Spring 2015

Coordinators: Steven Foley and Pranav Anand

June 8

Greg Scontras

June 5

Veronika Richtarcikova

May 8

Kristen Greer: "On the proper treatment of quantifier context dependence"

Quantifiers appearing in the DP (e.g., every, each, many, few, some, and their kin) are widely acknowledged to have meanings that are at least partially determined by the context in which they are uttered. Three phenomena in particular have been cited and treated as cases of quantifier context dependence: (a) the domain restriction, (b) the ambiguity of certain quantifiers between proportional, reverse, focus-affected, and cardinal interpretations, and (c) "expectation" readings. These are roughly illustrated in (1)-(3), respectively.

1) Every student failed the assignment.

≠ Every student in the universe failed the assignment.

= Every student in the class failed the assignment.

2) Many boys came to the party.

a. = Many of the boys came to the party. (Proportional)

b. = Many of the people who came to the party were boys. (Reverse)

3) a. Many lawyers attended the meeting this year.

b. Many doctors attended the meeting this year.

(Where [[3a]] ≠ [[3b] even if [[doctors]]=[[lawyers]], presumably because an expectation is exceeded in one case but not the other)

Existing analyses handle these cases with distinct formal mechanisms, which I characterize, respectively, as (a) the resolution of extensional vagueness, (b) the resolution of extensional ambiguity, or (c) the resolution of intensional vagueness.

I develop a unified approach to quantifier context dependence, showing that the phenomena illustrated in (1)-(3) can all be handled as cases of extensional vagueness, wherein context (construed as a set of sets) assigns content to variables in semantic structure. I argue that there are two such variables, one representing the domain of the quantifier and another the restriction of this domain to a relevant subset of the universe. I then develop a theory of the Logical Form of DP quantifiers that incorporates these two variables, emphasizing how this theory is both fully general and extensional. This pragmatically transparent structure also suggests that DP quantifiers are (a) fundamentally partitive and (b) lexically heterogeneous, dividing into quantifying determiners and quantifying adjectives. Finally, I consider how the analysis provides new solutions to familiar problems from the literature, notably issues of quantifier scope.

April 24

Katie Sardinha: "Strong and Stronger Modality in Turkmen"

Recent work on modal systems in typologically diverse languages has uncovered a variety of linguistic devices for communicating distinctions in modal force. While some languages such as English (Kratzer 2012) and Paciran Javanese (Vander Klok 2013) have modals with fixed force, other languages such as St’át’imcets (Rullman et al. 2008) and Gitksan (Peterson 2010) possess modals with force that varies contextually. Another significant finding in this area is that some languages derive weak necessity from strong necessity (von Fintel and Iatridou 2008). The aim of this talk is to add to this discussion by describing a previously unreported pattern of modal strengthening among necessity modals in Turkmen (Turkic). Turkmen has a single necessity modal -maly/-meli which is used to indicate the "best" alternative in context; I account for its semantics within a possible worlds framework (Kratzer 2012), incorporating the assumption that modal weakening occurs when propositions are added to the ordering source (Peterson 2010). Significantly, this 'strong' modal becomes even 'stronger' compositionally when the suffix -aaj/-ääj is added to derive -aajmaly/-ääjmeli, resulting in maximally strong necessity. Independent of its use in modal strengthening with -maly/-meli, I show that -aaj/-ääj is used to express a speaker’s commitment to a proposition based on there being objective, that is speaker-external, grounds for its being true. I then show that both the strengthening and objective-stance meanings of -aaj/-ääj can be captured in a unified analysis of -aaj/-ääj as a conventional implicature-bearing element (Potts 2005). A consequence of this analysis is that whenever -aaj/-ääj coocurs with -maly/-meli, certain speaker-relative (i.e. subjective) ordering sources are prevented from restricting the modal domain, resulting in a maximally strong modal interpretation. This pattern in Turkmen highlights a deep connection between modal strengthening, domain-widening, and objective stance which may hold quite generally in natural language.

April 3

Adrian Brasoveanu (joint work with Jakub Dotlačil): "Incremental and Predictive Interpretation: Experimental Evidence and Possible Accounts"

The main question we will address in this talk is whether meaning representations of the kind that are pervasive in formal semantics are built up incrementally and predictively when language is used in real time, in much the same way that the real-time construction of syntactic representations has been argued to be (Steedman 2001, Lewis and Vasishth 2005, Lau 2009, Hale 2011 among many others). The interaction of presupposition resolution with conjunctions vs. conditionals with a sentence-final antecedent promises to provide us with the right kind of evidence. Consider the contrast between the 'cataphoric' examples in (1) and (2) below:

(1) Tina will have coffee with Alex again AND she had coffee with him at the local café.

(2) Tina will have coffee with Alex again IF she had coffee with him at the local café.

We expect (1) to be less acceptable / more difficult than (2) right after the presupposition trigger "again" is interpreted: the conjunction "and" signals that an antecedent that could resolve the "again" presupposition is unlikely to come after this point (the second conjunct is interpreted relative to the context provided by the first conjunct), while the conditional "if" leaves open the possibility that a suitable resolution for the "again" presupposition is forthcoming (the first clause is interpreted relative to the context provided by the second clause). Crucially, the different expectations triggered by the interaction of the presupposition trigger "again" and the operators "and" vs. "if" are semantically driven: there is nothing about the syntax of conjunction vs. "if"-adjunction that could make the presence of a suitable presupposition resolution more or less likely.

Full abstract available here.

Winter 2015

Coordinators: Nick Kalivoda, Amy Rose Deal, and Adrian Brasoveanu

February 27

Three talks by the students of Experimental Methods (Fall 2014) on the results of their studies on island phenomena.

February 20

Melissa Fusco: "Deontic Disjunction"

Abstract: I propose a unified semantic solution to two puzzles: Ross's puzzle (the apparent failure of Ought φ to entail Ought (φ or ψ)) and free choice permission (the apparent fact that May(φ or ψ) entails both May φ and May ψ). I begin with a pair of cases from the decision theory literature illustrating the phenomenon of act dependence, where what an agent ought to do depends on what she does. The notion of permissibility distilled from these cases forms the basis for my analysis of May and Ought. This framework is then combined with a generalization of the classical semantics for disjunction—equivalent to Boolean disjunction on the diagonal, but with a different two-dimensional character—that explains the puzzling facts in terms of semantic consequence.

February 13

Nick Kalivoda: "The Derivation of Anti-Agreement and Agreement Weakening: Evidence from Zapotec"

Fall 2014

Coordinators: Nick Kalivoda, Amy Rose Deal, and Adrian Brasoveanu

December 5

Annemarie van Dooren: Dutch modals and their predicates: Three puzzles for compositionality

November 14

Sandy Chung & Matt Wagers: "Chamorro and the universality of incremental structure-building operations"

Does the placement of relative clauses with respect to noun they modify affect the way they are interpreted? This question has played an important role in debates over whether aspects of incremental structure building are universal. On the one hand is a sizeable body of evidence that the language processor preferentially inserts subject gaps (== syntactically higher gaps) in open A-bar dependencies to complete them. On the other hand is a small and somewhat contentious body of evidence from languages with prenominal relative clauses, in which object gap insertion is claimed to be the favored option.

In this talk, we examine data from Chamorro, which is among the smaller set of languages that productively allow both prenominal and postnominal relative clauses (as well as other types). Moreover these relative clauses can be entirely ambiguous between subject and object relativization without changes in RC-internal word order. This makes Chamorro an ideal language in which to answer the question of how relative clause order alone affects real-time interpretation.

Based on a picture-matching design, combined with a touch-tracking task, we find that prenominal relative clauses are indeed more object-gap-friendly environments. However, based on the dynamics of participants' responses, we find evidence that insertion of the subject gap happens earlier in incremental structure building than the insertion of object gaps. Object gaps only occasionally out-compete an initial analysis and this, we argue, is a consequence the near-simultaneous pressure to satisfy the subject-verb agreement relation.

Finally, we examine the interaction of subject gap insertion with Chamorro's person-animacy hierarchy - a language-particular morphological filter on the combination of certain transitive arguments based on their person, animacy and pronominality. Here we find further evidence for a universal incremental structure-building operation. Person-animacy effects strongly influence participants' ultimate interpretation, but strong competition ensues if the person-animacy hierarchy requires reanalysis of an initial subject gap insertion.

November 7

Steven Foley: "Split Ergativity in Georgian is not Structural"

Recent research derives aspect-conditioned split ergativity structurally (Laka 2006, Coon 2010, Coon & Preminger 2012). According to this view, split ergative languages are actually uniformly ergative: "splits" are epiphenomena of clausal partitions which create two case-assignment domains. Such clausal partitions lead to the illusion of non-ergativity, since the external argument is in an effectively intransitive domain. While this structural account may work for certain languages, it cannot explain the Georgian facts. Building on syntactic and morphological evidence, I propose that Voice⁰ in certain languages assigns either ergative or accusative case, depending on aspect (see Ura 2006). Georgian, then, is a truly split ergative language.

October 24

Line Mikkelsen: "What goes postverbal in a verb-final language? The interplay of syntactic category, information structure, and word order in Karuk"

October 10

Jorge Hankamer: "A Pseudogapping Puzzle"