The Meaning Group will meet on Thursday, March 2, 1:45-2:45 in Oak 338. Muyi Yang will present her new work. Title and abstract below. There will be an online option; for login instructions, see the email announcement or contact us.

Back to Boolean: Propositional conjunction in attitude ascriptions revisited

Abstract: Pluralities (i.e. sums of atomic objects) have been argued to be necessary for domains of a wide range of objects other than entities, such as predicates (Krifka 1990), worlds (Schlenker 2004) and propositions (Marty 2019 a.o.). This paper reexamines the view that propositions can be pluralized (Marty 2019, Schmitt 2019, 2020), and shows that this view runs into an overgeneration problem of propositions embedded under attitude predicates. Based on novel data of nominal and propositional conjunction in Japanese, I propose a solution based on a system without propositional pluralities.

The UConn Logic Colloquium will feature a talk on semantics by Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; currently Yale University) on Friday, February 24, 2pm. The talk will be in hybrid form.

Modeling Linguistic Causation

This talk introduces a systematic way of analyzing the semantics of causative linguistic expressions, and of how natural languages express causal relationships. For this purpose, I will employ the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) framework and demonstrate how this method offers a rigorous model-theoretic approach to examining the distinct semantics of causal expressions. This paper introduces formal logical definitions of different types of conditions using SEM networks, and illustrates how this proposal, along with its formal tools, can help to clarify the asymmetric entailment relationship among different causative constructions.

 

The UConn Linguistics Colloquium on Friday, February 17, 4-6pm will feature Robert Stalnaker (MIT Philosophy). A few things:

• Please fill out this form before this Wednesday if you decide to join the buffet after the talk
• Title & Abstract of the talk (below)
• Handout (we’ll also provide printed copies at the talk)
• Zoom link (see the email announcement or contact the organizers)

 

PRAGMATICS AND SEMANTICS OF BELIEF ATTRIBUTION, DE RE AND DE DICTO

My main concern in this talk will be about the relation between pragmatic and semantic elements in an analysis of ascription of belief and other propositional attitudes, with an eye on more general methodological issues concerning pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena.  My discussion will focus on two papers by Saul Kripke, one about the logical relation between de dicto and de re belief sentences (sentences of the form, ‘x believes that a is F’ and sentences of the form ‘x believes of a that it is F’ or ‘x believes a to be F’) and one that raises, but does not solve, a puzzle about de dicto beliefs about particular individuals.