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Place: Conference Room on the basement of the Graduate School of Letters

Time/Date: 10:00-18:00, March 2, 2012

Program

1. 10:00-11:00 Chris Davis (JSPS, Kyoto University)

Focus and particles in Miyara Yaeyaman

2. 11:00-12:00 Magdalena Kaufmann (Univ. of Goettingen)

Questioning Imperatives

Abstract:

Imperatives are notoriously problematic to analyze in formal semantics: on an intuitive basis, it is neither possible to assign truth conditions to them, nor to associate them with a uniform effect on the utterance context. In this talk, I will briefly propose and motivate an analysis that rebuts the non-propositionality of imperatives (Schwager 2006/Kaufmann 2012). Instead, I argue that imperatives express modalized propositions (`you should...') and carry presuppositions that are responsible for their non-descriptive behavior. These claims are supported with a novel set of data from Colloquial German (joint work with Claudia Poschmann), which involve imperative marking in indirect speech and in `wh'-clauses. The occurrence of imperative marking in embedded positions is surprising in view of standard assumptions from the literature, but it fits nicely with the propositional analysis. Finding imperative marking in `wh'-clauses poses particularly interesting challenges to the standard picture of imperatives and interrogatives as disjoint clause types. On closer inspection, it can be shown that these peculiar imperative `wh'-clauses fall into two classes: one shares important properties with imperatives in indirect speech and is unproblematic for standard theories of clause type marking; the other is subject to a functional restriction that is predicted by the presuppositions associated with imperatives and sheds light on the syntactic encoding of clause types. I will present the results of an experimental study that confirms these observations and conclude with a brief discussion of further implications for a theory of clause types and the semantics-pragmatics interface.

12:00-13:00 Lunch

13:00-14:00 Yukinori Takubo (Kyoto University)

How to derive concessive interpretation

14:00-15:00 Satoshi Kinsui (Osaka University)

Scope interaction of Wh-words and 'noda' (to be presented in Japanese).

Coffee Break

15:20-16:20 Hisako Ikawa (Tsuda Women's College)

An event approach to Japanese reciprocal constructions

16:20-17:20 Magdalena Kaufmann and Stefan Kaufmann (Northwestern University)

Particles and performativity

Abstract:

The German discourse particles 'ja' and 'doch' both mark the information expressed by their host sentence as somehow given, obvious, or uncontroversial. Two things are puzzling: (i) despite this epistemically related core meaning just mentioned, `doch' can appear with performative modals and in imperatives; (ii) despite their similarity, `ja' forces a descriptive reading on modal verbs and is unacceptable in imperatives. We argue that these facts can be explained under the assumption that (a) both the performative use of modals and the felicitous use of imperatives depend on particular contextual constellations in the same way; and (b) both particles add information about the context, which clashes with the requirements for performative modals and imperatives in the case of `ja' but not in the case of 'doch'.