NYI13

New Frontiers of Formal Semantics:

Two Puzzles

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

NYI 2013 - St Petersburg

1. Grammar vs. Iconicity in Sign Language

Slides

Update: A related talk given at the International Congress of Linguists in Geneva in July 2013 is now available online.

2 lectures (July 30-August 1, 2013)

Sign languages (here: ASL and LSF) make visible several key components of Universal Grammar as we know it from studies of spoken languages. At the same time, some of these components *also* display a strong iconic behavior in sign languages, one which isn't usually observable in spoken language. How should these two observations be reconciled, and what do they tell us about Universal Grammar?

Session 1: Pronouns as variables and pronouns as pictures

Sign language pronouns are typically realized by pointing towards a position in signing space (or 'locus') that stands for a discourse referent. In some ways, sign language pronouns display the same formal properties as spoken language pronouns, for instance in obeying abstract binding-theoretic conditions (e.g. Condition B, Strong Crossover, etc.); they are thus 'variables' in the syntactic and semantic sense. But loci can *also* be shown to be in some cases simplified pictures of what they denote. How can they be both variables and pictures?

Optional reading:

Main paper:

Schlenker, Philippe, Lamberton, Jonathan and Santoro, Mirko: to appear, Iconic Variables. To appear in Linguistics & Philosophy.

Companion paper:

Schlenker, Philippe: 2013, Iconic Features. Manuscript, Institut Jean-Nicod and New York University.

Session 2: Context Shift or Quotation?

'Role Shift' is an operation in sign language by which the signer overtly adopts the perspective of another character. Role Shift has been argued by several researchers to be a visible instance of 'context shift', an operation in which some attitude operators can shift the context of evaluation of indexicals in indirect discourse. At the same time, Role Shift displays strongly quotational properties, ones reminiscent of direct rather than indirect discourse. The plot only thickens when one observes that, unlike cases of context shift that have been observed in spoken language, Role Shift is sometimes used to describe an action rather than a propositional attitude. So what is Role Shift, and what can it teach us about context shift?

Background reading (not on sign language)

Long:

Schlenker, Philippe: 2011, Indexicality and De Se Reports. In Semantics, edited by von Heusinger, Maienborn and Portner, Volume 2, Mouton de Gruyter.

Short:

Schlenker, Philippe: accepted for publication, Indexicals. Accepted for publication in the Handbook of Formal Philosophy, edited by Sven Ove Hansson and Vincent F. Hendricks, Springer.

2. Primate Semantics

Slides

2 lectures (August 1-2, 2013)

Session 1: Thursday - General Lecture - non-technical aspects

Sessions 2 and 3: Friday Technical aspects + perspectives on ongoing research

General description:

Non-human primates have rich systems of alarm calls. Some of these calls (in Campbell's monkeys) have a root-suffix structure and are subject to dialectal variation. But what do these calls really mean? On the basis of some detailed case studies, we will develop the beginning of a 'primate semantics' for them, and sketch some directions for future research.

Optional Reading:

Philippe Schlenker, Emmanuel Chemla, Kate Arnold, Alban Lemasson, Karim Ouattara, Sumir Keenan, Claudia Stephan, Robin Ryder, Klaus Zuberbühler: 2013, Monkey Semantics: Two 'Dialects' of Campbell's Monkey Alarm Calls. Manuscript.

General Lecture (August 1, 2013) - Monkey Semantics: Towards a Formal Analysis of Primate Alarm Calls

By: Philippe Schlenker

(Institut Jean-Nicod and New York University)

based on joint work with Emmanuel Chemla, Kate Arnold, Alban Lemasson, Karim Ouattara, Sumir

Keenan, Claudia Stephan, Robin Ryder, Klaus Zuberbühler

Abstract: We will argue that field studies of alarm calls in recent primatology have produced such detailed data

that they should now be studied with the methods of formal semantics. By way of example, we will

discuss Campbell's monkey alarm calls, which were shown in Ouattara et al. (2009a,b) to have four

roots (boom, krak, hok, wak), one suffix (-oo), and a partly rule-governed syntax. Working with

experimental data from the Tai forest (Ivory Coast) and Tiwai island (Sierra Leone), we argue that in

one case the same alarm call isinterpreted differently in the two communities. We conclude that either

(a) part of the meaning is learned, or (b) the meanings are entirely innate, but environment-dependent.

Either way, the semantics of alarm calls is more sophisticated than might have been thought. While we

make no claim about the phylogenetic relation between monkey calls and human language, the issues

that arise and the methods we use to address them will be very familiar to linguists. In the case at

hand, one of the main questions is what is innate and what is learned in monkey calls; and our

methods primarily rely on a simple model-theoretic semantics, combined with heavy use of

competition principles – formally analogous to scalar implicatures – among possible calls. We thus

believe that this field has much to gain from the involvement of linguists in general and semanticists in particular.