Schedule

In this talk I look at two "gappy" intensional predicates and at their interaction with disjunctive complements. I call a(n intensional) predicate P "gappy" iff, given a propositional complement S, [not P S] implies [P not S]. The verb want, traditionally classified as a neg-raiser, is gappy because (1) implies that Chris wants to stay up (wants to not sleep).

(1) Chris does not want to sleep.

When want embeds a disjunctive proposition, it gives rise to an inference of ambivalence: (2) implies that Chris is open to sleeping on the sofa, and open to sleeping on the floor.

(2) Chris wants to sleep on the sofa or on the floor.

My main concern is the following. If the ambivalence inference in (2) is an implicature, its source would have to be the falsity of the disjunct alternatives Chris wants to sleep on the sofa and Chris wants to sleep on the floor. But if this falsity feeds the gappy property of want, the disjunct alternatives can only be false if Chris wants to not sleep on the sofa, and wants to not sleep on the floor. Together, these strong inferences contradict (2), and present an obstacle to the target inference of ambivalence. We would therefore have to say either (a) that the ambivalence inference is not an implicature, or (b) that the implicature mechanism does not feed the gappy property of want.

A similar issue arises with expressions of ability, which are arguably gappy too. This time the inference of interest is the free choice (FC) inference (3), which some believe to be an implicature.

(3) Chris { is / used to be } able to balance a fishing rod on her nose or on her chin.

--> Chris is/used to be able to balance a fishing rod on her nose

--> Chris is/used to be able to balance a fishing rod on her chin

Though not obvious, the challenge of deriving FC ability is related to the challenge of want's ambivalence inference. I discuss the similarities and the differences as I move from the first case to the second.

Hän, a Dene (Athabaskan) language spoken in Alaska and the Yukon Territory, has only six remaining speakers. While we work towards revitalization as an L2, we are faced with the necessary task of rapidly documenting the details of an understudied, critically endangered language which is not used in the daily life of any of the remaining speakers. This talk discusses how ongoing theoretical work on the pronominal prefix system (used for direct object verbal prefixes, indirect object postposition prefixes, and possessor-marking nominal prefixes) can be used in language learning materials such as lessons and textbooks. I explore how a complex pronominal system with unique linguistic features can be presented to non-linguist language learners and how we can break down theoretical concepts such as reflexive and disjoint anaphors, definiteness, and salience in order to give language learners actionable generalizations to use in their new language. I additionally discuss the challenges of conducting fieldwork on a dying language that is seldom used, especially those that affect this particular theoretical question.

Skills-based grading (SBG) provides students multiple opportunities to acquire and demonstrate mastery of course material. Following Zuraw et al. (2019), who report the first use of SBG in linguistics for teaching phonetics and phonology, we implement SBG in a formal semantics class for the first time. SBG is known to work well for teaching skills which require algorithmic approaches to arrive at an inarguably correct answer. In our application to semantics, we show that the benefits of SBG are transferable to courses skills approaching the philosophical, where there may not be a “right” answer.

Joint work with Douglas Ezra Morrison. This talk by Maura, Richard and Douglas won the LSA award for best student abstract!

1. Maura O'Leary [personal website]

2. Richard Stockwell [personal website]

I have previously presented in Semantics Tea on the lexical aspect of nouns and the locality constraint which governs the binding of nominal time arguments. Here I present the outline of a third facet of nominal temporal interpretation: the effects of discourse novelty on the temporal interpretation of nominal predicates. I propose that nominal lexical aspect and the temporal locality constraint only apply to predicates novel to a discourse; any subsequent use of the predicate is anaphoric, rather than descriptive. In a novel DP, a nominal predicate's time argument is used to pick out the correct group of entities to which the speaker is referring along a temporal dimension. However, a non-novel DP is merely anaphoric to the previously established set of entities, and therefore any use of a nominal predicate in a non-novel DP does not need to consider a time argument in order to denote the correct referents. This explains why saying (1) out of the blue is unacceptable, but (2) is fine.

(1) # Three bachelors are married.

(2) I attended college with many bachelors. Three/the bachelors are married now.

I argue that the tools we need to model this data require more than simple indices on DPs--we need a theory of dynamic semantics which stores variables and the predicates which describe them, so that the use of a particular nominal predicate in a non-novel DP can be used to identify which variables the DP should be coindexed with.

1. Maura O'Leary [personal website]