The 2024 Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal Semantics Workshop (TOM 16) will be hosted by the Department of Linguistics in-person at the University of Toronto on May 11, 2024.
Invited Speakers:
Michael Wagner (McGill University):
Syntactic alternative projection
Abstract:
Prosodic focus is often analyzed as flagging expressions for which alternative semantic meanings are salient in context. These alternative meanings can then compose pointwise, and play a crucial role in explaining contextual effects on prosodic prominence, but also constrain scalar implicatures, focus association, and related phenomena. This talk presents evidence that prosodic focus in fact relies on a syntactic mechanism of alternative generation. Focused constituents introduce a set of alternative expressions, which then 'project' in a pointwise way in syntax to generate sets of larger alternative expressions. Syntactic alternative projection sheds new light on a number of oddball phenomena, such as focus below the word level, metalinguistic uses of focus, expletive insertion within words, and echo questions, building the pioneering work on these phenomena by Artstein (2002). The analysis also raises new questions, however, about the architecture of grammar, since it relies on a syntax in which structural pieces are inserted early, before they are infused with syntactic features and meaning.
Naomi Francis (University of Ottawa):
Capturing degree uses of even
Abstract:
This talk addresses a class of examples that pose a problem for the classical semantics of even, namely degree uses (e.g., The thistles were so prickly that even Eeyore spat them out!). Such uses have recently been argued to challenge the view that even introduces an additive presupposition in addition to a scalar unlikelihood presupposition (Zhang 2022); I argue that the relevant data can be captured without abandoning additivity entirely. By modifying the additive presupposition of even so that it takes into account preconditions for the truth of its focus alternatives, we can correctly derive even’s apparent lack of additivity of even in environments where degree scales are salient without unduly weakening it elsewhere.
TOM is a friendly and informal workshop on semantics and related fields. It is an ideal forum where graduate students can share their research via a talk (20 minutes + 10 minutes Q&A) or a poster. Faculty from the associated universities will also be present as invited speakers and guests.
We thank the departments of Linguistics, Spanish and Portuguese, French, and the CLA for generously supporting TOM 16.