nyu15

The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

Philippe Schlenker

(LINGUAE, Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS; New York University)

September-October 2015 - NYU

Instructor: Philippe Schlenker

Directeur de Recherche, Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris

Global Distinguished Professor, New York University

E-mail: philippe.schlenker@gmail.com

Topic

This seminar will survey recent developments at the semantics/pragmatics interface. In the last 10 years, vibrant debates about presuppositions, scalar implicatures and supplements have led to a renewed understanding of the division of labor between semantics (literal meaning) and pragmatics (inferences drawn by reasoning on the speaker's motivations). Thus presuppositions, which were taken in the 1970's to be a pragmatic phenomenon, were argued in the 1980's to rightly belong to compositional semantics; but recent research has offered various alternatives to this conclusion, based in part on pragmatic mechanisms. The opposite movement took place in implicature theory: the neo-Gricean approach of the 1970's and 1980's took scalar implicatures to be primarily a pragmatic phenomenon, but recent debates on 'embedded implicatures' have located their source in the semantics or even in the syntax. Similar debates exist about supplements (= the contribution of appositive relative clauses). We will survey some of these topics, with special attention to new empirical issues that might bear on them (e.g. the analysis of co-speech gestures, analyzed as non-standard presuppositions ['cosuppositions'] or as supplements).

Background reading for the course:

Schlenker, Philippe: to appear, The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface. To appear in the Cambridge Handbook of Formal Semantics, eds. Aloni and Dekker.

Preprint available on LingBuzz.

Requirements

Besides active class participation:

(i) regular problem sets;

(ii) 1 class presentation;

(iii) 1 mini-term paper (to be emailed 10 days after the end of the seminar).

Schedule

8 weeks in September-October 2014 - see below for sessions and readings. Note that due to peculiarities of this term's calendar the main sessions will be on Wednesdays, at least towards the beginning of the term.

–General sessions (2 hours 45 per week) are open to everyone

–Student sessions (1 hour 45 per week) are open to all students and postdocs (whether registered or not for the course).

Reserved times

Mon 3.30 PM - 6.15 PM at 10WP 103

Wed 11.00 AM - 1.45 PM at 10WP 103

[the total is one hour more than the official duration of the seminar; we will use only 2 hours for the 'student session', to be held on Mondays towards the beginning of the term]

Sessions and Readings (still tentative; to be adapted as we go)

Note: the slides and the readings which are not found below are made available via this Dropbox folder [send e-mail to the instructor if you want the folder to be shared with you, rather than accessing it with a link]

Announcements: 1. If you wish to be informed of possible changes by email, please register here. 2. There will be a makeup student session on Friday, September 25 at 2pm (see below).

The main readings are in bold.

Additional Links [many links got broken after NYU retired Files 2.0; I am working on restoring them, but don't hesitate to send me email if you can't access a paper from the following list]

Basic Readings on Presuppositions

• Origins of the Dynamic Approach

Heim, I.: 1983, On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions. In D. Flickinger et al. (eds), Proceedings of the Second West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 114-125. Reprinted in Davis, S. (ed): 1991, Pragmatics: A Reader, Oxford University Press [pdf]

Stalnaker, R.: 1974, Pragmatic Presuppositions. In Munitz, M. and Unger, P. (eds.) Semantics and Philosophy. New York: New York University Press. Reprinted in Davis, S. (ed): 1991, Pragmatics: A Reader, Oxford University Press. [pdf]

Karttunen, L.: 1974, Presupposition and Linguistic Context. Theoretical Linguistics 1: 181-194. Reprinted in Davis (ed): 1991, Pragmatics: A Reader, Oxford University Press. [pdf]

• Presuppositions

Geurts, B.: 1999, Presupposition and Pronouns. Elsevier. Some chapters are available here:

Chapter one: Presupposition

Chapter two: The binding theory

Chapter four: Dynamic semantics

Chapter six: Modals

Kadmon, N.: 2001, Formal Pragmatics. Blackwell.

Heim, I.: 1990, Presupposition Projection. In R. van der Sandt (ed.) "Presupposition, Lexical Meaning and Discourse Processes: Workshop Reader," University of Nijmegen, 1990. Available here through Semantics Archive.

Additional Readings on Presuppositions

Overview of some recent approaches, including trivalence

Schlenker, Philippe: 2009, Presupposition Projection: the New Debate, SALT

Be Articulate and Local Contexts

Schlenker, P.: 2008, "Be Articulate: A Pragmatic Theory of Presupposition Projection". Theoretical Linguistics 34:3, 157-212 [pdf]

Schlenker, P.: 2009, "Local Contexts". Semantics and Pragmatics 2, 3: 1–78, 2009 [pdf]

Schlenker, P.: 2010, "Presuppositions and Local Contexts". Mind 2010 [pdf] (short and relatively non-technical)

Schlenker, Philippe: 2011, “Presupposition Projection: Two Theories of Local Contexts – Part I”. Language and Linguistics Compass 5, 12: 848–857, DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2011.00299.x

Schlenker, Philippe: 2011, “Presupposition Projection: Two Theories of Local Contexts – Part II”. Language and Linguistics Compass 5, 12: 858–879 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2011.00300.x

On 'local redundancy' and the reconstruction of local contexts:

Mayr and Romoli 2015: A puzzle for theories of redundancy: exhaustification, incrementality, and the notion of local context

Trivalence

Fox, Danny (2008) Two short notes on Schlenker’s theory of presupposition projection. Theoretical Linguistics 34, 3: 237-252 [pdf]

George, B. R. (2008) 'Presupposition Repairs: a Static, Trivalent Approach to Predicting Projection’, M.A. thesis, UCLA. [pdf]

George, B. R. (2008) ‘Predicting Presupposition Projection: some alternatives in the strong Kleene tradition’, manuscript, UCLA. [pdf]

Peters, S.: 1979, A Truth-Conditional Formulation of Karttunen's Account of Presupposition. Synthese 40, 2: 301-316 [pdf]

Continuations and presuppositions

Barker, Chris: 2010, Notes on presupposition and order of composition.

Probability and the Proviso Problem

Lassiter, Dan: 2012, Presuppositions, provisos, and probability. S&P

The DRT Alternative to Dynamic Semantics

Stanford Encyclopedia Article on Presupposition (Beaver and Geurts)

Stanford Encylopedia Article on DRT (Beaver and Geurts)

Geurts's Paris Lectures on the Presuppositions

I. Presuppositions

II. DRT

III. Focus

Geurts, B.: 1999, Presupposition and Pronouns. Elsevier. Some chapters are available here:

Chapter one: Presupposition

Chapter two: The binding theory

Chapter four: Dynamic semantics

Chapter six: Modals

van der Sandt, R.: 1992, Presupposition Projection as Anaphora Resolution. Journal of Semantics: 9: 333-377 [pdf]

Further recent theories

• Presuppositions vs. Implicatures

(i) Chemla's Similarity theory

Chemla, Emmanuel: Similarity: towards a unified account of scalar implicatures, free choice permission and presupposition projection

(ii) Romoli's theory

Published version

(iii) Abusch's theory

Abusch, Dorit: Presupposition Triggering from Alternatives.

(iv) Psycholinguistic work

Acquisition

See below: Chemla 2009, Chemla and Bott

• Sudo's bidimensional anaphoric theory

Sudo, Yasutada: 2014, Presupposition Projection in Quantified Sentences and Cross-Dimensional Anaphora

• DRT with Local Contexts

Schlenker, Philippe: 2011, DRT with Local Contexts. NALS. [LingBuzz] [Published]

• 'Projective Meanings'

"Toward a taxonomy of projective content", Judith Tonhauser, David Beaver, Craige Roberts and Mandy Simons, Language 89(1): 66-109. [doi], Preprint (PDF).

Experimental Approaches

A recent survey:

Schwarz, Florian: Experimental Work in Presupposition and Presupposition Projection

Chemla, Emmanuel (2009). "Presuppositions of quantified sentences: experimental data". Natural Language Semantics 17(4), pp 299-340, doi:10.1007/s11050-009-9043-9 [pdf]

Chemla, Emmanuel and Lewis Bott (in press). "Processing presuppositions: dynamic semantics vs pragmatic enrichment". Language and Cognitive Processes. [pdf]

Chemla, Emmanuel and Schlenker, Philippe (2012). "Incremental vs. Symmetric Accounts of Presupposition Projection: An Experimental Approach". Natural Language Semantics 20(2), pp 177-226, doi:10.1007/s11050-012-9080-7. [pdf]

Kennedy, Schwarz, Crain, Folli, and Romoli: Scalar Implicatures vs. Presuppositions: the view from Broca’s Aphasia [NELS abstract] [paper]

Florian Schwarz and Sonja Tiemann Presupposition Projection in Online Processing

Further topics

• Maximize Presupposition

Singh, Raj (2010) "Maximize Presupposition! and Local Contexts" [pdf] Accepted with minor revisions in Natural Language Semantics.

Percus, Orin (2006) "Antipresuppositions". [pdf] In A. Ueyama(ed.), Theoretical and Empirical Studies of Reference and Anaphora: Toward the establishment of generative grammar as an empirical science, Report of the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), Project No. 15320052, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 52-73

• Triggering Problem

Abrusan, Marta (2010) "Triggering Verbal Presuppositions" [pdf] Manuscript, Oxford.

Abusch, Dorit: Presupposition Triggering from Alternatives.

• Formal Properties of the Transparency Theory

Schlenker, P.: 2007, Anti-Dynamics: Presupposition Projection Without Dynamic Semantics. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 16, 3: 325-256 (32 pages)

• Other papers in the trivalent tradition

Beaver, D. and Krahmer, E.: 2001, A Partial Account of Presupposition Projection. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 10, 2. Available here.

• Accommodation

Beaver, D. and Zeevat, H.: to appear, Accommodation. In Ramchand, G. and C. Reiss (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces, Oxford University Press.

A new handbook paper by R. Singh on presupposition projection and presupposition accommodation.

• More on the Proviso Problem

Schlenker, P.: 2011, The Proviso Problem: a Note, NALS

• General Survey

Beaver, D.: 1997: Presupposition. In J. van Benthem and A. ter Meulen (eds.), The Handbook of Logic and Language, Elsevier, pp. 939-1008.