
during sentence comprehension to create expectations about the future
development of the utterance. In
my talk I will present results from EEG studies on scalar implicatures
processing arguing in favor of the constraint-based model. Comparing results
from two studies: where the scalar implicature processing was tested in
context of full information and in context of partial information, I will
discuss how the contextual support may determine the cognitive costs of the
implicature processing. |
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November 16, 2016 Willy Geuder Heinrich Heine University Manner adverbs, agentive adverbs, and adverbs in
between
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November 9, 2016 Christian Wurm Heinrich Heine University The algebra of ambiguity We present an algebraic approximation to the semantic
content of linguistic ambiguity. Starting from the class of ordinary Boolean
algebras, we add to it an ambiguity operator and a small set of (rather
peculiar) axioms which we think are correct for linguistic ambiguity beyond
doubt. We then show some important, non-trivial results that follow from this
axiomatization, which turn out to be surprising and not fully satisfying from
a linguistic point of view. The results leave us with some open questions,
both on the linguistic algebraic side – like the nature of intention in
ambiguous statements, or the properties of disjunctive axioms in universal
algebra. |
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July 20, 2016 Barbara Tomaszewicz Universitt
zu Kln Focus association in sentence processing The focus structure of a sentence reflects the
discourse context, but in the presence of various operators, such as only,
even and most, it has an effect on the truth-conditions or the
presuppositions of the sentence. Stolterfoht et al. (2007) and Carlson (2013)
showed that only facilitates the processing of focus structures during silent
reading. When (1) is read without preceding context, the first conjunct
receives a wide focus interpretation (marked as FI), and when the processor
encounters the ellipsis remnant (F2), it must revise the focus structure of
the first conjunct from wide to matching narrow focus (F3). The presence of
only in (2) requires narrow focus on its associate (FI), which is congruous
with the ellipsis remnant. Revision of the focus structure in (1) vs. (2) was
associated with an ERP signature in the Stolterfoht et al. study on German,
and with increased reading times in Carlsons self-paced reading study on
English. 1) [Am Dienstag hat der Direktor [den Schler]F3
getadelt]F1, und nicht [den Lehrer]F2 On Tuesday has the principal.Nom the pupil.Acc
criticized and not the teacher.Acc 2) Am Dienstag hat der Direktor nur [den
Schler]F1 getadelt, und nicht [den Lehrer]F2 On Tuesday has the principal.Nom only the
pupil.Acc criticized and not the teacher.Acc Since only x ... and not y is frequent in
discourse, the presence of only could create an expectation for an explicit
mention of excluded alternatives, and this bias alone could account for the
facilitation in (2). In self-paced reading experiments on Polish we showed
that the processing of replacive ellipsis ( and not ... ) is facilitated
in the presence of the three associators: only, even, most, which indicates
that it is indeed the focus association mechanism that explains the
facilitation in (2) (Tomaszewicz and Pancheva (2016)). The use of Polish
allowed us for a direct comparison between only, even and most, because (i)
like in German replacive ellipsis is unambiguous due to Accusative case
marking, and therefore any differences in ellipsis resolution can be
attributed to the processing of focus structure alone; (ii) with most the
focus on sculptors yields a superlative reading that is unavailable in
English or German (in Pancheva and Tomaszewicz (2012) and Tomaszewicz (2015)
we argue that this reading arises via focus association). We found that in Polish only, even and most
create an expectation for narrow focus on the object, but the facilitatory
effects occur already on the conjunct and not with only and even, and on
the ellipsis remnant with most. This difference likely reflects the
difference between two types of focus association: obligatory and optional as
identified in the formal semantic research on focus. Obligatory focus
association is taken to be encoded in the lexical semantics of focus
sensitive expressions (only, even), whereas optional/free association is a
result of the contextual setting of the domain variable of an operator like
most (Beaver and Clark (2009)). While prenominai only and even have one
syntactic associate (3), most is free to associate either with the adverbial
or the subject in English (4a-b), or with the object in Polish (5). 3)a. John invited only/even [sculptors]F for
coffee. b. *John invited only/even sculptors [for coffee]F
4)a. John invited the most sculptors [for
coffee]F. Reading: John invited more sculptors for coffee
than for any other relevant occasion, b. [John]F invited the most sculptors for coffee.
Reading: John invited more sculptors for coffee than for any other relevant
individual did. 5) John zaprosił najwięcej
[rzeźbiarzy]F na kawę. John invited most sculptors for coffee Reading: John invited more sculptors for coffee
than any other group of people that he invited. During incremental processing prenominai only and
even create a precise expectation for the location of focus, but most allows
association with either the object or the adverbial in Polish, which is
compatible with our results. Currently, we are extending these findings to
meisten in German, which like English most does not allow association with
the object, to show that optional associators facilitate the processing of
focus structures that are compatible with the semantics resulting from focus
association (and that it is not the case that the mere presence of a
prenominai modifier increases the salience of the contrast in the replacive
ellipsis). |
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July 6,
2016 Noortje Venhuizen Universitt
des Saarlandes Projection in Discourse: A
data-driven formal semantic analysis In this talk,
I present a unified, data-driven formal semantic analysis of projection
phenomena, which include presuppositions, anaphoric expressions, and
conventional implicatures (as defined by Potts, 2005). The different
contributions made by these phenomena are explained in terms of the notion of
information status. Based on this analysis, I present a new semantic
formalism called Projective Discourse Representation Theory (PDRT). PDRT is
an extension of traditional Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp, 1981; Kamp
and Reyle, 1993), which directly implements the anaphoric theory of
presuppositions (van der Sandt, 1992) by means of the introduction of
projection variables. I show that PDRT captures the differences, as well as
the similarities between the contributions made by presuppositions, anaphora
and conventional implicatures. In order to illustrate PDRT's representational
power, I present a data-driven computational analysis of the information
status of referential expressions based on data from the Groningen Meaning
Bank; a corpus of semantically annotated texts (Basile et al., 2012).
Taken together, the results pave way for a more integrated formal and
empirical analysis of different aspects of linguistic meaning. |
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June 29, 2016 Markus Schrenk Heinrich-Heine-Universitt
Dsseldorf Causal Power and Modality as
Stumbling Stones for a Semantic Analysis of
Dispositional Predicates Attempts to give a semantic
analysis of dispositional predicates (like solubility",
inflammability, etc.) in terms of (counterfactual) conditionals (for
example: if x were put in water it would dissolve) saw a plethora of
counterexamples: void satisfaction, random coincidences, masks, finks,
antidotes, etc. Already on the (semantic/logical) surface the reasons for failure
are pretty obvious. Yet, there are also some deeper (metaphysical) reasons
– Causal Power and Modality – that can be unearthed. In this talk
I will go through all the above. |
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June 22, 2016 Higher School of
Economics, Department of Linguistics, Moscow A Typology of Falling Events Falling is a kind of quite
standard motion event with Source, Goal and a special manner of motion which
is usually reduced to the up-down (vertical) axis. The talk shows that
there are other semantic characteristics which build semantic
oppositions within the domain of falling and trigger its metaphorical
extensions. |
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June 15, 2016 Heinrich-Heine-Universitt
Dsseldorf The PoP approach to vector
semantics
The use
of vector space models, however, is problematic due to the high
dimensionality of these vectors and due to the fact that co-occurrence
patterns often follow what is known as heavy-tailed distribution (as
exemplified by the Zipfian distribution of words in documents). For instance,
while a few words frequently occur in text (thus co-occur with other words,
such as the function word the), many content words occur rarely.
Consequently, as the number of vectors/entities increases, the number of
co-occurring context elements (i.e., the dimensionality ofvectors) escalates.
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June 8, 2016 Suzi Lima Universidade Federal do Rio
de Janeiro Portions, individuation and measurement Container nouns (cup) are nouns that denote concrete
objects that can be used as receptacles for substances. It has been argued that
in constructions with numerals (as in two glasses of water), container
phrases can be interpreted in at least two different ways (Selkirk 1977,
Rothstein 2012, Partee and Borschev 2012). Firstly, a container noun can be
used to denote actual containers filled with some substance; e.g. glasses of
water can denote actual glasses filled with some quantity of water
(individuation). Secondly, a container noun can be used as the description of
a unit of measurement. Based on the results of a felicity judgment task
with children and adults with Brazilian Portuguese, English and Yudja, it
will be argued that individuation precedes measure. Second, unlike in
English, container phrases in Yudja can be interpreted as locatives or
trigger a concrete portion interpretation that is different from measure.
Similar results were found for Brazilian Portuguese when the question
included a prepositional phrase (Eu bebi dois copos com gua I drank two cups
with water) as opposed to pseudopartitive constructions (Eu bebi dois
copos de gua I drank two cups of water). |
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June 1, 2016 Jens Fleischhauer Heinrich-Heine-Universitt
Dsseldorf Animacy and
affectedness (in Germanic languages)
(1) a.
Das Mdchen schlug den Jungen. Lundquist & Ramchand (2012) argue
that inanimate entities are conceived as less affected by processes such as
hitting or kicking than animate entities are. de Swart (2014), on the other
hand, argues that the alternation marks a difference in sentience. As
sentience presupposes animacy, the animacy contrast is merely epiphenomenal.
Both analyses have shortcomings: de Swarts analysis does not rely on
affectedness and therefore cannot explain the contrast between (1b) and (2).
Lundquist & Ramchands analysis is couched in the generative framework
and they define affectedness as a binary feature. Their analysis does not
give a principal explanation of why it is only a subset of contact verbs that
gives rise to the alternation illustrated in (1). An explanation of them
phenomenon requires two things: First, a graded concept of
affectedness, like the one proposed by Beavers (2011). Beavers notion of
affectedness provides an explanation of why contact verbs show an alternation
dependent on affectedness. According to him, these verbs entail potential
results and the alternation can be seen as a resolution of this potentiality.
If the referent of the second argument is animate, it is conceived as
affected. If it is inanimate, it is taken to be non-affected. Second, an
explication of the relationship between affectedness and animacy is needed.
Lundquist & Ramchand argue that inanimate entities are only affected, if
they are physically damaged. Beside physical affectedness, animate beings can
also be emotionally/psychologically affected. This allows combining the basis
insights of Lundquist & Ramchands analysis with the one of de Swarts. The aim of the talk is to present a
unified analysis of the phenomenon, which combines a gradual notion of
affectedness with the notion of
sentience. It will be shown that
such an approach allows explaining why the alternation arises with this
particular set of verbs. Furthermore, the analysis will shed light on the
relationship between affectedness and animacy. |
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May 25, 2016 Karoly Varasdi & Zsofia Gyarmathy Heinrich-Heine-Universitt Dsseldorf A model of evidence and an evidence-based analysis of progressive
achievements In our
talk, we are going to outline a lattice-theoretic model of evidence and an
evidence-based approach to progressive achievements. Our starting point is
that an agent is justified in asserting a progressive sentence if the agent
has enough evidence supporting the base sentence in that specific scenario.
In our framework, evidence for a proposition is that which justifies the speaker
in asserting the proposition. We will argue that the set of all potential
pieces of evidence ordered by containment form a lattice, and is connected
with the lattice of propositions in a specific way based on the notion of
(partial) justification. We will show how this evidence-based framework can
be used to predict felicitous progressive uses of achievements, such as
"Mary is arriving at the station" and still exclude unacceptable
progressive achievements like "*Mary is noticing the picture". To
this end, we exploit the fact that sentence entailment and evidence
containment go in opposite directions in our framework and that achievements
that can appear in the progressive are those that describe the right
boundaries of extended events. |
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May 4, 2016 Zsofia Gyarmathy Heinrich-Heine-Universitt Dsseldorf Achievements and presuppositions This
session will include i) a presentation of a theoretical idea about the
activity presupposition of a subclass of
Vendler's achievements (called culminations by Bach 1986), ii)
outlining some ideas for three experiments to test the theoretical
assumptions, and iii) an open discussion where I would be happy to hear
comments and feedback especially about the experimental design. The
basic theoretical idea I propose is that culminations like win or arrive have
an existential presupposition that is of a hitherto not recognized kind that
I call an extra soft presupposition, which is cancellable even when the trigger
is not embedded under any operators, but is more similar to presuppositions
than implicatures in other respects. |
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April 27, 2016 Daniel Lassiter Stanford
University Time: 16:30-18:00 Location: Building
24.91. Room 01.22 Must, might, knows, and the rest
of the epistemic system Linguists and philosophers have long been torn between the intuition
that must is
'weak' – expressing reduced commitment vis-a-vis the unqualified
expression – and the intuition that it expresses some fairly strong epistemic
relation, such as knowledge. Recently von Fintel & Gillies (2010) have
argued that the latter hunch is correct – must picks out a strong epistemic
necessity modal la modal logic S5 – and that the intuition of
weakness can be explained by reference to a little-noticed evidential meaning
component of must. Using corpus and experimental data I'll show that must does
not express knowledge, certainty, or anything of this form: speakers
routinely use must to mark out a proposition p when they are explicitly
uncertain about the truth of p, say that they do not know p, and
consider not-p a
possibility. The experimental results also illuminate the relationship
between might and
epistemic possible,
which are (contrary to the usual assumption) not synonymous. I'll discuss the
implications of these results for a variety of epistemic items, arguing that
they problematize Kratzer's (1991) influential proposal as well and favor a
theory where epistemic modals are given a semantics built around the
probabilistic support of a proposition. |
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April 21, 2016 Todor Koev Heinrich-Heine-Universitt Dsseldorf Countability and the Diminutive in Bulgarian This technical report briefly explores the count/mass distinction in Bulgarian.
It pays particular attention to diminutive modification and its ability to
achieve a mass-to-count shift when applied nouns that describe granular
aggregates. |
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April 14, 2016 Michael
Daniel National Research University, Moscow Higher
School of Economics Centre
for Fundamental Studies / Laboratory of the Caucasian Languages Mass and Class: Number, nominal classes and mass nouns in East Caucasian In many
ways, East Caucasian languages manifest a complex interaction between the categories
of grammatical number and gender as nominal classification. One obvious
example of such interaction is that the inventory of nominal classes in the
singular (usually three to five classes) is reduced to only two classes in
the plural – human vs. non-human. Not less important, though probably
somewhat less salient, is the treatment of mass nouns as P(luralia) T(antum).
Thus, in Dargwa languages, mass nouns show non-human plural agreement. That
mass nouns are PT is, of course, by no means typologically unexpected. What
is peculiar is that the mass nouns show this agreement though being
morphologically singular, while, at least for some of them, morphologically
plural forms are also available. Similar but more complex is the situation in
Archi, an outlier of the Lezgic branch of the family. In Archi, mass nouns
are usually described as fourth class (singular). Incidentally, agreement
pattern for this class is identical to non-human plural. Many of these nouns
show plural inflectional morphology. This morphology is however not
consistent and is coupled with singular agreement on the attributes. I
suggest that mismatches between morphology and agreement are explained by a
more general morphosyntactic property of East Caucasian languages that do not
ascribe agreement pattern to a lexical item as a whole but do this separately
to its singular and plural forms, and that the ascription is governed not
only by lexicon but is partly driven by semantics of the respective
morphologically singular and plural forms. |
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February 10, 2016 Simon Dobnik University of
Gothenburg Interfacing Language, Spatial Perception and Cognition in Type Theory
with Records |
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January 27, 2016 Fabienne Martin The imperfective in subjunctive conditionals: fake or real aspect? This
talk aims to provide a 'real aspect' approach of the 'fake' imperfective in
subjunctive conditionals (SCs) and a new account of the (non)-cancellability
of the counterfactual inference in SCs, largely based on Ippolitos 2013. It
is argued that PAST and PRES above MODAL in conditionals compete the same way
as in non-modal stative sentences, see Altshuler and Schwarzschild 2012. On
this view, the counterfactual inference of SCs, when cancellable, is nothing
else than the cessation implicature routinely triggered by past stative
sentences. |
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January 20, 2016 Fred Landman Tel Aviv University and University of
Tbingen Aspects of Event Semantics for Aspect |
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January 13, 2016 Todor Koev Parentheticality and Discourse
(i)
the backgrounded status and projection/scopal properties of implications
triggered by slifting parentheticals, (ii)
the often weakened assertion strength of the main clause, (iii)
the requirement that slifting parentheticals create an upward-entailing
environment (cf. #*The dean, Susan doubts, flirted with the secretary*). I will
argue against the idea that the main clause is interpreted in the scope of
the slifting predicate. Rather, I suggest that the strength of the main
clause depends in a quasi-pragmatic way on the slifting parenthetical, as the
latter can lower the assertability threshold for the main clause. I will also
try to derive the informational properties and the polarity restrictions on
slifting parentheticals from their role as providing grounds for the main
claim of the sentence. |
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December 9, 2015 Paul Gaus Result States in the Perfect Time Span - Combination of two Theories of
the Perfect The Perfect Time Span approach (PTS) is an
approach which tries to capture perfect meanings by locating the
Reichenbachian Event Time (E) within a time span. I found that in German
certain accomplishment constructions cannot be captured by this approach. In
this thesis I will show a solution to this problem by combining the PTS
approach with the so called Result State approach. My modi |
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December 3, 2015 Todor Koev Heinrich Heine University Appositive Projection and Its Exceptions This paper has two major goals. The first is to offer a comprehensive
account of the projection properties of appositive constructions. Appositives
posit a challenge to traditional assumptions about form and meaning because
they are interpreted in situ with respect to order-dependent phenomena like
discourse anaphora but nevertheless escape the scope of entailment-canceling
operators like negation or modals. Accounting for this pattern requires an
innovative way of looking at propositional operators and how they interact
with appositives. The second goal of the paper is to address various claimed
exceptions to the otherwise robust projectivity of appositives. I argue that
in some cases the construction under consideration is most likely not an
appositive at all. In other cases, the observed non-speaker-oriented readings
can be derived by pragmatic reasoning or are due to a perspective shift.
Although genuine instances of semantically embedded appositives do seem to
exist, I point out that such data have a limited empirical scope. I conclude
that appositive projection is a pervasive phenomenon and is part and parcel
of the semantics of appositives. |
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November 25, 2015 Peter Sutton
and Hana Filip Heinrich Heine University Dsseldorf Mass/Count Variation:
A Mereological 2d Supervaluationist Semantics We propose a
novel analysis of the mass/count distinction, within a new framework:
2-dimensional mereological supervaluationism. While the notions akin to
VAGUENESS [1], SEMANTIC ATOMICITY [4] and OVERLAP [3] are needed to ground
this distinction, no single notion is sufficient to fit the whole range of
data, especially intra- and crosslinguistic variation in mass [-C] vs. count
[+C] encoding. We make this variation tractable by treating it as following
from the interaction of all three of the above notions. We formally derive
four semantic classes of nouns (which closely match those in [2]) to explain
these form-denotation mappings and overcome challenges faced by [1; 3; 4]. References [1] Chierchia, G., 2010. Mass nouns, vagueness & semantic
variation. Synth. 174, 99-149. [2] Grimm, S., 2012. Number & Individuation. PhD Diss., Stanford
University. [3] Landman,
F., 2011. Count nouns, Mass nouns, Neat nouns, Mess nouns. In: The Baltic
International Yearbook of Cognition: Vol. 6. pp. 1-67. [4] Rothstein, S., 2010. Counting & the mass/count distinction.
JoS 27 (3), 343-397. |
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November 19, 2015 Susan Rothstein Bar Ilan University
(Israel) & Tbingen University Object mass nouns from
a crosslinguistic perspective Rothstein 2010,
Schwarzschild 2011 show that nouns like furniture denote sets of individuable
entities. Barner and Snedeker (2005) show further that comparisons such as
who has more furniture? typically are answered by comparing cardinalities. On
this basis they suggest that object mass nouns have essentially the same
denotations as count nouns. In the first part of the talk, I will show that
the conclusions drawn by Barner and Snedeker (2005) are too strong: while
comparisons of object mass nouns may involve comparing cardinalities, they
need not do so. There is thus a basic contrast between object mass nouns and
count nouns: count nouns require comparison by cardinality while object mass
nouns allow it, but also allow comparisons along other, continuous
dimensions. I will support this with data from English, Brazilian Portuguese,
Hungarian and Mandarin. This means that object mass nouns and count nouns
must have different semantic interpretations, contra e.g. Bale and Barner (2009).
But whatever semantics we give for object mass and count nouns, we need to
answer the obvious question: If object mass nouns are not countable, how can
they be compared in terms of cardinality? In the second part of the talk, I
offer a solution to this problem, proposing that there are cardinality
scales, which allow us to evaluate and compare quantities in terms of their
perceived or estimated number of atomic parts without actually counting the
atoms. This allows us to clarify the distinction between counting and
measuring, and to maintain the general principle that only count nouns have
countable denotations. |
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November
11, 2015 Henk
Zeevat Heinrich
Heine University Presupposition
Blocking by Causal Inference The talk develops an account
of causal inferences in update semantics. A typical case would be the
inference of a causal relation in: When John pushed the
button, the bomb exploded. While cause inferences
have many applications, the talk applies it to presupposition projection. It
shows that the effects of Karttunen's satisfaction theory are better captured
by causal inferences than by the logical satisfaction relation employed by
Karttunen. E.g. blocking is not predicted by satisfaction in: If Marie is French,
she has stopped eating snails. It is after all just
false that every French person eats snails. But there is a plausible causal
inference that being French can lead to eating snails. In: If John has
grandchildren, his children are happy. most people infer that
John has children, contra the satisfaction theory. And of course, children
are the cause of grandchildren and not inversely.The talk also adds a new
class of presupposition blocking that is unreducible to the satisfaction
theory, based on identity inferences. |
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November
4, 2015 Rainer Osswald Heinrich
Heine University Quantification in
Frame Semantics with Hybrid Logic |